"All it takes is a signature"
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Asked in December 2023 whether he understood why the Epstein flight logs could not be obtained, John Kiriakou answered from experience of the machinery rather than from theory.

The mechanism

"No, there's no reason why we cannot get them. I used to be the senior investigator and we had investigative power. All it takes is a signature of the senator. It can be given at two o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock in the morning or whenever you want, just to sit down and sign the paper. So this notion that they ran out of time is not sensible."

The reference is to his own post as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from which he has described the same power being exercised, flying to Afghanistan on flag status as senior congressional staff to conduct an inquiry, for instance, over the objections of the people on the ground.

The argument for release

Kiriakou treats the case for disclosure as close to self-evident. Epstein "is dead and he has been dead for four years. He is a convicted pedophile, a convicted child molester. What possible reason could there be to hide this information? How could this not be in the public interest?"

He adds an argument about ownership that recurs throughout his public work: "it's one of the things that the American people have the right to know. They own this information and they have a right to its release."

And he notes that no constituency is demanding the opposite: "it's not like the constituents are demanding that this information be kept secret."

The limits he attaches

Kiriakou does not treat appearance on a flight manifest as evidence of wrongdoing, and in the same conversation accepted an example of an innocent explanation being given and holding up.

The position is consistent with the one he takes when the documents do arrive. Reviewing the 2026 release, he cautioned that a great deal of what was circulating about it, claims about what particular men had done, and the ages of particular girls, did not actually appear in the documents, and warned specifically against AI-generated reporting presenting such claims as findings.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Jeffrey Epstein
- The Epstein statute of limitations
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Freedom of Information Act
