The Department of Education SWAT raid
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John Kiriakou cites a case he says received "just about no media coverage" in the United States, dating it to roughly three years before April 2019. A woman working as a journalist for the Washington Times was married to an official at the Department of Education. "One morning at six a.m., armed federal agents broke down the door of their house and seized not just their computer, but also files."

The detail he emphasises is which agency did it. "This was an armed SWAT team of the Department of Education. So most Americans don't have any idea that the Department of Education has an armed SWAT team that will bust your door down at six o'clock in the morning. They actually do, as does the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Labor, and other governmental organisations. The dirty little secret about federal law enforcement."

The stated grounds were that the husband had government proprietary information on the computer. But the agents also took the wife's reporter's notes and would not return them; there was no criminal prosecution at the end of it, and she had to sue the government civilly to recover them.

Why he raises it

Kiriakou uses the episode as an existing precedent for seizing a journalist's protected notes and the names of her sources, one established years before Julian Assange was charged, and passed over in silence. "For whatever reason, no other journalist paid any attention in this case. And now here we are, where a journalist is being prosecuted and a journalistic entity is being prosecuted." His conclusion is directed at the press rather than the government: "we have ourselves to blame for not putting our foot down when these rights began to be whittled away and saying 'no, we have constitutional protections.' We didn't do that, and now we find ourselves in this predicament."

See also

- Julian Assange
- Espionage Act
- John Kiriakou
