Title: John Kiriakou  :  How Rogue Is US Intelligence?
Show: Judging Freedom (Judge Napolitano)
Date: 2026-02-09
URL: https://youtu.be/hdfJ51hKM9E
Duration: 28:00

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[00:03] Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force [music] by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force [music] must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love [music] your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right?

[00:34] What [music] if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom [music] than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest [music] hour of danger is now? >> [music] >> Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is

[01:06] Monday, February 9th, 2026. My long-time friend and former CIA officer John Kiriakou joins us. Now, John, always a pleasure. I was just listening to our intro, and some of it in the voice of Ron Paul, some of it in my own, and I mean this with the greatest of respect and even affection. I guess you are living proof that it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. I'm sorry to say that's been the case. I

[01:37] was just talking to a friend of mine a few minutes ago, and and she asked me if I had applied for a presidential pardon. And as you know, as you've helped me, I have. And um and I said, you know, it just pains me that the process is so difficult because the issues seem so clear in my mind. Either there's a right or there's a wrong and I I think that history has vindicated me and still just kind of waiting for my day. Right. I think your day will come

[02:09] my dear friend and I was privileged to play a small role in that and obviously I hope it is successful. >> small. Thank you. Thank you. When when US intelligence officers take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution um which includes things like due process and no search and seizure without a warrant. I mean, do they take this oath seriously? Do they take it literally? That's that's really the question right there. I I say all the time, I was one of about 300 people uh

[02:41] on my first day at the CIA all sitting in the CIA's auditorium called the bubble and when I put my right hand in the air and I swore to uphold the Constitution and to protect it against all enemies foreign and domestic, I hate that I've had to come to the conclusion that I was pretty much the only person that day who actually meant it. Uh but we should all be standing in support of the Constitution. We should all want to protect the Constitution and to uphold the Constitution rather than whatever policy happens to be in vogue or

[03:11] whatever political party happens to control the White House. Of course I took the same oath. I took that oath when I um joined the military and then I took that oath when I was appointed uh to the bench. But being a judge of course have a a lot of leeway. You're supposed to interpret the Constitution as it was originally understood but there are a variety of means for interpreting it but when you are

[03:42] a CIA officer I mean, do they tell you the president will authorize you to break the law, don't worry about it? Yes, they do. And in fact, on the day that I was asked if I wanted to be, their words, trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, the first words out of my mouth were, "That sounds like a torture program and torture is illegal." And my colleague from the Counterterrorism Center immediately

[04:13] responded with, "It's not illegal, the president approved it and the Justice Department authorized it." And I said, "I don't know what laws they're reading, but this seems pretty obviously illegal to me." I was, I'm sorry to say, the only one of 14 people who who said no at the end of the day. Do presidents regularly authorize, maybe regularly is the is the wrong word, I'll let you put whatever adverb in there that you think is a appropriate, uh criminal behavior, kidnapping,

[04:46] drug dealing, murder, uh by US intelligence agents? I hate to say, but yes. Um in the most egregious example, we have uh what has become known as the Tuesday morning kill list meeting, where during the Obama administration, John Brennan convened a group of operations officers and attorneys from the White House, the CIA and the Justice Department to come up with a list of people every Tuesday morning,

[05:18] people who would be killed that week. Uh once the names were agreed upon, the teams would fan out around the world, carry out their assassinations, and then meet up again the following Tuesday for for that week's list. That's just murders. Then you have to consider renditions or extraordinary renditions, which are different. A rendition is, if you are, let's say, Tunisian and I capture you in Afghanistan and I send you back to Tunisia. That's a rendition.

[05:49] If you're Tunisian and I catch you in Afghanistan and I send you to Egypt and I don't tell the Tunisian government, but I know that in Egypt you're going to be softened up a little bit, that's an extraordinary rendition and that is just simply not legal. And then when it comes to to drugs, you know, it's taken us decades to finally get the real story as to what happened uh uh with the Contra rebels and the arrival of of cocaine in the United States that ended up leading to the crack uh epidemic.

[06:20] Yeah, these all came out of White House actions. And again, it doesn't matter who's in the White House. It doesn't matter what political party controls the White House. This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue where the executive has overstepped and neither Congress nor the courts have pushed back. Do uh agents ever worry that they might be prosecuted by a subsequent uh administration? I mean, suppose, just throwing it out there, suppose Gavin Newsom succeeds Donald Trump. Uh might uh a Newsom Justice Department

[06:54] uh prosecute those who caused the chaos in Iran or participated in the uh kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro? Oh, certainly. Certainly. And that's why the CIA um always insists on a presidential finding or on an interpretation of the law by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel before they'll allow such an operation to go forward. That that's come out of the 1980s, actually, uh or the 1990s. I

[07:24] had a friend at the agency, Robert Baer, Bob Baer, who's made a name for himself as a commentator. He was serving in Iraq, uh northern Iraq in the 1990s, and uh uh he was working with uh with the Kurds to see if he might be able to take out Saddam Hussein, which he believed to be his mission. This is what he had been told to do. Well, one of his communications was intercepted by NSA. NSA informed the National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, that there was a rogue CIA officer who was looking to

[07:56] kill Saddam Hussein. The NSC under Berger ordered the CIA to bring Bob home, and they threatened to charge him with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the, you know, murder of Saddam Hussein. Uh he ended up having to leave the agency. But in fact, Bob didn't do anything wrong. Bob did exactly as he had been told to do. And uh the operation just fell apart, and the White House was looking for a fall guy. That happens with some frequency.

[08:28] Do agents, groups of agents, management and agents go rogue, or do they always have the knowledge and comfort of a presidential authorization or or a DOJ authorization? And before you answer, I got to tell you what the courts have said uh about DOJ legal opinions. They're not worth the paper that they're often not even printed on. It That it's not a defense in a courtroom that some lawyer in the

[08:58] Justice Department told you you could do it. Don't agents know that? No, they don't. That's such an important point. You know, I say all the time, Judge, that we we have the 1946 Federal Torture Act, which bans torture. We have the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which bans torture, and which we wrote. Right. But then, you know, we we waterboard people, we put them in freezing cells, and they end up dying of hypothermia. We put them in

[09:29] in enclosed spaces like coffins, and and play Russian roulette with them, and hold power drills to their heads, all in violation of international law, and we just pretend that it's okay. And I'll add another thing. I say this all the time, but I feel very strongly about it. In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. We executed them. That was a death penalty crime. In 1968, in January, the Washington Post ran a front-page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North

[10:00] Vietnamese prisoner. That soldier was prosecuted, and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years at Fort Leavenworth. The law never changed, but by 2002, we just decided, "Oh, the law doesn't apply to us. We're the good guys. OLC says we can do this. We're going to go do it." All right. OLC is the Office of Legal Counsel in the DOJ that reports to give legal advice to other aspects of the executive branch of the government. These are the people that the courts have said their words are not

[10:31] a defense if you're a prosecutor, and apparently we know that that's not the case. When um the chaos was caused in the streets in Iran, Mhm. and when we know from a um an ex-posting by former CIA director and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo that Mossad and CIA agents were there. What kind of things,

[11:03] what kind of behavior did the CIA do on the ground in order to foment that chaos, which resulted in innocent people being murdered in the streets? >> Yes. Yes, it did. Well, we know, thanks to Mike Pompeo's flapping gums, that that this was a Mossad CIA operation. It was always my experience that the CIA just simply didn't have people on the ground, but the Mossad certainly certainly did, and and a lot

[11:33] of people on the ground. But we now know also that both the CIA and the Mossad have cooperated very very closely with the MEK, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. The Mujahedin-e Khalq started off as something akin to a cult. Uh it was founded by a married couple couple, the Rajavis. Uh the the husband mysteriously disappeared in the 1970s. Um the rumor was that his wife had had him killed and just buried in the desert somewhere. Maryam Rajavi took over the

[12:04] organization. This is an organization that tried to assassinate the US ambassador in Iran in the 1970s, that tried to assassinate an American lieutenant general who was the highest ranking military official in Iran, US military official. And um and they were given safe haven by Saddam Hussein in northeastern Iraq. Well, in 2009, when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, we decided to take the MEK off the terrorism watch list. And immediately the likes of everybody from

[12:35] from Rudy Giuliani to Howard Dean, prominent people on the left and the right in in everyday American politics, they all started taking MEK money. And they started lobbying for the MEK. So all of a sudden now, Maryam Rajavi, who was a murderous lunatic just prior to this, was now feted in Washington at these gigantic dinners, spent millions of dollars hiring more and more American political figures to lobby

[13:05] for the MEK. And then we have the Mossad bragging that they have an operational relationship with the MEK. One of the things that surprised me with these demonstrations, I I believed at the outset that these were Mossad inspired uh demonstrations. The Mossad actually came out or the Israeli government came out and said, "Yes, it was us. Aren't we clever? Look how successful we were." But what sort of tipped me off was that these protesters were burning mosques, for example. They burned 18,000 I'm sorry, they burned 18 mosques. And then

[13:37] they set fire to 38 fire trucks. Well, if you're demonstrating for democracy and freedom and, you know, that kind of thing, why in the world would you set mosques and and fire engines on fire? That that didn't make any sense to me. Well, now it makes sense because the Mossad and the CIA want chaos in Iran. Chaos to try to bring down this government. And listen, chaos has never resulted in anything better, at least in the near term. If there is chaos, a whole lot of people

[14:10] are going to die. When uh President Trump said he didn't know anything about the origins of the chaos in the streets and he assumed that they were spontaneous demonstrations by uh shopkeepers and uh consumers because the value of the dollar fell, his uh Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, shockingly, went on a national television and said, "Yeah, we made the dollar we made the the real, not the dollar. We made the real uh fall. Uh we caused that to

[14:42] happen. We know how to create uh economic chaos and we did it to create uh the problems in the streets." Would that type of economic chaos in the banking system in Iran, and would that type of chaos, which included murder and arson, as you've just described, John, in the streets, could that have happened without presidential approval? No. No, that would be what is called a covert action program.

[15:13] And so that has to have very specific presidential approval. It has to have the president's signature after having gone through the CIA General Counsel, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, the National Security Council General Counsel General Counsel, and then the National Security Advisor before it even gets to the President. So, it has to be a very well thought out plan that the President finally approves with his signature before it can be implemented. But, I'll add that the Israelis often times just

[15:46] can't control themselves. They can't help themselves. They jump the gun frequently before the US is ready to to act alongside them. And they'll just go in and start doing something. One of the things that the Israelis have been very very successful at vis-a-vis Iran is that they recruited hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Afghan refugees. There are 2 million Afghan refugees in Iran. And as refugees, they're entitled to no

[16:16] government services at all. No food, no water, no medical care, no housing, no nothing. So, they're destitute. Well, if the Israelis go in and say, "Hey, we'll give you $200 a month if you just stand on this street corner for 12 hours a day and look at that apartment and tell me when the general comes out of his out of his apartment onto his balcony so that they can adjust their missile GPSs to take out the general's apartment." They end up succeeding in that way. In the US, we have a far heavier

[16:48] bureaucracy. It takes longer for for these plans to work their way through the process. If the Israelis want to do something, they just do it. Wow. Um going to play a clip for you. It's um uh Vice President Vance being interviewed by my friend and former colleague uh Megan Kelly uh in which he's giving the administration line as to why uh Iran's nuclear enrichment needs to be

[17:18] destroyed by violence. And then the second part of the clip uh, is about 12 years old and I think you know the person being interviewed by my friend, uh, and former colleague at Fox, David Asman, about whether or not the Saudi, uh, government has, uh, nuclear weapons. The reason I raise this is because of your familiarity with the person in the Asman, uh, clip. Uh, and because of the

[17:49] misleading nature of what, uh, the Vice President, uh, is saying. Chris, can you play that, please? What happens when the same people who are shooting up a mall or driving airplanes into buildings have a nuclear weapon? That is unacceptable. And it's not just them, because if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, you know who gets a nuclear weapon like the next day? The Saudi Arabians. People, uh, Mr. Claridge have talked about Saudi Arabia. They certainly have more money than anybody in the Middle East. Are you concerned about the possibility they may

[18:19] get a nuclear bomb? Saudis already have the bomb. But people fail to remember >> Let me hold on hold on a second, Mr. Claridge. Let me just emphasize that point, cuz that's that's an important point. You say Saudi Arabia already has a nuclear bomb? Oh, several. People forget that it was the Saudis who financed the Pakistani bomb. They put billions of dollars into that effort to create that that, uh, nuclear

[18:51] capability. And in return, of course, they got something. Now, uh, people can argue whether it was dibs on four nuclear devices or seven. That's the argument. But no one who really in the know argues that they do have access to nuclear weapons. First of all, do you know if the Saudis have nuclear weapons? And secondly, did did you know cuz he's no longer living

[19:22] Mr. Clarridge and is he worthy of belief? Oh, Dewey Clarridge is a legendary figure in CIA operations. He was a giant from the 1980s. A giant who was prosecuted actually for um his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. Uh you know, one of the first things I learned uh when I joined the CIA in January of 1990 was that the Saudis had long been seeking a nuclear bomb. Um I also know that the that the Saudis are

[19:54] more generous with Pakistan than with any other country on the planet to the point where the city of Faisalabad, a city of some 7 or 8 million people in uh in West Central, I'm sorry, in East Central Pakistan was named after Saudi King Faisal because of his generosity. Uh the the Saudis the Saudis gave the gave the Pakistanis as much money as they needed to to develop a

[20:25] nuclear bomb as a counter to the Indians. And I always assumed as Dewey Clarridge did that that the Pakistanis shared those nuclear bombs with the Saudis. I believe that was the quid pro quo. The question then is do they have a delivery uh system? Do they have a missile capable of carrying a nuclear device? I think the answer is probably no, but impossible to say. Um listen, the bottom line for me is whether you like Dewey Clarridge or not, whether you like Dewey Clarridge's

[20:55] politics or not, uh he was a serious operator at the CIA. And if he says that the Saudis have a nuclear bomb, I would believe that the Saudis have a nuclear bomb. Was he ever in the importation in his official capacity at the CIA of cocaine into the United States? I believe that he was. Um you know, I've researched the daylights out of this. Uh there were two different Contra groups, one in the north of Nicaragua and one in

[21:26] the south. Um we were working with the Contras in the north. The Contras in the south were taking in Colombian cocaine. And the CIA involvement at the very least was to allow the cocaine through the north of Nicaragua unmolested, knowing that that cocaine was making its way to the United States. And in in response to that we would get no pushback from the southern Contras to the arming of

[21:59] the northern Contras and indeed the southern Contras would continue to fight against the Sandinistas. So, I I believe it's been pretty well documented that the that the CIA at the very least allowed cocaine to come into the country and at the at the worst um facilitated cocaine coming into the country. So, uh from time to time we have uh two people on the show who say the opposite about this. Uh Sheriff David Hathaway, who's the sheriff of a county in Arizona but spent 30 years with the Drug Enforcement

[22:31] Administration including in senior management positions, agrees with you entirely. Jack Devine, whom you may know or know of, everybody smiles when I mention Jack's name and who has become a friend of mine, we're neighbors uh in New York City, um insists adamantly that that's not true, that the CIA was never involved in cocaine. Who's right and who's wrong? I think the sheriff is right. I think Jack Devine is wrong.

[23:01] You know, I had the I had the good fortune to work for Jack Devine briefly in oh, 2001 or 2002. Great guy, great officer, true believer in the CIA and the belief that the CIA is the good guy. Um God bless him. I think he's either either willfully wrong or just pretending that he you know, like Sergeant Schultz used to say

[23:32] on Hogan's Heroes, he knows nothing, nothing. But I think the evidence is out there that that the CIA was facilitating the importation of cocaine. Is the CIA dangerous to American freedom? Oh, I believe that it's it's antithetical to American freedom. Only because we've allowed it to be. You know, there was this there was this wonderful period from roughly 1975-76 until about 1982 where congressional oversight of CIA was was real and it was hands-on. We're

[24:04] talking about the Church Committee becoming the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Pike Committee becoming the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and they really were hands-on overseers as we needed. By 1982 with the war in Nicaragua, the gloves came off. Next thing you know, we're arming them with the help of the Iranians and Saudi middleman and cocaine's coming into the country and the the thing just went off the rails. One of the things that I learned at the CIA during my career

[24:36] there is that they will push, push, push, push until somebody pushes back. And if nobody pushes back, well, they've just reclaimed new territory or claimed new territory and they're not giving it up. And that's what we've seen over the years where the committees now are really little more than than cheerleaders for the CIA rather than being overseers and controllers of the CIA. It's going to take another Church and Pike Committee, period, to rein the CIA in. And technology is so

[25:08] advanced now, I'm not even sure that that's possible. Wow, is this regulatory capture? You know, where the regulated entity ends up controlling its own regulator, as often happens in the banking industry. I think so. And if for many, many years now, all anybody at the CIA ever had to say was, "9/11." And everybody would just drop whatever it is they were pushing back on. You know, national security, 9/11. Is the CIA involved in the Epstein case?

[25:41] >> [sighs] >> A couple of weeks ago I would have said probably not, and now I say probably yes. We're seeing so much new information from this 3 million document drop. Uh we're seeing that the White House counsel, uh Kathryn Ruemmler, for example, uh who's now the general counsel at Goldman Sachs, tried repeatedly to connect Jeffrey Epstein with John Brennan. We don't know if that connection took place. I would guess that it probably did, and certainly John

[26:11] Brennan has never said anything about it. But now in the last uh 48 hours, we've learned that Epstein's lawyers had specifically reached out to the CIA to ask the CIA to confirm its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, whatever that was. There's no indication that the agency ever responded. There's no indication that the National Security Council responded, but Epstein was actively seeking some sort of role with the CIA. And it looks like he may have

[26:43] had some sort of role with MI6 in the UK, as well as with the Israelis that I think many of us have speculated on over the years. Thank you, John. A great great conversation. Your candor is so refreshing. Of course, you you are the next to the word candor in Webster's unabridged should be a picture of John Kiriakou. Thank you, my man. Thank you so much, Your Honor. It's always such a pleasure to see you. I just got a text from Jack. Uh he wants your cell number. I'm not going to give it to him. Um

[27:14] >> [laughter] >> I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. I wouldn't I will hear from him, I'm sure. >> [laughter] >> Thank you, John. All the best. >> Pleasure's mine. Thank you. What a great great uh human being who of course went to jail over the torture program, not for torturing, of course. It's antithetical to his morality, but for revealing it. Uh coming up, 2:00, Ian Proud from London. How close is the British government to collapsing over the Epstein affair. And at 3:00 hour, a new guest, an expert on military

[27:46] expenditures, Ben Freeman. When is too much money to the Pentagon going to lead to more war? Justin Paul Tarr for Judging Freedom. >> [music]

[28:18] [music]
