Consulting job entrapment offers
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Asked in 2021 whether he had reached a point of not trusting certain people based on how they speak, John Kiriakou said he had, and then described the specific approach he has learned to recognise.

The pattern

You can't imagine, he said, the emails and calls he gets from people who want to offer him a job. And the job is always consulting. And it is always just baiting him to violate federal law. Asked whether the purpose was to get him in trouble and stop his case from moving forward and his getting his just deserts, Kiriakou agreed, and added: actually, it happens all the time.  

Why he treats it as routine rather than paranoid

Kiriakou places the offers alongside the other unwanted attention that followed his prosecution, including the threats that arrive whenever he appears on television, described in phone microphone ad targeting and at greater length in Kiriakou's death threats. 

He also had a working precedent for the shape of the thing. In the same conversation he described a job in the private sector that arrived like a gift and turned out to be something else: the chief operating officer's post at an Athens private equity firm, more money than he could have dreamt of, which he says he realised about six weeks in was a money laundering operation, so he resigned and telephoned the FBI. As he put it, it's always something.  That episode is covered in Kiriakou's money laundering tip.

On the wider question of what a former officer with a conviction can safely accept, Kiriakou's standing advice to would-be whistleblowers is the same instinct applied earlier: hire an attorney first, and have one sitting next to you when you do it. 

See also

- Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's money-laundering tip
- Threats against John Kiriakou
- Phone microphone ad targeting
- Kiriakou Legal Counteroffensive
- Espionage Act
