The Latin American newspaper prediction
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Asked in December 2019 why Reality Winner had been treated more harshly than earlier national-security defendants, John Kiriakou answered that it was because Donald Trump was president, and then volunteered, unprompted, that he had once publicly predicted the opposite.

The interview

A week or two after Trump became president, Kiriakou gave an interview to a Latin American newspaper. The reporter asked whether he thought things would be better or worse for whistleblowers under the new administration. The same question was put to several other people, among them Thomas Drake and Chelsea Manning.

Kiriakou says he was the only one who said things would be better, "and I was very foolish to say it", on the reasoning that they "couldn't possibly be any worse than they were under Obama." He does not name the newspaper.

What actually happened

By his own account the prediction failed on both measures he cared about. "In fact, the Trump administration initiated three times as many leak investigations as the Obama administration did." And the sentences the Justice Department sought and won under Trump were longer than those under Obama, "and that's what reality ran into. It's worse."

The comparison is one Kiriakou draws deliberately against himself. In the same conversation he says Winner "got it far, far worse than I did or so many others", worse than himself, worse than Drake, worse than Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe.

The standing of the claim

Kiriakou offers the episode as a caution rather than an analysis. He does not argue that the Trump administration was uniquely hostile in kind, only that the baseline he had assumed, that the Obama record represented a floor beneath which no successor could fall, turned out to be wrong. The Espionage Act prosecutions he had treated as an outer limit were not one.

He raises the point in the context of prison conditions rather than sentencing alone. Asked whether conditions had changed since his own 23 months, he said they had not: "the Bureau of Prisons is doing nothing to help ease reality's time. This is rough, and it's meant to be rough." He rejects the phrase "club fed" in the same breath, "prison is prison. Whether it has guard towers or not, it's prison."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Reality Winner
- Barack Obama
- Espionage Act
- Thomas Drake
