The fifteen-dollar maintenance fee
==================================

The anecdote arrives in the middle of an appeal for viewers to move to a platform that pays the show more. Kiriakou interrupts it to explain, without euphemism, why the appeal matters to him. 

The appointment

He had been to the bank that morning, he says, on an appointment made "because I'm so broke." The bank had taken a $15 monthly maintenance fee, and the fee had put the account at negative fifteen dollars. 

Kiriakou describes what he did about it in the terms of an ordinary customer with no leverage: "So, I had to go back and say, 'Guys, come on. Can you just give me back my $15?'" 

The bank did. "Thank goodness," Kiriakou says. "So, I'm back up to zero." 

Context

The story sits inside a broader account Kiriakou gives of his post-conviction finances. In the same broadcast he and his co-host discuss the fact that the programme does not cover their bills, Rall introduces the platform pitch as a way to "help John and I be able to pay our bills, something that we currently cannot do." 

Kiriakou has made the general claim elsewhere that whistleblowers die broke. The maintenance-fee story is that claim reduced to a single arithmetic fact, told against himself: a former CIA counterterrorism officer and published author negotiating with a teller over fifteen dollars in order to return his balance to nothing. 

He does not dramatise it. The account is delivered as an aside, is over in a few sentences, and ends with him back at zero rather than ahead. 

See also

- "Whistleblowers die broke"
- Bankruptcy and the dropped charges
- The book the publisher sat on
