The Kerry yacht tax
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The Kerry yacht tax is an episode from John Kiriakou's service on John Kerry's Senate staff, recounted on the DeProgram programme in August 2025 in the middle of a discussion about members of Congress and their money.

Kerry's money

Kiriakou first corrects the common account of where the fortune came from. It is generally assumed to be his wife's, and "a little more than half came from his wife, but he was independently wealthy before her. He comes from a very long line of money."

He adds a second correction, about identity rather than wealth: Kerry "comes off as this good Irish Catholic" but "only discovered that he was Irish as an adult. His people came over on the Mayflower. He just happens to have one Irish branch of the family and it just happens to be his surname."

Kiriakou puts the total at "about 750 million bucks" and says Kerry "didn't give a shit what people thought about that. He didn't care."

The boat

The purchase was, in Kiriakou's description, not a pleasure craft in the ordinary sense: "he bought a yacht, but it wasn't even a yacht. It was like this major ocean-going ship."

The tax planning followed. "To save himself the yacht tax, he docked it in Rhode Island because they don't have a yacht tax in Rhode Island. They have one in Massachusetts."

The reaction, and the advice

The office absorbed the consequences. "People just practically took to the streets. We were getting hundreds of calls and nasty emails and letters," Kiriakou says.

He took it up with the staff director, whom he describes as "a really good guy who actually is a member of the Kennedy family", and whose advice he framed as a matter of appearances rather than law: "This is a really bad look. The guy's got all the money in the world. Just pay the fucking tax."

The advice worked, eventually. "It took him about two weeks, but he finally got around to it and he paid the tax and moved the boat to Massachusetts."

Kiriakou's conclusion is general rather than personal: "these rich people, they're all the same. They're so afraid you're going to chisel $100 from them or something. And God knows they don't want to pay their taxes."

See also

- John Kerry
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Letters the cabinet ignored
- John Kiriakou
