The plea-hearing objection
==========================

The plea-hearing objection is John Kiriakou's account of the one moment in his prosecution at which he contradicted the record on his own behalf, and of how little it changed.

Who writes the document

The premise he supplies first is procedural. In a federal plea there is a final agreement, and it is the prosecutors who write it. A defendant can object to what is in it, and they can tell him to go fly a kite.

What his own agreement contained, on his account, was a confession to grave crimes that he had not committed.

The exchange

At the hearing the judge asked whether he had anything to say. His lawyer answered for him that he did not. Kiriakou overrode his own counsel, "no, I do", and stood.

He told the judge that the agreement was all nonsense and that he had not done any of the things that had been put into it. Her answer, in his telling, was that it was just window dressing. His reply: "be that as it may, it's simply not true."

What he draws from it

Kiriakou offers the episode in 2019 as a forecast rather than a grievance, attaching it directly to Julian Assange: the same thing, he says, is going to happen to him.

He treats it as of a piece with the wider practice of federal plea bargaining, in which the document a defendant signs is drafted by the party prosecuting him and its contents are not, in the end, open to correction.

See also

- Federal plea coercion
- Leonie Brinkema
- Julian Assange
- The CIPA hearing in Kiriakou's case
- Eastern District of Virginia
