Barack Obama
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Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States. John Kiriakou says that from the Reagan era onward, every Israeli prime minister who visited the White House pressed the president to "please bomb Iran", and every president refused, until the present one. Kiriakou recounts that Obama himself said Netanyahu had asked him to bomb Iran and threatened to use nuclear weapons if he did not; Obama, in Kiriakou's telling, replied "Go ahead. Go ahead. Do it," and Netanyahu backed off because the threat was a bluff. Kiriakou says Netanyahu ran the same bluff on Donald Trump, who believed it. In a separate telling of the same episode, Kiriakou dates it to the Iran nuclear negotiations, quoting Netanyahu as saying "We're thinking of using nuclear weapons," and Obama calling his bluff: "Go ahead. We're not going to help you."

Whistleblower prosecutions and the 'Nixonian obsession'

Kiriakou says Obama had a "Nixonian obsession with national security leaks", a characterization he says he got directly from people who worked face-to-face with Obama in the White House. Between the 1917 passage of the Espionage Act and 2009, Kiriakou says, three people total were charged with espionage for speaking to the media; under Obama alone, eight were, roughly three times as many as under all previous presidents combined. He says Obama brought more espionage cases against whistleblowers than any president before him, despite publicly opposing torture. Kiriakou says a friend then working in the White House told him that around 2011, roughly nine months before his own arrest, Obama lost his temper and "flipped out like a crazy person," screaming about a national-security leak and about how angry he was that people at the CIA couldn't keep their mouths shut, with John Brennan standing by the whole time, nodding. Three weeks after Obama took office, Kiriakou says, the CIA asked the new president to secretly reopen the already-closed criminal case against him; he learned of this only years later.

No experience in government

Kiriakou says he voted for Obama in 2008 partly because Obama had been explicit about defending whistleblowers. He argues Obama had no government experience beyond two years as a senator and time as a community organizer, calling him exactly the kind of "unprepared president" the CIA loves, because "they just suck him right into their orbit", made worse, in Kiriakou's account, by John Brennan "whispering in his ear" that whistleblowers were enemies of national security. By his own account the last time he voted for either major party was Obama's first term, backing him on the promise to end the post-9/11 wars, before concluding Obama himself was compromised, Kiriakou describes Obama's maternal grandfather as having been "MK Ultra'd" and as a cousin of George H.W. Bush, with whom, he says, the grandfather "built" the CIA.

The droner in chief

Kiriakou calls Obama "the droner in chief," saying he killed ten times more people with drone strikes than George W. Bush did. He traces the Obama administration's rendition and interrogation policy to the same pattern: during the transition, Obama told George Stephanopoulos that under no circumstances would the Army conduct enhanced interrogations, a pledge Kiriakou calls beside the point, since it was never the Army doing the interrogating, but the CIA acting through proxies. In Kiriakou's assessment, Obama's national-security policy was "nothing more than a more violent extension" of Bush's, citing the drone-strike death toll as the clearest evidence.

"I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people"

Kiriakou has repeatedly cited Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book on the 2012 election, in which Obama, sitting for an interview, said two things Kiriakou calls "shocking." Asked about his politics, Obama said, matter-of-factly, "I never said I was a liberal", or in another telling, "I never told anybody I was a liberal." Discussing the drone program, he said, "I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people." Kiriakou's response: "That's not a brag. You're a murderer."

'A cabal of criminals' and the immunity backwash

On the PBD Podcast in April 2026, John Kiriakou called the Barack Obama administration, and, extending into the Biden years, the Democratic executive apparatus, "a cabal of criminals coming out of that Obama administration and extending into the Biden administration." Asked how likely federal prosecutions of Obama-era officials were, he answered that Obama himself was now legally out of reach: "these recent Supreme Court decisions clearing Trump also, you know, through the back door cleared Obama of just about anything that he's been accused of doing." Hillary Clinton, he added, was likewise shielded, the statute of limitations having expired on "just about everything you could possibly accuse Hillary of doing." Only John Brennan, in his view, was still exposed.

The 'nixonian' obsession with leaks

On the Roundtable in September 2022, John Kiriakou said friends who worked inside the Obama White House had described the president's obsession with prosecuting national-security leaks in terms he called "nixonian." Kiriakou tied the fixation to the failed initial attempt to install John Brennan as CIA director in 2009: progressives "just threw a fit," Brennan was withdrawn, and, on the account Kiriakou heard, Obama began compensating by taking the aggressive line on leaks Brennan and Brennan's allies wanted.

The clemency arithmetic

Kiriakou says he knows why Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence, because he was the alternative. Joe Biden argued his clemency case to the president in person; ten minutes in, "the president put up his hands and said, 'guys, I'm just not going to do this. It's either him or it's Manning.'" Kiriakou's reading of the choice that followed is that it turned on the length of the sentence rather than the merits: "Obama was not upset that Chelsea was convicted; Obama just believed that 35 was too much. So he didn't really commute Chelsea's sentence out of the goodness of his heart." See "It's either him or it's Manning".

He attaches a statistic to the same presidency: "in Barack Obama's final two years as president, the US pardon attorney recommended zero people for a pardon. Zero. There were commutations, but nobody was pardoned in the last two years."

"Look forward", but for whom

Kiriakou''s objection to the administration''s formula of looking forward rather than backward was never to the principle but to its selectivity. He said he had supported the president''s stated concern for the "wonderful, talented, hardworking men and women at the CIA who need to be protected", "but at the same time, it''s one thing to look forward; it''s another thing to look forward just for the torturers. It''s just not fair. It''s not fair to the American people." If prosecutions were to be brought at all, he argued, "those prosecutions can''t just be against the people who blew the whistle on the torture" while no action was taken against those who conceived the policy, implemented it, destroyed the evidence of it, or wrote the legal opinions that justified it.

Continuity with his predecessor

He dates his own view of the continuity to a 2010 book event in Los Angeles, where a questioner asked him to explain the CIA''s position on "the jihadisation of American foreign policy under President Obama." He laughed, and answered: "Ma''am, with all due respect, President Obama''s foreign policy is an extension of President Bush''s foreign policy. If there''s any difference at all, President Obama is killing more people overseas than President Bush ever did." His judgement on the period was one of waste rather than malice, "there was a wonderful opportunity to take a different path and to reclaim our position as a moral leader in the world."

Kiriakou's prediction in the documents scandal

Reviewing the 2023 classified documents scandal, Kiriakou noted that Bill Clinton and both Bushes had been publicly cleared of holding classified material improperly, "and nobody said anything about Barack Obama."

His guess at the next disclosure was specific as to location if not to content: documents either in the storage facility outside Chicago holding his papers pending the construction of his presidential library, or at his oceanfront house on Cape Cod.

He also made a general point about what presidential libraries are for, and against what they have become: the purpose "should be for scholars to be able to go to these presidential libraries and read these documents and use them in scholarly publications or their PhD dissertations. They shouldn't be altars to self-promoting greatness."

The Nixonian obsession

Asked what Obama could have been thinking, Kiriakou reports the explanation his side was given at the time rather than offering one of his own: "We were told by an attorney at the National Security Council that Obama had a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks."

The consequence, on that account, is that the prosecution was never really about him.

> "He was perfectly happy to come down on me like a ton of bricks, not because it was me, not because of what I had done, but because he wanted to scare anybody else who might be thinking about going to the press with classified information."

He treats this as the single most important thing he has to say about the period, his interviewer calls it the most important revelation of the interview and he does not demur, and he pairs it with the arithmetic that he says makes it a policy rather than an accident: three Americans charged under the Espionage Act for speaking to the press between 1917 and Obama's election, and eight in Obama's eight years. "That's almost three times the number of all previous presidents combined. This wasn't an accident or a one-off. This was a policy."

See also

- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Donald Trump
