Bob Trout
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Bob Trout is a Washington defense attorney and the partner of Plato Cacheris at the firm Trout Cacheris. He was one of the eleven lawyers who represented John Kiriakou, and one of the four most senior of them. Kiriakou's descriptions of him are consistently affectionate, "an elegant southern gentleman," "a sweet gentleman," one of the loveliest men he has ever met, known for his beautiful suits.

"We just lost the case"

Trout is the lawyer Kiriakou quotes at the turning point of his defense. Of some 15,000 classified pages, the team had pulled roughly 150 relevant to the defense and filed 150 separate motions to have them declassified, with three days of court time blocked off for the judge to hear them. She opened by denying all 150 at once and declassifying nothing, telling Kiriakou "either you did it or you didn't do it, I think you did it," and rapping her gavel. Walking out, Kiriakou asked Trout what had just happened. "We just lost the case. That's what happened." Asked what to do now, Trout said: now we talk about a plea.

"If you were my own brother"

The scene Kiriakou returns to most often is the morning after he told the lawyers he was going to trial. Having stayed up all night with his wife and refused a three-year offer, he emailed all eleven attorneys at 6 a.m. saying he had done the research and was going to trial. One wrote back: "Put on a pot of coffee, we're on our way over." The four most senior came to the house.

Cacheris came in first, "You stupid son of a bitch. Take the deal." Trout followed with the line Kiriakou quotes verbatim across a decade of retellings: "John, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take the deal." The third, Mark McDougall of Akin Gump and Strauss, pulled him aside with the argument that closed it: "Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal."

Cost

Kiriakou's standing advice to anyone investigated under the Espionage Act begins with the firm: hire the best national-security attorneys money can buy, he names Cacheris and Trout of Trout Cacheris, and McDougall of Akin Gump and Strauss. The bill was correspondingly large. In 2017 he put his remaining debt at 880,000 dollars and said he would never be able to pay it, "but what I gave them, they earned." In later tellings he says he paid only some of the eleven, that he owed 1.15 million dollars and filed for bankruptcy, and that the lawyers ultimately forgave the bill.

See also

- Plato Cacheris
- John Kiriakou
