Max Blumenthal
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Max Blumenthal is an American independent investigative journalist whom John Kiriakou describes as a personal friend and one of the most capable analysts working.

Kiriakou's assessment

"Max Blumenthal is a friend of mine and I'll tell you what, he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever encountered. He is able to put these pieces of a puzzle together in a way that almost no one else I know is able to do." Kiriakou routinely places him among the small set of commentators whose reading of the Israeli,Iranian confrontation he treats as the conventional wisdom worth taking seriously, alongside Trita Parsi and Larry Johnson.

The Venezuelan embassy case

Kiriakou recounts that Blumenthal was accused of assaulting a woman outside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington and had the charges dropped roughly a month before Kiriakou discussed it in February 2020. On Kiriakou's account the video showed the reverse of the allegation, "it was Max who was assaulted, he never raised his hand to anybody, a woman or otherwise", and the police did nothing.

The Grayzone

Blumenthal publishes The Grayzone, and Kiriakou identifies him as the son of Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton confidant, a genealogy he raises only to underline that the son does not write like the family's politics would predict. He introduces him as a cutting-edge journalist while describing the sequence in which pressure moved from Consortium News outward to other independent outlets, The Grayzone among them.

Blumenthal is a fixed point in Kiriakou's answer to where an ordinary reader should now go for reporting. Asked repeatedly who is still doing real investigative journalism, he answers with ProPublica, the Brennan Center, Dropsite News and Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone, work of a kind, he says, no longer done at the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the LA Times. Asked whom to follow rather than what to read, he gives a short list he keeps deliberately short, Ryan Grim, Blumenthal, Elizabeth Lane, and, for the Middle East specifically, Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, both of whom he calls terrific writers and analysts. On Iran his confidence is unqualified: Blumenthal at The Grayzone, he says, knows everything that is happening there now. He also lists him among the figures who constitute the new media, alongside Ken Klippenstein and Alexander Mercouris.

Two pieces of Blumenthal's reporting recur in Kiriakou's own arguments: video of a Grayzone journalist questioning pro-Shah, pro-Israel Iranian-American demonstrators about what they were actually supporting, and the reposting of the photograph of American special operators in Israel greeting President Biden, an image that officials tried to take down while denying Americans were there.

Invited together

In September 2025 Kiriakou disclosed on air, for the first time, that he was one of six people invited to meet Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in New York during the UN General Assembly, he had accepted without asking what it was about. Blumenthal was another of the six, along with Medea Benjamin and Andy Shallal; Kiriakou did not know who the remaining two were.

Under the same pressure

Kiriakou groups Blumenthal with himself and with outlets such as MintPress News when describing official and institutional pressure on independent journalists: "nobody's safe ... ask Max Blumenthal, he'll tell you all about it, because he's under the same kind of pressure ... they're coming after all of us."

See also

- Trita Parsi
- The death of investigative journalism
- John Kiriakou
