Phil Mudd
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Phil Mudd is a former CIA and FBI official turned television commentator. John Kiriakou brings him up not for anything he did in government but as the second data point in a pattern, introduced with the words "there are others like John."

The pattern

The observation is that the escalating on-air denunciations of Donald Trump by senior intelligence alumni are, in Kiriakou's reading, career moves rather than assessments. He quotes Mudd's contribution, Trump is "a petulant child"; Trump "needs a pacifier and a new rattle", and then supplies what he takes to be the motive: "Phil's trying to get his own show on CNN, and Phil wants to be the deputy director of the FBI or the deputy director of the CIA."

He extends the same reading to John Brennan, whose ambition Kiriakou places on the Pentagon, and treats the two together as evidence of a market rather than of a conspiracy. His summary is a shrug rather than an accusation: "I mean, that's Washington. That's just the way it is."

The conclusion Kiriakou draws from the pattern is not about either man but about the audience for them, that a viewer who dislikes Trump is not thereby obliged to believe the people attacking him. That argument is set out at no good guy.

See also

- John Brennan
- No Good Guy
- Donald Trump
- Deep state
