[00:00] [Music] hi everyone i'm anja parham pill and this is redlines my guest today is cia whistleblower john kiriakou who recently sought a pardon from the trump administration on charges he violated the intelligence identities protection act kiriyaku is the only individual who ever served time for charges related to the u.s waterboarding program but that was for
[00:30] revealing its existence rather than participating in it john welcome to redlines thanks for having me anya let's get right into it the new york times recently reported that quote a one-time top advisor to the trump campaign was paid fifty thousand dollars to help seek a pardon for john kiriakou a former ca officer convicted of illegally disclosing classified information and mr kiriakou was separately told that
[01:01] mr trump's personal lawyer rudy giuliani would help him secure a pardon for two million dollars kiriakou rejected the offer but an associate fearing that mr giuliani was illegally selling pardons alerted the fbi giuliani denies these characterizations of course but john is the times reporting here true uh i hate to say that it is true yes uh all of it's true and you know to his credit mike uh schmidt the primary author of
[01:31] that report interviewed more than 30 people uh for the article it wasn't just you know john decided to take a to take a cheap shot at rudy giuliani uh he interviewed a lot of people for that article and so that means there were at least two trump allies attempting to sell pardons just based on your story alone yeah um yeah you know they made a uh they made a differentiation between selling pardons and lobbying for pardons
[02:04] clearly this was pay for play uh and boy you know where do you even start with the story you know what anya i'll start at the beginning i have an attorney who has been helping me try to get a pardon for many years he didn't really have very good contacts in the trump administration i had no contacts in the trump administration and so we decided to hire a woman by the name of karen giorno who ran the trump campaign in florida in
[02:37] 2016. she is a uh you know she doesn't like to call herself a lobbyist but she's a political strategist for what that's worth and so we met with her at my attorney's office here in washington in 2018 and she told me that she was very close to the president she showed me the president's personal cell phone number that she had saved in her phone at least that's what she said it was she claimed that the president called her uh in the middle of the night on a regular basis to talk about policy
[03:08] and politics and that she was still very close to him and for fifty thousand dollars she would lobby the white house on my behalf and if i got a pardon she would want another fifty thousand dollars uh i borrowed the fifty thousand i didn't have it so i borrowed it i gave it to her and then essentially never heard from her again and so every four five six months i would call and i'd say hey i haven't heard from you in four or five or six months what's up and she would tell me the same story oh
[03:38] uh kellyanne conway is is on your side and she's aware of your story and sarah huckabee sanders is on your side and aware of your story and i talked to the white house political director and he's uh on your side it got to the point where i said to her one time i called her and i said so help me god if you tell me one more time that you spoke to the white house political director i'm gonna flip out because i don't even know who the white house political director is but whoever he is he clearly does not have regular access
[04:10] to the president i said damn it karen i want you to go to the president and ask him to pardon me and if you can't go to him i want you to go to kushner because she had been bragging about her access to jared kushner well she didn't know jared kushner jared kushner wouldn't know her if she had walked up to him on the street and uh you know when push came to shove she didn't help me get a pardon now i knew that this was happening and i knew that time was growing short so last summer on the first of july
[04:43] two business associates of mine and i had a meeting with rudy giuliani and an assistant of his or an associate of his at the trump hotel here in washington this was to sell a very large number of uh kn 95 masks to the pentagon and so during a lull in the conversation i said to rudy hey you know why don't we talk about uh a pardon and as soon as i said the word pardon he stood up and said i have to hit the
[05:14] head and he walked away to the bathroom his associate said to me rudy doesn't talk about pardons you want to talk about a pardon you talk to me but rudy's gonna want two million dollars and i i laughed at him i actually laughed at his face and i said two million dollars i said listen first of all i don't have two million dollars secondly why in the world would i spend two million dollars to recover a 700 000 pension i said
[05:45] that's outrageous and i ended the conversation now i related this to karen giorno and she told me oh well you know that's the going rate i gave you a deal dinesh d'souza paid a million for his and conrad black paid a million for his and she just went on and on well i related this story later on to a friend of mine another whistleblower um robert mclean the tsa whistleblower and he said to me you know this sounds like pardons are for sale and i said
[06:18] that's a crude way of saying it but but yeah i think that's really what is going on here they they call it lobbying uh but it's not really lobbying i think pardons are for sale and even if donald trump isn't you know getting the money at the end of the day it's people like rudy giuliani enriching themselves that's really what this comes down to even even if people don't have the connections to actually follow through as as was the case with miss giorno yes yes exactly exactly it was a money grab
[06:49] is what it was whether it was karen giorno or any of the other you know dozen people purporting to have had close contacts with the white house or close enough contacts with the white house to to get a pardon yeah that's what it was it was a money grab so i mentioned this to robert mclean he was appalled to his credit and um and he called the fbi and he reported it he reported it that rudy giuliani was essentially selling pardons and the fbi
[07:19] was not interested and robert was so disappointed that the fbi didn't care that this was happening that he called the new york times and that's how they got started on this story and then as you say spoke with dozens around 30 sources in order to cooperate this this dealing regarding the pardons john is is this kind of corrupt management of the pardon process unique to the trump administration no this happened during the clinton
[07:50] administration as well although it wasn't the lobbyists and lawyers who were making the money it's uh they were passing the money on in the form of donations to the clinton foundation so this isn't specifically a partisan thing it's not specifically a trump thing it's it just points to the corruption of the entire system and and let me add something about that that i think is very important the system that we have that allows convicted felons to apply for pardons is utterly broken
[08:20] right the way it's supposed to work is you go online to the website of the office of the us pardon attorney and you fill out a form and you say i'm rehabilitated i'm sorry for my crime and i'm on the straight and narrow and this is what i'm doing with my life and then they turn all that all of that over to the fbi the fbi does a background investigation and then when the fbi is done with their investigation they
[08:50] pass the file back to the pardon attorney and the pardon attorney determines if yes you deserve a pardon or no you do not deserve a pardon so in a perfect world that's how it's supposed to work the way it really works is ten thousand people apply for a pardon every year and they recommend five or six people so you mean out of 10 000 people only five or six have really rehabilitated themselves and so at the
[09:21] end of the day nobody gets a pardon well if nobody gets a pardon and if everybody knows that the that the formal process doesn't work then what are they going to do well if you're poor you're not going to do anything because you're out of luck if you have money or you have friends in high political places then you go the lobbyist route and that just shows you how perverted this entire system has become yeah how are you now advocating for reform of the pardon system based on
[09:53] your experience well you know i've always maintained that the that the original authorizing legislation uh back in you know the the early 19th century that authorized the creation of the office of the us pardon attorney meant or intended for the pardon attorney to be independent of the attorney general we know that from contemporaneous accounts of the debate around the legislation
[10:25] but it's never been independent it's always been seconded to the office of the attorney general and that's just wrong so instead of the pardon attorney being housed at doj it should be housed at the white house it should not report to the attorney general it should report to the executive office of the president and they should be able to make their own um determinations as to who deserves forgiveness and who doesn't deserve forgiveness
[10:56] absent uh political pressures because as things stand now almost nobody apparently deserves uh a pardon you know at the very end of the obama administration uh obama fired the pardon attorney for that very reason because the pardon attorney would go years at a time without recommending anybody for a pardon and that just defeats the whole purpose of the office absolutely while i've got you on the line i wanted to ask you about some of
[11:28] the intelligence priorities of the new biden administration on january 20th avril haynes became the first biden pick to be approved by the senate she will serve as biden's director of national intelligence and we've been hearing a lot about her role in the cia's drone program as well as whitewashing u.s torture how will she influence president biden yeah that's a very important question and a very important issue avril haynes is very very much in the mold of john
[11:59] brennan and gina haspel she was she was brennan's deputy at the national security council she was brennan's deputy at the cia and remember avril haynes who was confirmed by the senate yesterday by a vote of 82 to 10 which just made my hair stand up um avril haynes was the one who was responsible for creating the legal arguments in support of john brennan's kill list
[12:30] at the uh nsc it's avril who would take you know the call from from the field saying we have the terrorists uh jeep in in our sights request permission to launch and she would give permission to launch and invariably we killed innocent uh civilians women children elderly and she never answered questions at least not in my mind she never answered questions related to her role in the drone program at least as
[13:01] important as that it was avril haynes who was john brennan's deputy at the cia when brennan ordered cia operatives to hack into the computer system of the senate intelligence committee the democratic staff because they were writing the senate torture report and brennan wanted to know what they knew and so he ordered this hack of the system well avril haynes was in up to her neck in the hacking of the system so that's two little things i mean
[13:33] little in terms of you know global politics that bother me another thing that bothered me is we really don't know where avril haines stands on issues like china russia iran counter-proliferation counter-terrorism she never had to answer any of those questions at least not in a public venue yet she was she was approved by a vote of 82-10 and is today the director of national intelligence
[14:03] for some reason many of these intelligence picks or questions seem to have bipartisan support john what do you make of biden's decision to nominate william burns a career diplomat to lead the cia now that i was very happy about i've known bill burns for the last 30 years he has ably served presidents of both parties uh he was he was the point man for the
[14:35] obama administration during the negotiations with iran for the jcpoa the iran nuclear deal he devoted his professional career to supporting human rights and the arab-israeli peace process he's the real deal and he is apolitical to a fault there's not a political bone in the man's body he's had essentially every high level position at the state department from uh deputy secretary on down he was ambassador to russia he was ambassador
[15:08] to jordan he was the special peace envoy so if you're looking for someone who's not afflicted with the stink of torture or guantanamo or secret prisons uh around the world uh he's your guy if if you're looking for somebody with the the political juice in the bureaucracy to actually reform the cia if that's what you want to do and i i think it's in dire need of reform then bill burns is the guy to do
[15:39] it and it what was a mystery to me uh anya is that um is that joe biden could pick somebody as able as bill burns and somebody as disastrous as avril haynes in the same week i just don't understand it suggests a bit of schizophrenia within the administration perhaps some have said that the selection of burns and you alluded to this suggests that negotiating with iran restarting talks
[16:10] with iran will be a major priority of the binan administration along with friend of the show gareth porter you actually wrote a book the cia insider's guide to the iran crisis from your perspective why is the united states so fixated on branding iran as a top enemy and how will the biden administration approach the country yeah that's a great question historically the problem that we had vis-a-vis iran was the specter of
[16:42] communism as quaint as that may sound now the cia and the state department were absolutely obsessed with the notion that iran could go communist and of course you know in typical uh american fashion we overreacted by installing brutal dictators like the shah of iran mohammed raza palabi and his father reza palavi in order to crush whatever left-wing
[17:13] dissent there might be in the in the country well of course they went overboard as dictators are wanted to do and they ended up oppressing their own people and killing many thousands of people that led to the iranian revolution of 1978 and 79. um we've never gotten over the iran hostage crisis like as a as a country as a government we've just never gotten over it and we don't trust the iranians because of it well the iranians don't trust us because
[17:43] of our interference in their country spanning so many decades at the same time i know we always seem to need an ism to to oppose whether it's communism anarchism socialism as the decades roll by islamic fundamentalism it's like we we seek an ideology to rally against because it helps us
[18:13] politically and i think that's that's the rut that we've been in with iran the the jcpoa the the successful negotiation for the jcpoa was a giant leap forward in american diplomacy the shame of it is twofold one that it came so late in the obama administration and two that it was not ratified as a treaty by the us senate so it could just be canceled uh by donald trump as it was well now joe biden wants to
[18:45] uh reinvigorate uh reestablish the jcpoa and the iranians are reluctant and i think deservedly so because their view is that's fine you know we we agree to go back into the jcpoa and then what what's to keep you from pulling out of it again imposing crippling sanctions on us again you know don't forget these sanctions these aren't just paragraphs in the official gazette these
[19:16] sanctions have real impact people die because of sanctions whether they can't get food or medications or fuel or spare parts people die there's a squeeze and it's not just on the government it's on the citizenry and so the iranians just simply don't trust us especially now we're hearing that the biden administration according to secretary of state nominee anthony blinken won't necessarily return to negotiations
[19:47] without asking for even more from iran even though it was the united states which broke the deal to begin with so you know tony blinkens another person that i've known for a long time i actually took his desk when i went up to the senate foreign relations committee uh he he left the senate foreign relations committee the week that i arrived and tony very much is a is a creature of washington he owes his entire career to joe biden he has spent his entire career as an
[20:17] aide to joe biden in different capacities he was a staff assistant at the senate foreign relations committee and then he worked his way up to be the staff director of the senate foreign relations committee when biden became its chairman he followed biden to the white house uh 12 years ago and became the deputy national security adviser then the vice president's national security adviser then deputy secretary of state uh and he spent the four years working with madeleine albright and and other heavy hitters from the
[20:49] democratic party's diplomatic uh grouping of people and uh now he finds himself secretary of state and he owes it all to joe biden and finally john i just wanted to ask you we know according to u.s defense documents that since early 2018 the u.s has placed a great power competition concerning russia and china at the center of its strategy why are our military and intelligence agencies so focused on this
[21:20] fight and how might it manifest under biden and his cabinet this is a dangerous uh policy development i think instead of of engaging russia and china instead of trying to um to try to figure out where for example in intelligence we can cooperate with them for example on counterterrorism counterproliferation counter narcotics we we challenge them and we just make a a policy assumption that that we're on
[21:50] the verge of a hot war and so we have to prepare for that hot war this is a policy decision that was made many many years ago uh it's bipartisan in nature and uh and we're in the minority in that people like you and i want to see cooperation and negotiations uh but i don't think it matters really who is in the white house i don't think it matters who the secretary of defense is who the national security adviser is or who the secretary of state is we're going to be challenging russia and
[22:22] china uh in perpetuity that's that's the lobbying that we see done on the part of the defense contractors that's the the uh you know what else can you say eisenhower warned us about the the um the military-industrial complex and he was exactly right here we are now three generations later and was we're still having the same conversation nothing's going to change
[22:52] and i don't care how liberal people want to believe joe biden is uh our relations with russia and china won't change during blankens senate confirmation hearings a major theme was especially china and even from someone such as blink and who's not considered as hawkish as some of the other individuals biden may have chosen for that position then the major threat blink and saw as well as most of the senators on the foreign
[23:23] relations committee was that china is going to replace us as the number one power in the world and i think that will just be a huge theme throughout the biden presidency i agree the chinese will replace us as the largest economy uh in the next 10 years uh but i i agree with you tony blinken is a neo-liberal just like just like you know hillary clinton was when she was the secretary of state and don't forget that it was barack obama who talked about the pivot to asia uh turning away from russia as
[23:54] our as our greatest threat and uh and looking at the chinese as our greatest threat that was a democratic strategy and i think that strategy is uh is still in in play uh during a biden administration it certainly will be john kiriakou cia whistleblower thanks so much for your time you know we were really i was really rooting for your pardon and i'm sorry that about how it all worked out but i appreciate you sharing this story
[24:24] and discussing some of the issues with this system now just as you did after your time in prison i know you you talked a lot about the experience of prisoners after after you started to keep up the fight thank you so much john thank you anya take care you