[00:02] Please support our work over at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored Thanks everyone for joining us back at the Project Censored radio show. We're very glad right now to be joined by John Kiriakou, who is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose
[00:34] and blow the whistle on the Bush administration's torture program. John, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Eleanor. Happy to do it. So, starting off here, I want, because you and Assange have this in common, that you're both being pummeled by the Espionage Act, and he would, like you, end up in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, and I was wondering if you could give folks some context of what that means to be in the Eastern District Court, and how that flies in the face of the argument that were Assange to be
[01:05] extradited, he would receive a fair trial. Oh, yeah. First of all, bottom line up front. It's not possible for him to receive a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. It's just not possible. The easiest reason for that is that his jury would be made up of people who work for or who have friends or relatives who work for the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, or any number of dozens and dozens of intelligence community contractors. That's the jury pool. So it's just not possible to, to get a fair trial.
[01:38] And I'm going to ask a rhetorical question. You know, I was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia. Jeffrey Sterling, the CIA whistleblower, was in the Eastern District. Snowden has been charged in the Eastern District, as has Julian. But when former CIA Director David Petraeus exposed the names of 10 covert CIA operatives to his girlfriend, and gave her access to the president's black books, which were the most highly classified documents that exist in the American government, where was he charged?
[02:10] He was charged in the Western district of North Carolina. They knocked his charge down to a misdemeanor. He took a plea and he got 18 months of unsupervised probation. He kept his security clearance. He kept his contract with the white house. And at his sentencing hearing, the judge came down from the bench to shake his hand and to thank him for his service to the country. So there's a big difference in the way people are treated under the
[02:42] Espionage Act, depending on which federal district you're charged in. They call the Eastern District of Virginia the Espionage Court for a reason. And it's that no national security defendant has ever won a case there. Ever. And I'm curious, too, because in your trial, as I understand it, and I'm hoping you can speak more to this, you weren't actually allowed to put up a defense for yourself. No. That's, that's one of the quirks of the Espionage Act.
[03:15] There is no affirmative defense. You can't say, yes, I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, but I did it because it was an illegal program. All you can say is, yes, I exposed classified information. You can't, you're forbidden from saying why you did it. And Ed Snowden, I was in close touch with Ed Snowden after he first made his revelations. Well, first of all, he said he was willing to come home and face the music.
[03:49] And I said, listen, you've got to hire the best lawyers that money can buy. You should hire my lawyers, right? And so he did, he hired my lawyers and they immediately engaged in conversations with the justice department to try to work out a deal because as I said, he was willing to come home and face the music and go to prison, he told me this himself. If they would allow him to stand up in court to explain why he did what he did. And they said, absolutely not.
[04:23] So for whatever reason, that's never been explained, it was better for the justice department for Ed Snowden to make a new life for himself in Russia than it was for him to come back and explain that the CIA and NSA and myriad other services are spying on American citizens. They wouldn't do it. And it's really, I mean, if you think about it, intention is really a big deal in court. Because it separates, of course, murder trials.
[04:53] Like, did you mean to kill the person, or did you accidentally kill them? So intention is really a vital point of the justice system. But not in the Espionage Act. My lawyers actually tried to make that argument in the very first hearing that we had and, my judge, Judge Leonie Brinkman, a Reagan appointee, she interrupted the lawyers and she said, I'm not going to respect precedent from other courts that the defendant had to have a criminal intent.
[05:28] And my lawyers are saying, well, wait a minute, your honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage? And she said, that's exactly what I'm saying. And then she turned to me and she said, Mr. Kiriakou, you either did it or you didn't do it. And I think you did it. And that was it. We blocked off three days. We wrote up hundreds of motions to throw out documents.
[05:58] And we blocked off three days for her to hear these 200 motions. So we walked in. And they were all about criminal intent, right? Because they showed, these cables showed my refusal to take part in the torture training, my objection to torture while I was still in the CIA, and there were dozens, hundreds of cables that laid out the actual torture techniques that were being used. And she said, we walked into the courtroom, and she said, I'm going
[06:31] to save everybody a lot of time, and I'm denying all 200 of these motions. And so, that was it. She declared us in recess and as we were walking out, I said to my lead attorney, what just happened? And he said, we just lost the case. That's what happened. And that's the Eastern District of Virginia. In the end I got a best and final offer from the Justice Department and I decided to turn it down.
[07:03] My wife and I stayed up all night talking about what to do and I believed in my heart that I was innocent and I was going to turn it down and I said very naively, once I get in front of a jury and I explain what happened, they're going to see how ridiculous these charges are. So I emailed my attorneys very early in the morning and they responded immediately that three of them were coming over to the house, four of them were coming over to the house. The one who was the oldest and the most grizzled when he walked in, he
[07:35] said to me, these were his exact words. He said, you stupid son of a bitch, take the deal. And then the second one who was kind of this Southern gentleman, he said, listen, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take this deal. It's not going to get any better than this. And then the third one who was tough but who I liked and respected the most got right in my face.
[08:05] And forgive me if I've told this story too many times, but got right in my face and he said, you know what your problem is, your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice, it's about mitigating damage, take the deal. And so I took the deal. And that's what they expect. That's why, according to ProPublica, the federal government wins 98. 2 percent of its cases and in the Eastern District of Virginia, they win 99.
[08:37] 1 percent of their cases. You don't have a chance. You can't win. And as you've said before, Julian Assange would not, I mean, there's no way that he would be offered a deal by the Justice Department at this point. I doubt it. The only way I could see the Justice Department offering him a deal would be if he or if Wikileaks had additional information that had not yet been released and as part of the deal, they would negotiate, you know, X
[09:10] amount of time in exchange for you not releasing the information or returning it back to the government. But no, he's facing 175 years in prison on dozens of espionage charges. I can't imagine that they would want to make that any easier for him. And in your experience too, it's not just about the Eastern District, it's also about trying to ensure that lives are destroyed after the fact.
[09:41] And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about that. So let's say that somehow he was pardoned. There's also this large state apparatus that tries to ensure that whistleblowers and truth tellers have their lives destroyed even outside of the justice system. Yeah, you know, automatically people walk away from you, right? Friends, former colleagues, even relatives will just walk away from you and they'll never speak to you again. That's hurtful, right?
[10:13] But you can live with that. Okay, you get to see who your friends really were anyway. And then you make new friends in a new community. So you're okay there. But where you're not okay is you will never work in your field ever again. And on top of never working in your field, you have a national security felony conviction. So you lose your federal pension. You lose the right to vote. You lose the right to ever own a firearm.
[10:45] You're always a suspect in something. I mean, it was years after I got home from prison that the FBI continued to follow me around. Not all the time, but with some regularity. And so, here, myself as an example, I was one of the U.S. government's leading experts on the Middle East. And I ended up stocking shelves at Michael's craft store on midnight shift before I got a minimum wage job at a left wing think tank,
[11:18] and then finally my wife left. She couldn't take it anymore. So, that's all part of the longer term punishment. They want you to be ruined. Not because they specifically have it out for you, right? They're not sitting around a table saying, how can we screw Eleanor? How can we make it so she never works again? What they're doing though is saying, how can we use Eleanor as an example? Where we make her so hurt that other people are going to look
[11:52] at her and say, you know, I was thinking about blowing the whistle, but look what they did to Eleanor. I better keep my mouth shut. A New York Times reporter told me that on the day of my arrest, literally every one of the New York Times national security sources went silent and stayed silent for six months. And that was the goal. That's what they wanted to do. Wow, that is terrifying. Well, and I'm curious too, because you worked at the CIA, and because
[12:25] the CIA has been particularly rabid against Julian Assange, were you surprised when you heard, for instance, that Pompeo had hatched this plan to have Julian Assange murdered? Did that seem in step and in line with how the CIA operates on the inside? Yes. And I'll tell you why. I was sickened, of course, by this report. You're talking about the report from Yahoo News. I was sickened by it, but not at all surprised. And there are a couple of little details in there that are not generally publicly
[12:57] known that I think are very important. So what you're talking about is a report by Michael Isikoff that ran in Yahoo News. Now, Mike Isikoff is a very well known, very highly respected national security journalist here in Washington. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner, made his made his bones at Newsweek when Newsweek was a major publication. He was able to get 30 current and former intelligence officers to talk to him for this report.
[13:28] So it's not like just one guy said, Oh, Pompeo wanted to kill Julian Assange. This is 30 people from the inside who gave the details of this operation. Now the idea was if Julian attempted to leave the Ecuadorian embassy that he would be snatched off the street and rendered, either to the Eastern District of Virginia to face trial, or to Guantanamo to be held until they could figure out what to do with him. Or, if they couldn't render him, to shoot him dead in the street.
[14:03] They also talked about a Plan C: that if he were somehow to make his way to one of London's airports and board a Russian embassy flight, the CIA was authorized to shoot out the tires of the plane. Now this is an act of war, to shoot out the tires of the plane to ensure that it couldn't take off. Okay, one of the things that most people missed was a couple of days
[14:34] before this became public, Mike Pompeo, in an interview, called WikiLeaks a hostile, non state intelligence service. Those words were very carefully chosen, because if WikiLeaks is a hostile, non state, intelligence service, that makes this whole case a counterintelligence case. Now, a counterintelligence case would be run by the CIA's counterintelligence center.
[15:06] But counterintelligence cases are the most highly classified cases that the CIA handles. They're so highly classified that they are the only cases that don't have to be briefed to the House and Senate oversight committees. Why? Because counterintelligence usually means that you're working for a foreign power, a foreign government. Well, if the CIA is investigating a mole, who's to say that the mole
[15:40] maybe isn't the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, right? Or the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. So those are all held internally. Well, if this operation were to be carried out, all anybody would know was that Julian Assange tried to leave the embassy, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and he was shot dead, period. And that's the end of the story. That's why he used those very specific words, that very specific term, or terminology, that it was a hostile non state intelligence service.
[16:14] And of course it's not. It's a transparency and journalism outlet, but that's what they don't want people to think. And let me add one thing, and this is just an educated guess. I don't have any inside information to prove that this is the case, but I think the reason why this never happened was the modus operandi for a covert action
[16:45] program like this is you first go to the CIA's general counsel, they say, yes, it's legal, no, it's not legal. If it's legal, it goes to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, OLC, and they say, yes, it's legal. No, it's not legal. If they say, then it goes to the National Security Council General Counsel and he'll say yes, it's legal, no, it's not. If it is, it goes to the national security advisor for a signature.
[17:15] If that person signs it, it goes to the president for his signature. And if the president signs it, it's implemented. I think that it made its way to the N.S.C. And I think the national security advisor received it and said, are they out of their minds? We are going to assassinate a Five Eyes citizen, a citizen of Australia, who has never faced his accusers in a court of law?
[17:45] We're gonna murder him in broad daylight in the street in Knightsbridge, London? So somebody, probably the National Security Advisor, was the adult in the room and killed it. But I think at the same time, there were enough people in the CIA who were aware of the planning for it that they said, this is above and beyond, we've got to say something because people have lost their minds.
[18:16] And I think that's why this team of Yahoo reporters didn't have one source or two sources or five sources. They had 30 sources who all confirmed each other's information. Yeah, that is remarkable. And I want to kind of talk about that hierarchy for a second because it does seem like it's a bit askew, right? Because yes, in that case, the CIA could be tamped down by the NSC and basically like, no, we're not doing that, that's ridiculous.
[18:48] But at the same time, as Kevin Gosztola points out in his book, there's a good chance that Assange wouldn't be facing the charges that he's facing were it not for the CIA's rabid stance against Assange, because the DOJ was really scrambling to charge Assange once Pompeo made it very clear that he wanted Julian's head on a stick. It seems like the hierarchy where the CIA operates underneath anyone, that doesn't seem to be the case.
[19:20] Yeah, people, I think, generally don't realize just how authoritative the CIA is in areas of government where they shouldn't even be a part of the conversation, right? The CIA's job, very simply, is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets, to allow policymakers to make the best informed policy decisions, period. That's it. It shouldn't be up to the CIA to decide who's charged with a crime,
[19:52] who gets prosecuted with a crime, to create paramilitary forces, to carry out international kidnappings or torture programs in archipelagos of secret prisons, to decide what Congress should and shouldn't know. None of that should be up to the CIA, but we've allowed the CIA, like we did with the FBI in the 50s to just keep pushing that envelope to the point where it's too late to stop them. And you need a Church Committee or a Pike Committee to finally
[20:29] reign them back in again. Remember, Barack Obama, as bad as he was, especially for national security whistleblowers never charged Julian Assange with a crime. It was Donald Trump that did it. Now, many of us, and I'll admit that I was just as wrong as many of my friends and colleagues, many of us thought that, well, you know, Joe Biden was a part of the Obama administration and he knew what Obama was talking about when
[20:59] he said that charging Assange would give him a New York Times problem, and we can certainly talk about that. Certainly Biden understands the New York Times problem and he'll have to drop these charges. No, he doubled down. He doubled down and here we are, expecting that Julian will be extradited to the Eastern District before the end of this year and then probably sit in pre trial detention, you know, for years while the two sides bicker about what should be
[21:31] admitted as evidence and what shouldn't. Yeah. And I would definitely like you to speak to the New York Times problem. For people who don't know, could you briefly explain what that is before we, before we sign off? Yeah, it's one of the funny ironies of this whole situation. You know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, AP, all of these big news outlets, these big mainstream news outlets publish classified information literally every single day. Washington couldn't run if it didn't have classified leaks every single day.
[22:06] And usually it's the White House or the Pentagon that's doing the leaking. I can point to leaks that I'm positive came from the CIA just in the last two weeks about Israel / Palestine. But when those leaks are authorized, eh, you know, everybody's happy. When the leaks are unauthorized, then the White House is very upset and the CIA will file something called a Crimes Report with the FBI, and then the FBI has to investigate it.
[22:36] But the truth is, if you're going to charge Julian Assange, a publisher with multiple counts of espionage, then you're going to have to charge the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, AP, and everybody else who publishes classified information every single day. Well, that's a First Amendment violation, isn't it? So we're either going to be transparent and supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of press, etc or we're not.
[23:09] Because you can't be both. Yeah, there really is that much that hangs on this case, and I'm curious, just because when you were speaking, I was like, an authorized leak, wouldn't you just call that sharing information, but they still call it an authorized leak? An authorized leak is like, the CIA leaks: we got it right on Gaza. We predicted three days before that they were going to launch this attack. And then they leak that to the Post and then the Post says: classified
[23:43] CIA paper says the CIA got it right. And then the CIA says, Oh, no, that information was classified. It makes us look really good. We probably should report it to the FBI. But they probably won't be able to figure out who leaked it anyway. That's an authorized leak. I see. Okay. Like accidentally posting a really good looking picture of yourself online or something. Yeah.
[24:13] Exactly. Wow. Okay. John, thank you so much for giving this really, really important context and sharing your own story about what happened to you. Really appreciate it. Oh, thanks for the work that you do, Eleanor. It's important. Thanks for having me. If you enjoyed the show, please consider supporting our work at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored