The 2023 classified documents scandal is the sequence of discoveries of classified material held privately by Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence. John Kiriakou treats it as a statutory problem rather than a personal one.
Everyone is technically guilty
His argument runs from his own prosecution. Because the judge in his case defined espionage as “providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it” — and confirmed from the bench that a person could commit it accidentally — the same definition catches the principals here. “That unconstitutionally broad definition of an unconstitutionally broad law means that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Pence and who knows who else are technically guilty of having committed espionage. The way that the Espionage Act is being used today makes them guilty.”[1][2]
He does not want them charged. “Are they guilty of espionage? Of course not. Should they be prosecuted for espionage? Of course not.” What he wants is the opening: “this gives us an opportunity to scrap this terrible law and to rewrite it, so that people who are guilty of espionage — people working for our enemies, people working on behalf of foreign governments or foreign powers — can be rightfully prosecuted, and whistleblowers and people who accidentally take home a classified document are not subject to this draconian law.”[2][3]
Pence’s briefing books
Of the three, Kiriakou rates Pence’s material the most sensitive. What was found were briefing books from foreign trips taken as vice president, and those contain finished CIA intelligence — “for example, psychological profiles of the foreign leaders that he’s going to meet with. That’s very highly classified.”[4][5]
His comparison is deliberate: “Julian Assange never released anything as highly classified as that. So this is worse than what Julian Assange is being accused of having done.”[5]
Biden’s Senate documents
The discovery Kiriakou says cannot be shrugged off is the material Biden appears to have taken as a senator. He grounds the objection in his own two-plus years as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the committee Biden had chaired.[6]
Outside the intelligence committee, he explains, a senator cannot hold classified material at all: “you can’t just have classified documents in your office, because your office is not a vaulted area. It’s not a secure area.” Reading a briefing or cable traffic means an appointment at the office of the Senate security officer — “which is underneath the Capitol Rotunda” — and reading it in the vaulted conference room there.[7][8]
From which the conclusion follows: “you can’t walk out with classified documents. You have to make an effort to walk out with classified documents.” And so: “classified docs from your Senate days — those don’t accidentally get into your stuff. He’s going to have to explain it.”[8][9]
Who is next
Kiriakou noted that Bill Clinton and both Bushes had been publicly cleared while “nobody said anything about Barack Obama,” and predicted the next announcement would concern him — documents either at the storage facility outside Chicago awaiting his presidential library or at his oceanfront house on Cape Cod.[10][11]