The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the U.S. political organization advocating for U.S. support of Israel. In John Kiriakou’s framing, AIPAC functions as a foreign lobby and ought to be registered as such under U.S. law but is not: “They somehow have convinced the government that they are just a group of Americans who really love Israel, which of course is utter complete total horseshit. … It should be registered as a foreign lobbying group, and it’s not.”[1] Kiriakou has called AIPAC, by his own count, the largest foreign agent operating in America, and says it has lobbied for 75 years, building state-level organization and funding so effective that the operative question on Capitol Hill often was not what U.S. policy should be, but simply “What’s AIPAC say about this?”[2][3] Kiriakou says Israel has financed AIPAC not just to shape messaging but to actively influence House and Senate races, presidential races, and the selection of judges, calling it by far the most powerful lobbying group in Washington.[4]
What AIPAC is
Origins and the strategic decision
Kiriakou grounds AIPAC’s existence in an Israeli threat perception. The Israelis genuinely believe they are alone in the world; they know the United States is close but fear it might not be tomorrow; and they believe that if they are not among the strongest powers in the world they will “end up floating in the Mediterranean.” From that, he says, came a strategic decision in the mid-1950s to have as much impact on American elections as possible.[5] AIPAC was created in the 1950s as a domestic lobbying organisation supporting Israeli foreign policy goals.[6]
He dates the turn to election fundraising to the late 1960s, followed by Nixon’s 1969 guarantee of Israeli national security, and then growth from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions — enough to be competitive in effectively every political race in America.[7][8]
The foreign-agent question
Kiriakou notes that every country has lobbyists in Washington and that there is nothing unusual in that; what is unusual is that AIPAC alone among such organisations does not have to register as a foreign agent. “They’re clearly working on behalf of Israel, but they pretend that they’re not.”[7] Foreign lobbyists are ordinarily required to register as agents of a foreign government — a simple form, he says, that takes five minutes to file — but AIPAC insists it is totally independent of the Israeli government even as it acts as its de facto advocate in Washington.[9] He calls this uniquely unfair: every other ethnic lobbying group, Turkish included, has to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but AIPAC does not, and Kiriakou says he does not know why the Justice Department gives it a pass.[10][11][12]
He draws the contrast personally: in 2008 he had to register as a foreign agent for a small paid contract writing a handful of op-eds in support of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, worth a few thousand dollars, while AIPAC — which he calls the biggest agent of any foreign state operating in America — is exempt from filing at all.[3] As an example of how far this asymmetry extends, Kiriakou describes a 2016 incident in which Turkish security personnel physically fought Armenian protesters outside a White House meeting with Erdoğan; a court later ruled the Turks lacked diplomatic immunity and should have been arrested, but were not.[13] Asked directly, he has said he believes it is Israel — specifically AIPAC, rather than Russia — that most influences American elections, and that he believes “1,000 percent” AIPAC should register as a foreign agent, though he characterizes this as his opinion rather than something evidence-based.[14]
How it enforces the line
The primary
AIPAC’s principal mechanism of influence, per Kiriakou, is the primary election. “If you are an elected official in the United States and you are not 100% pro-Israel, they will primary you, and they have great success in defeating incumbents who express even the vaguest support for Palestinian human rights.”[15] He describes the underlying mechanism the same way elsewhere: “if you stray even one iota from the pro-Israel political line, they will primary you” by running a fully pro-Israel challenger.[16]
The two named cases of successful primary defeat in this pattern are former Representatives Cori Bush (St. Louis) and Jamaal Bowman (New York), both of whom delivered House floor speeches characterizing the war in Gaza as a “wholesale massacre of Palestinian civilians and women and children.” Both were defeated in their next primaries.[17][18] Kiriakou has repeated the Bush example elsewhere to make the same point about fear driving Congress: nothing changes in the lobbying system, he says, without going after AIPAC directly, and everyone in Congress is too cowed to do it, since a member who is not 100% pro-Israel gets primaried and loses — Bush, he notes, lasted only two years in the House before AIPAC-aligned money ended her career.[19]
He cited the 2026 primary campaign against Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky as a further example: approximately $30 million was spent to unseat a congressman whose record, in Kiriakou’s view, was almost uniformly conservative and constitutionalist. Kiriakou attributed the effort entirely to Massie’s opposition to U.S. funding of Israel and foreign interventionist wars, summarizing the lobby’s posture as: “They want Israel first. America can be co-first, but it’s going to be America and Israel both first.”[20]
The money
The choice facing any elected official is binary: accept substantial campaign funding from wealthy pro-Israel donors and align with Israeli government positions, or risk having AIPAC fund and field a candidate against you in the next election. Kiriakou stated that in the most recent election cycle, AIPAC-backed challengers won five out of six such races against incumbents who had deviated from the pro-Israel line.[21][22] He describes AIPAC’s underlying strategy as “take no prisoners” — total loyalty or nothing — and says it funds pro-Israel campaigns generously, sometimes sending $500,000 to a single congressional race, while financing primary challengers against any member who votes the wrong way on Israel.[23] He puts a number on the take-up: roughly 88 to 90 percent of members of Congress have taken AIPAC money, he says, because it is simpler to take the money and vote pro-Israel than to risk a well-funded primary challenge.[24]
His summary: “Would you rather take $150 million for your campaign from wealthy donors and toe the Israeli line, or do you want to risk having them run a candidate against you and then not winning re-election? Most American politicians fall into line.”[22][25]
He connected this dynamic directly to the decision to enter the Iran conflict: previous presidents could resist Netanyahu’s repeated requests to bomb Iran; the current president — operating within a political structure where AIPAC’s financial leverage is decisive — could not.[25]
When it backfires
Kiriakou cites a New Jersey congressional race as a case where the strategy backfired: AIPAC’s support for a third, more pro-Israel Democratic primary challenger split the pro-Israel vote against a pro-Israel incumbent, and a pro-Palestinian candidate won as a result.[26] He says candidates for lower-level offices are increasingly announcing proactively that they will not take AIPAC money, a trend he expects to become a major issue in the next presidential election.[27]
Reach into Congress
A lobbyist for every office
John Kiriakou has described AIPAC as the most powerful lobbying organization in the world, operating not only at the federal level but in every state capital in the United States. He stated that literally every member of Congress is assigned a dedicated AIPAC lobbyist[28][29] — staffers, he says, assigned to all 535 congressional offices, who participate in meetings and write legislation as though they were staff members themselves, and are stationed daily in offices to press members on Israel-related positions.[30][31] As visible markers of that closeness, Kiriakou points to Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham and Congressman Randy Fine displaying Israeli flags at the entrance to their offices — behavior he says should prompt an FBI investigation if he were still in government.[32]
The trip to the “Holy Land”
Kiriakou describes a personal account: as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman John Kerry from 2009 to mid-2011, two AIPAC representatives walked unannounced into his office on his very first day and offered him an all-expenses-paid trip to the “Holy Land” — not “Israel,” he notes they were careful to say — approved by the Senate Ethics Committee. He declined, telling them, in his words, “total legal bribery,” and eventually had to tell them to get out of his office; three or four of his colleagues took the trip.[33][34][35]
Reach below the federal level
John Kiriakou has described the Israel lobby’s political operation as extending to every level of American government — not only federal offices but state legislatures and local races including school boards: “They are at every level of government. They’re embedded on Capitol Hill. They’re in the state legislatures. They’re even working on local races like school boards.”[36]
The fifty state legislatures, and “John Kiriakou Day”
The instance he returns to is his own. A Texas state senator who had followed his case called to say he wanted to sponsor a routine “John Kiriakou Day” resolution — the kind passed 140 to 150 times a year, each earning a certificate with the governor’s gold seal. Weeks later the senator called back to say it was cancelled: AIPAC had objected.[37] In another telling the target is described as a friend of his, a civic leader in Texas, whose acquaintance in the state senate proposed one of the roughly 140 proforma resolutions passed each year and then called back to say it would not happen because “AIPAC killed it.”[38][39] Asked why, when it had been pro forma, the answer Kiriakou reports was: “The AIPAC lobbyists objected to it.”[40][41]
He draws the general conclusion from it: AIPAC has lobbyists in all fifty state legislatures, and is involved in mayoral races and city council races across the country, not merely in New York — “because they want to make the United States a 100% pro-Zionist country, and they’re succeeding.”[39][42] It has now gone further still, getting involved in mayoral, city council, and school board races as it “builds its bench.”[37]
Down to the water board
Kiriakou reports being surprised by the depth of the organization’s reach below federal politics. His follow-up question — whether AIPAC keeps lobbyists in state capitals for state legislatures — got a broader answer than he expected: “Not just in the state capitals. They have lobbyists all over America. They’re lobbying in local city council elections,” down to a candidate for “the water board of whatever city or the garbage commission of whatever city you happen to be living in.”[41]
What the alignment buys
The CIA’s posture on Israel
Kiriakou attributes the categorical CIA prohibition on intelligence operations against Israel directly to AIPAC’s political weight: “Can you imagine if we spied on the Israelis and got caught? Every member of Congress would be demanding the CIA director’s head.”[43] Pressed in August 2025 on whether the United States spies on Israel, his answer was “absolutely not,” and “it’s a hard and fast policy” — no exception, not even with a wink and a nod.[44]
Asked why, he gave the reason without elaboration: “Because AIPAC says not to. Really, that’s what it comes down to. It would be bad politics.” His own assessment of the arrangement was equally short: “It’s awful. It’s a terrible policy.”[44][45] He applies the same mechanism inside the agency: with practically everybody on Capitol Hill taking AIPAC money and members primaried if they refuse it, institutional independence is lost.[46]
The silence on Israeli espionage
Asked in August 2026 why an administration does nothing about a service its own agencies rank a critical threat, Kiriakou treated the question as answering itself — “That’s easy. Politics.”[47] His account of the mechanism emphasises reach downward rather than volume. AIPAC “has spent so much money in American politics at every level, not just the federal level, but state and now local levels, too, that you don’t dare challenge the Israeli government.” The enforcement is electoral: “they will primary you and they will defeat you.” The survival rule he derives is absolute — “if you want to survive as an American politician, you have to be utterly completely pro-Israel.”[48]
What that buys, in his telling, is silence on a specific list of facts. No politician will say that the Israelis “are spying on us all over the United States”, that “they’re embedded in our defense contractors”, or that they are on Capitol Hill “stealing our secrets” and trying to infiltrate the CIA, the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency.[48]
He ends the argument on the case he treats as its reductio — an Israeli official arrested by local police in Las Vegas on a child-sex allegation and, in his account, hurried onto a plane out of the country. His gloss is a single sentence: “We choose the Israeli government over our own children.”[49]
The embassy move and the Abraham Accords
Kiriakou traces AIPAC’s clearest policy win to the embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he attributes primarily to AIPAC pressure and to donor Sheldon Adelson, who gave $120 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign and personally paid out of pocket for the embassy’s relocation.[50][51] He explains that in 1993, Congress, under AIPAC pressure, passed a law to move the embassy to Jerusalem but froze the move pending an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty; every subsequent president kept the freeze in place until Donald Trump executed the move, closing the PLO’s Washington office and expelling Palestinian diplomats just before the Abraham Accords.[52] Kiriakou says the Accords succeeded in splitting the Arab world — the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco opened relations and embassies with Israel — while Saudi Arabia held off, engaging in talks only up until October 7 ended them.[53]
How it got this way
Asked directly whether blackmail explains the shift in American policy toward Israel — whether Israel holds dirt on powerful Americans — John Kiriakou allowed that compromising material probably exists, but argued that the real explanation is fundamentally political and “broader and more nefarious than that.”[54][55]
His account is of accumulation rather than a single capture. Arab leaders have told him, and told American ambassadors in his hearing, that the last U.S. president to give the Arabs a fair shake was George H. W. Bush; before him they loved Kennedy and Eisenhower, and everyone since has been Zionist in policy terms. Against that backdrop the Israelis keep chipping away “little by little by little,” with the work done “not just in the White House, but on Capitol Hill through AIPAC,” until the point was reached where disagreeing with Benjamin Netanyahu as a person marks a person as antisemitic. “Of course it took them decades to get to that point, but they did it.”[56][57][58][59]
The gap between voters and their representatives
Kiriakou’s account of AIPAC’s effect is not that it changes minds but that it decouples elected officials from them. By mid-2026 he was pointing to polling showing a clear majority of Americans saying the relationship with Israel is too close, that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and that Israel is the aggressor in the recent conflicts — alongside legislators who “still line right up in support of Israel.” The figure he gives for the gap is stark: roughly 77 percent of Democratic voters say they support the Palestinian side, against about 90 percent of elected Democrats supporting the Israelis.[60][61] His conclusion is constitutional rather than diplomatic: “And where does that leave us? That leaves us in a place where we don’t have a democracy.”[62]
Why he does not expect it to change
The few dissenters
Asked how it ends, he set aside the optimism he says he is habitually accused of. Every incremental change over thirty-five years has gone Israel’s way, and the number of members willing to break ranks — he names Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, with Marjorie Taylor Greene since departed — “doesn’t really grow.” “I’ve got to be realistic, and I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”[63][61] He gives the same short list elsewhere — Massie, Ro Khanna and a small handful of others — and notes again that the number does not grow, even as polling shows a clear majority of Americans think the relationship too close.[64][65]
The Pollard precedent, and the Epstein question
Asked in February 2026 whether confirmation that Israel had run Jeffrey Epstein — after emails surfaced showing the Israeli mission to the UN coordinating the installation of alarm and surveillance equipment at his Manhattan building — would be survivable for the alliance, Kiriakou’s answer was that it would barely register. “This is going to be a little blip. A temporary blip.” The reason he gives is structural rather than partisan: “the pro-Israel lobby, mostly in the form of AIPAC, is so entrenched in American politics, American society, American culture that the relationship isn’t changing at all.”[66][67]
His precedent is Jonathan Pollard: caught red-handed with the operation being run from the Israeli defence minister’s office, “they didn’t care for more than a few weeks.” The Israelis hemmed and hawed, quietly apologised, and the relationship “roared right back.” He predicted the same sequence of dismissals here — that Ehud Barak is a has-been, that it was almost ten years ago, and that it is not Netanyahu who is in charge.[68][67]
The one thing he thinks might shift it is not an institution but an audience: “it’s only because of the likes of Tucker Carlson, people with large followings out there speaking truth and talking about what America first really means. That might make a difference.”[67]
The primary threat
John Kiriakou states the lobby’s leverage over Congress as a simple conditional: “if you are not 100% pro-Israel in your voting record, they will primary you and they will spend millions of dollars to defeat you. That scares most members of Congress. And so they’re just not willing to challenge anybody.”[69]
He describes the day-to-day presence as continuous rather than episodic — representatives permanently on Capitol Hill who “practically had offices up there,” and who according to House members would sit in a member’s office every day and address arriving constituents themselves.[70][71] His own experience of being approached is recorded at the AIPAC “Holy Land” trip offer.
By 2026 he had begun to treat the threat as testable rather than absolute. Opening a programme on the day of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, he trailed it as the contest in which AIPAC “might get its biggest embarrassment yet” — an AIPAC-backed candidate, Haley Stevens, against the Democratic Socialists of America-backed Abdul El-Sayed, who was leading by fifteen points in Emerson’s polling.[72][73][74] What made the race matter to him was not the money but the argument it undercut: the claim that the centrist is the more electable candidate, which he called failing “one of the first times” against a field in which DSA-aligned candidates had already taken five congressional primaries, at least three from incumbents.[75][76]