Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States. John Kiriakou says that from the Reagan era onward, every Israeli prime minister who visited the White House pressed the president to “please bomb Iran” — and every president refused, until the present one.[1][2] Kiriakou recounts that Obama himself said Netanyahu had asked him to bomb Iran and threatened to use nuclear weapons if he did not; Obama, in Kiriakou’s telling, replied “Go ahead. Go ahead. Do it,” and Netanyahu backed off because the threat was a bluff. Kiriakou says Netanyahu ran the same bluff on Donald Trump, who believed it.[3] In a separate telling of the same episode, Kiriakou dates it to the Iran nuclear negotiations, quoting Netanyahu as saying “We’re thinking of using nuclear weapons,” and Obama calling his bluff: “Go ahead. We’re not going to help you.”[4]
Whistleblower prosecutions and the ‘Nixonian obsession’
Kiriakou says Obama had a “Nixonian obsession with national security leaks” — a characterization he says he got directly from people who worked face-to-face with Obama in the White House. Between the 1917 passage of the Espionage Act and 2009, Kiriakou says, three people total were charged with espionage for speaking to the media; under Obama alone, eight were, roughly three times as many as under all previous presidents combined.[5][6] He says Obama brought more espionage cases against whistleblowers than any president before him, despite publicly opposing torture.[7] Kiriakou says a friend then working in the White House told him that around 2011, roughly nine months before his own arrest, Obama lost his temper and “flipped out like a crazy person,” screaming about a national-security leak and about how angry he was that people at the CIA couldn’t keep their mouths shut — with John Brennan standing by the whole time, nodding.[6] Three weeks after Obama took office, Kiriakou says, the CIA asked the new president to secretly reopen the already-closed criminal case against him; he learned of this only years later.[8]
No experience in government
Kiriakou says he voted for Obama in 2008 partly because Obama had been explicit about defending whistleblowers.[9] He argues Obama had no government experience beyond two years as a senator and time as a community organizer, calling him exactly the kind of “unprepared president” the CIA loves, because “they just suck him right into their orbit” — made worse, in Kiriakou’s account, by John Brennan “whispering in his ear” that whistleblowers were enemies of national security.[10] By his own account the last time he voted for either major party was Obama’s first term, backing him on the promise to end the post-9/11 wars, before concluding Obama himself was compromised — Kiriakou describes Obama’s maternal grandfather as having been “MK Ultra’d” and as a cousin of George H.W. Bush, with whom, he says, the grandfather “built” the CIA.[11]
The droner in chief
Kiriakou calls Obama “the droner in chief,” saying he killed ten times more people with drone strikes than George W. Bush did.[12] He traces the Obama administration’s rendition and interrogation policy to the same pattern: during the transition, Obama told George Stephanopoulos that under no circumstances would the Army conduct enhanced interrogations — a pledge Kiriakou calls beside the point, since it was never the Army doing the interrogating, but the CIA acting through proxies. In Kiriakou’s assessment, Obama’s national-security policy was “nothing more than a more violent extension” of Bush’s, citing the drone-strike death toll as the clearest evidence.[13][14]
”I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people”
Kiriakou has repeatedly cited Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book on the 2012 election, in which Obama — sitting for an interview — said two things Kiriakou calls “shocking.” Asked about his politics, Obama said, matter-of-factly, “I never said I was a liberal” — or in another telling, “I never told anybody I was a liberal.” Discussing the drone program, he said, “I never had any idea that I would be so good at killing people.” Kiriakou’s response: “That’s not a brag. You’re a murderer.”[15][16][17]