Bruce Fein is John Kiriakou’s longtime attorney and, by Kiriakou’s description, “not just one of my closest friends, but my attorney as well.”[1] A Harvard Law-trained constitutional attorney and Berkeley graduate, he served as Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan and as General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.[2][1][3] Kiriakou introduces him variously as “a renowned constitutional scholar” and, more briskly, as a man who “has done everything — he’s an awesome guy.”[2][3] Kiriakou has referred to him as “one of my attorneys”, indicating Fein was one of several counsel rather than the sole one.[4]
The hundred books
Fein maintains a standing list of one hundred books he believes every American should read. Kiriakou raises it as the answer to the question of what an intelligence professional ought to be reading — “I’m like, all of them. Read all of the books” — and stresses that the list is not a conversational flourish: “He’s really serious about this. Every American needs to read these 100 books. And I think he’s absolutely right.”[1][5]
The CIA-failures book
Fein and Kiriakou have spent roughly a decade circling a joint book on the CIA’s record of institutional failure. The earliest version on the record is framed around groupthink: in 2018 Kiriakou said the two of them “have been talking about writing a book exactly about that,” on the grounds that across the major international developments of the agency’s first seventy years “the CIA has been wrong about just about every one of them.”[4][6]
By February 2026 the project had a history and a restart date. The two had produced an outline about ten years earlier, then “both got busy and we didn’t write the book.” Kiriakou began writing again a couple of weeks before the interview and had reached the first 5,000 words of a manuscript he estimates needs to run between 80,000 and 100,000. Fein, whom he calls “a prolific writer,” has taken a divided share: “we’ve divided his part of the book from my part of the book, and it’s going to be hard work, but we’re going to do that book.”[7][8]
The thesis Kiriakou gives for it is a claim about consent: “I think the American people deserve to know what the CIA has done in their name, and how the CIA has failed time after time after time.”[8]
The Kushner approach
Fein was the point of contact for the first serious opening in Kiriakou’s pardon campaign. After Tucker Carlson put Kiriakou on air repeatedly with instructions to speak directly into the camera to the president, Donald Trump saw one of the segments and sent the clip to Jared Kushner. The next day Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, telephoned Fein and said: “My client wants to see your client.”[9]
Kiriakou’s reaction was undisguised — “I was so excited, I wanted to jump up and down” — and the two of them went to Lowell’s office together and met with Lowell and Kushner. Kushner closed the meeting by asking for a one-page paper: three-quarters of the page telling Kiriakou’s story, the last quarter explaining how a pardon would help Trump get re-elected. They wrote it, submitted it, and “then we never heard back again.”[9][10]
2018 Giuliani meeting
Fein accompanied Kiriakou to the 2018 meeting at the Trump International Hotel at which Rudy Giuliani — via an unnamed aide — solicited $2 million from Kiriakou in exchange for arranging a presidential pardon. On the way out of the meeting Fein’s only comment, per Kiriakou: “Criminal. Criminal.”[3][11]
Days later, when New York Times reporter Mike Schmidt contacted Kiriakou about the incident, Kiriakou was sitting in Fein’s office. Asked whether to go on the record, Fein: “Hell yeah, go on the record. Giuliani needs to take responsibility for what he did.” The Times ran the story on its Sunday front page.[12][13]
2022 FBI introduction
In 2022, when Kiriakou had assembled 15,000 pages of evidence of bank fraud and money laundering at a firm that had hired him as COO, Fein connected him to a mutual contact — a former deputy director of the FBI — who arranged an appointment for Kiriakou at the FBI’s Washington field office. The FBI declined interest in the case.[14][15]