John Kiriakou began a Monday broadcast with news that Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others had been pardoned that morning, and with a rare piece of disclosure about his own position.
The meeting
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” he said, “but I had coffee on Friday evening with a cabinet member.”[1]
The cabinet member’s message was short: “he told me to be patient.” Kiriakou’s answer, as he reports it, was conditional on the source — “it’s only because you’re saying that that I will be patient.”[1]
There was a second instruction, and Kiriakou disclosed its existence while obeying it. Asked to say more, he said: “I have to watch what I say, which is another thing he told me.”[2] Ted Rall accepted the limit — “we all understand that” — and did not press.[2]
What he does not expect
Kiriakou declined to read the meeting as encouragement about the merits. “I have to say that I’m not sanguine that this is all based on justice,” he said.[3] Rall agreed, noting that the pardon power descends from monarchy and is not a small-d democratic process.[3]
His summary of his own position was flat and total: “there is literally nothing else that I can do to make a strong case. There’s nothing. I’ve done it. I’ve done it all. I’ve been on every show I needed to go on. I’ve said all the things I need to say. There’s nothing else I can do.”[3][4] Rall said he thought that was probably true.[4]
Reading the morning’s news
Kiriakou described how he had received the day’s pardon announcement. It was the first thing he woke up to, and he read the article “thinking, well, Giuliani is the headliner name — maybe I’m buried somewhere in the bottom.”[4] He was not.
The hope was not unreasonable on his own account of this president’s practice: Trump “will pardon someone and not tell anybody, and they read about it in the press.”[4]
The first thing he would do
Rall, half seriously, warned him to stay healthy, telling a story about a laureate who died driving to receive news of a prize.[5] Kiriakou answered with the plan he says he has already made: “If I get a pardon, I may take that day off so I can go buy guns, which I promised myself is the first thing I’m going to do.”[6] Rall observed that he would at least be stimulating the economy.[7]