Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor who in 2013 disclosed the scope of U.S. mass surveillance — including the Section 702 collection program — and subsequently fled the United States. John Kiriakou discusses Snowden as a fellow national-security whistleblower targeted under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou says Snowden himself has publicly credited two people as his inspiration: “Ed Snowden told the New York Times that Tom Drake from NSA and I inspired him to do what he did.”[1]
Qualified praise
Kiriakou rejects the framing “once CIA, always CIA” as intellectually lazy, pointing to Snowden — a former CIA technical employee before his NSA contractor role — alongside Philip Agee and Ray McGovern as examples of CIA dissidents: “Can you imagine walking up to Ed Snowden and saying, well, once CIA, always CIA, what the [expletive] are you talking about?”[2] He calls Snowden’s metadata revelations “absolutely heroic” for exposing warrantless domestic spying, but says he agrees with the view that some of what Snowden disclosed — including special-access programs given to Russia and China, comparable to material later exposed in the CIA’s Vault 7 files — should have stayed classified.[3] He does not agree with everything Snowden exposed: he says he wants the NSA to intercept Angela Merkel’s cell phone, calling that “what NSA is supposed to do” and normal statecraft practiced by every country, while still calling Snowden’s overall actions “positively patriotic.”[4]
Never coming back
Kiriakou says Snowden will never get a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia and is unlikely ever to return to the United States, despite having repeatedly offered to: “that dude is never coming back to the United States… he has offered to repeatedly, repeatedly. The problem is he wouldn’t get a fair trial — no way, not a chance — in the Eastern District of Virginia.”[5]
Kiriakou frames Snowden’s affirmative legal defense around a specific principle he says is codified in U.S. code: a program cannot be classified for the purpose of concealing a crime from the American people, even though there are other legitimate reasons a given act might be classified. “It is illegal to classify a crime… you cannot classify a program for the purpose of keeping it from the American people if it is a criminal act."[6]
"Two awful slippery slopes”
Kiriakou framed Snowden’s situation as a genuine dilemma: on one hand, “he breaks his oath and breaks the chain of command to leak information” that carries real risk and sets a precedent the next leaker can point to; on the other hand, “he had tried to go through the chain of command because he caught something that was anti-constitutional — it was cut and dry against the Constitution — and no one was doing anything about it.”[7][8]
Kiriakou noted that Snowden, like himself, could not realistically use his chain of command: Kiriakou’s own chain of command was Jose Rodriguez.[9]
The torture-treaty distinction
Asked whether he would feel the same about his own torture disclosure if Dick Cheney’s office had technically changed the law to permit it, Kiriakou said yes — but called it an easier question for him than for Snowden, because the United States is a signatory to (and a principal author of) the United Nations Convention Against Torture. An approved international treaty “carries with it the force of law and it supersedes any domestic law,” so to legalize the torture program the U.S. would have had to withdraw from the convention entirely.[10]
The Brinkema docket
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia — who reserved major national-security cases for herself rather than letting them be randomly assigned — had the Snowden case on her docket alongside Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the Julian Assange extradition. The Snowden case never came to her court; Snowden left the country before trial.[11]
Section 702
Kiriakou credits Snowden’s 2013 disclosures with bringing Section 702 — and the broader architecture of warrantless surveillance — to public attention for the first time. He has cited the hundreds of thousands of improper FBI queries against the 702 database as the kind of abuse Snowden exposed.[12] Section 702 traces to the FISA Act, passed around October 2001; Kiriakou says that in the roughly 11.5 years since Snowden’s revelations, opposition to renewing it has grown only incrementally, driven mostly by Republicans in the House.[13] His attorney, constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, separately told him that the NSA’s domestic spying also violates posse comitatus.[14] Kiriakou says less than 10% of the Snowden documents have ever been publicly released, and that he is unsure a complete dataset exists publicly at all, since Glenn Greenwald never published the rest.[15]
On Kiriakou’s show, Reality Winner separately criticized the New York Times as “garbage,” noting that Snowden himself had called the paper and left messages that were never returned.[16] Kiriakou has cited Snowden’s own public call to change the incentive structures surrounding whistleblowing.[17] Der Spiegel was among the outlets that published Snowden documents beginning in 2012.[18]
‘They always move on’
John Kiriakou says his then-wife urged him to keep talking about his own case, predicting the government would eventually shift to its next target — which it did, to Edward Snowden. “They move on. They always move on,” he recalls, “and she was right.”[19]
Willing to come home (News Beat)
John Kiriakou says Edward Snowden told him from the beginning he was willing to come home and serve 10 or 20 years if he could mount a public-interest defense — explaining to a jury that he acted for the American people. Snowden hired Kiriakou’s attorneys, who raised it with the Justice Department; the answer was “absolutely not,” so they never took custody of “the most dangerous man in America.”[20][21][22]
Learning of the disclosures from prison, and two letters to Moscow
Kiriakou says he learned of Snowden’s 2013 disclosures roughly three months into his own sentence at FCI Loretto, when a prison friend he calls “Dave” woke him in the middle of the night, having heard on the AM program Coast to Coast AM that someone had gone public with information about CIA and NSA spying on Americans.[23] Prompted by Dave, Kiriakou wrote two letters to Snowden in the days that followed: a public open letter and a private one.[24] The public letter called Snowden’s revelations “a great public service,” quoted Lincoln that America “will never be destroyed from the outside,” and predicted Americans would come to see his actions as “heroic.”[25] It offered concrete advice — hire the best national security attorneys, build a website for supporters and donations, and cultivate sympathetic members of Congress and groups like the ACLU and the Government Accountability Project — and, most importantly in Kiriakou’s telling, never cooperate with the FBI, which he called “the enemy” for its willingness to “lie, trick, and deceive.”[26][27] The original letter urged Snowden to seek asylum in Iceland, based on a same-day report — later proven unfounded — that Iceland’s government would take him in; Kiriakou notes Iceland’s NATO and EU membership likely made this impossible under U.S. pressure.[28] He sent a separate private letter to his friend and former CIA colleague Ray McGovern, who personally flew to Moscow and hand-delivered it to Snowden; that letter added the blunter advice not to trust anybody, since Snowden could never know who might be working for the FBI.[29][30] Kiriakou says Snowden later told the New York Times that watching both his case and Tom Drake’s inspired him to go public.[31]
Snowden’s father visits Loretto
Kiriakou says that while he was imprisoned, Snowden’s father came to visit him at FCI Loretto and was initially refused entry solely because of his last name; Kiriakou threatened to raise a fuss and call CNN, and the visit went ahead.[32] Kiriakou also recalls that at a London whistleblower event, Snowden told him directly that without Tom Drake and Kiriakou, “there would have been no Ed Snowden.”[33]
Rejecting “defected,” and the Ecuador near-miss
Kiriakou says he especially objects to characterizations of Snowden as having “defected” to Russia, asserting instead that Secretary of State John Kerry invalidated Snowden’s passport while he was transiting Moscow, effectively stranding him there.[34] He says the Obama administration forced a private jet carrying Ecuador’s president to land in Vienna using two F-16 fighter jets, on a rumor — false — that Snowden was aboard, calling the interception “an act of war.”[35] In Kiriakou’s account, the CIA subsequently helped remove Ecuador’s left-wing government and install a right-wing, pro-American one, which then “gleefully” gave up Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London; he believes Snowden would likely be in a maximum-security U.S. penitentiary today had he reached Ecuador instead of being stranded in Russia.[36] Snowden is now a Russian citizen and a coder at a Russian social media company; his American girlfriend moved to Moscow, where they married and now have two sons.[36]