The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is the U.S. law compelling the government to release records on request. It recurs throughout John Kiriakou’s story — as a weapon used on his behalf, a right stripped from him by his plea agreement, and the source of some of his most damning examples of government and media misconduct.
Banned for life — and filing anyway
A condition of Kiriakou’s plea agreement was that he could never file a FOIA request about himself — “ever, ever again in my life.”[1] About six months into his sentence at FCI Loretto, reasoning that prison staff were not the reading type, he filed one on himself with the Bureau of Prisons out of curiosity.[2][3]
He got back about 200 pages — 90 percent garbage, visitor lists and health records — but six pages were clearly stamped, top and bottom, “FOIA EXEMPT — DO NOT RELEASE TO INMATE.” Either the FOIA office couldn’t read, he says, or someone took pity on him. The pages were memos from the warden to staff, sent before he arrived, warning that the incoming prisoner had access to the media.[4] His earliest account of the same request, given months after his release, gives the count as about 250 pages with six to eight exempt ones accidentally left in, and quotes the warning itself as it appeared — in “big bold large type letters,” reading CAUTION: INMATE HAS ACCESS TO THE PRESS. The request had been filed to find out why he was taken into the prison at all: the judge had recommended and the prosecution had agreed to the minimum-security work camp, but on 28 February 2013 he was escorted to the back of the prison instead, and told “not according to my paperwork, you’re not.”[5][6][7] The documents also showed the staff had been trying to set him up.[8]
His own count of that return has varied between tellings, and both versions are recorded here rather than reconciled. In 2017 he put it at “two hundred and fifty-five pages” of which “there were eight pages in there that were clearly stamped at the top and bottom, FOIA exempt, do not release to inmate”; in 2021 the figures were about two hundred pages and six.[9][10] The 2017 account also supplies the wording he says was set in “huge block letters” on one of them — CAUTION: INMATE HAS ACCESS TO THE MEDIA — alongside a separate memo from the warden telling all the guards to be especially careful around him because he was highly trained and had ready access to the press.[10][11]
Another request nailed the commissary: the across-the-board 30% markup was supposed to fund athletic equipment and library books for prisoners. Instead — as the FOIA response proved — it bought the staff workout equipment and a large-screen TV.[12]
And one of the warmer discoveries of his life came through FOIA: former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson had quietly written to officials urging that Kiriakou be allowed to go home and support his family. Johnson never mentioned it; Kiriakou learned of it later through a records request.[13]
He kept filing after his release, and recommends the route to others on the strength of one practical asymmetry: a request to the CIA may take five years, while the wait at the FBI is “about six weeks.”[14] He asked the Bureau for everything it held on him from the day he left prison onward, and six weeks later received a CD-ROM of the surveillance logs — agents parked half a block from his house with eyes on, recording that he left for work at 7:15 and came back at 2:35. His reaction was less alarm than accounting: “why are you wasting the taxpayer’s money watching me come and go from my house?” The lesson he draws is that the record is honest even when it is unflattering — “they’ll tell you the truth, even if it makes them look silly.”[15][16]
Jason Leopold, “FOIA terrorist”
Kiriakou calls his friend Jason Leopold “the king of the Freedom of Information Act” — a man who has filed more FOIA requests than anyone in America, to the point that a senior defense official called him “a FOIA terrorist.”[17][18]
Two Leopold results loom large in Kiriakou’s telling. First, the discovery that a CIA detainee was sedated one day without being told what was happening — and woke up with his eyeball gone. “We didn’t ask him… we just did it. That’s a crime against humanity.”[19] Second, Leopold’s blanket request for correspondence between the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs and mainstream reporters, which caught Ken Dilanian — NBC’s chief national security correspondent — sending his stories to the CIA before sending them to his own editor. “That’s not journalism… that’s fascism.”[20][21][22]
The historical record
Kiriakou also credits FOIA and natural declassification with settling history: the record now shows the Greek military junta was allowed to remain in power because Henry Kissinger wanted it so.[23] Jeffrey Sterling’s plea terms, he notes, carried the same FOIA self-ban as his own — a proviso designed to keep defendants from discovering FBI wrongdoing in their cases.[24]
The congressional exemption
Kiriakou raises the Act’s boundary as the decisive fact in a case where a senator could not obtain documents his own institution held. “The Congress is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act” — a point he generalises without qualification: “they always exempt themselves from their own laws, right? So no laws apply on Capitol Hill. They do anything they want.”[25]
Because the records were Senate rather than executive-branch documents, neither a request to the CIA nor the ordinary declassification deadline reached them; see the buried Senate documents.[26]