Hillary Clinton is a former U.S. Secretary of State and the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee. John Kiriakou says he loathes her, calling her one of the most dangerous political figures of the last generation[1] — and, asked to sum her up in a single word elsewhere, answers simply: “demonic.”[2] He describes her as arguably the most neoconservative candidate the Democrats could possibly have nominated — not only in the mold of Barack Obama, but, in his assessment, even more militarist than her own husband. He cites Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan discussing an endorsement of her candidacy as early as 2014.[3] As an example of that hawkishness, he points to Clinton kneeling before Henry Kissinger — whom Kiriakou calls a war criminal — on the evening news, comparing it to Kamala Harris later touting her own endorsement by Dick Cheney.[4] Kiriakou separately credits Clinton with removing the MEK from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations, after which prominent Democrats and Republicans alike began taking MEK money to lobby on the group’s behalf.[5]
Personal encounters
Kiriakou traces his impression of Clinton to two direct encounters, a decade apart. The first came in late 1999, when he was a young CIA officer assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Athens and was detailed to take notes on Bill Clinton’s meeting with the Greek prime minister. Standing two feet from Bill Clinton after the meeting, Kiriakou watched Hillary Clinton step off an elevator, cross the hallway with a sour expression, and — when Bill Clinton twice tried to make small talk about their visit to the Parthenon that morning — cut him off: “Jesus Christ, Bill, it’s raining all day, I’ll be in the room.”[6] The second came years later, after Kiriakou left the CIA and became chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Clinton, having just left the committee to become Secretary of State, returned periodically, and Kiriakou found her “impossible” to deal with each time.[7]
2016 campaign and the Clinton Foundation
Kiriakou dismisses as “utter complete nonsense” the defense of the Uranium One deal — that donors who gave $145 million to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton’s State Department approved a uranium sale to Russian interests had no quid pro quo motive.[8] He also cites WikiLeaks material showing Chelsea Clinton had internally flagged corruption inside the Clinton Foundation and was told to keep quiet about it.[9] Separately, he notes WikiLeaks revealed a 2015 internal Clinton campaign poll had already identified her biggest vulnerability as the charge that, as Secretary of State, she had signed off on a uranium deal handing 20 percent of U.S. uranium production to Russian interests — and that campaign strategists Robby Mook and John Podesta then devised turning that same charge against Donald Trump.[10] On the primary itself, Kiriakou notes Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia primary and the Colorado caucus in 2016 but received no delegates from either state while Clinton took all of them — which he calls theft rather than democracy.[11]
Agreeing with her on Iran
Despite that broader critique, Kiriakou says Clinton got one specific point about Iran exactly right: that Iran is not actually a theocracy but a military dictatorship, run day-to-day not by the Ayatollah but by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a structure he calls more dangerous than genuine clerical rule.[12] Kiriakou had made a closely related argument himself years earlier, describing Iran as essentially a military dictatorship rather than the theocracy it is portrayed as, while noting that ordinary Iranians, on a people-to-people level, very much want good relations with the United States.[13]
Post-Athens: the Parthenon scowl and the Senate return
Extending the Athens 1999 account already cited from other appearances, John Kiriakou recounted the same scene again on the PBD Podcast: Hillary Clinton stepped off the elevator with Chelsea “with this puss on her face,” and cut short her husband’s attempt at small talk about their morning at the Parthenon with “Jesus Christ, Bill, it’s raining all day. I’ll be in the room.”[6][14] Kiriakou adds a further characterisation from his own time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff: Clinton, who had briefly sat on the committee before becoming Secretary of State, “used to come back all the time and she was impossible” — “impossible at that level.”[15]
The 2020 vice-presidency rumour
Asked in February 2020 whether Clinton was returning to the field, Kiriakou did not soften the answer: “I loathe Hillary Clinton. I think Hillary Clinton was one of the most dangerous political figures of the last generation.”[16]
The rumour he had heard was that she might accept the vice-presidency on a Michael Bloomberg ticket. His comment on the prospect was arithmetic rather than ideological: “we just have to keep our fingers crossed that we don’t trade one corrupt billionaire for another corrupt billionaire.”[16] He was voting for Bernie Sanders, and expected the party machinery to do to Sanders in 2020 what he says it did in 2016.[17]
The apology to Berlin
Kiriakou cites Clinton’s trip to Germany after the NSA was found to be intercepting Angela Merkel’s mobile phone as an example of an apology that settled nothing. The revelation was, he says, big news — Merkel being “one of our closest allies” — and Clinton went and apologised. “And then we did it again.”[18]