Jeffrey Sterling was a Black CIA officer who filed a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the agency after being passed over for promotion. According to John Kiriakou, a CIA supervisor explicitly told Sterling the promotion had been denied because of his race: “When did you realize I was black?” Sterling reportedly responded.[1]
Sterling gave an interview to the New York Times about the discrimination lawsuit. He was subsequently charged with nine felonies — seven counts of espionage — despite no allegation that he had provided classified information to any foreign government or that any national-security harm had resulted.[2]
Daniel Ellsberg asked Kiriakou to go to trial so the Espionage Act’s constitutionality could be litigated from a conviction; Kiriakou declined because of his five children. Ellsberg then made the same request of Sterling. Sterling went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced at the Eastern District of Virginia by Judge Leonie Brinkema, who announced she was giving Sterling “Kiriakou plus 12 months.”[3] Kiriakou notes Sterling, like Edward Snowden and later Julian Assange, was prosecuted in the Eastern District of Virginia — a venue where, per Kiriakou, no national-security defendant has ever won a case.[4] Sterling, a fluent Farsi speaker who had been the top-rated fraud investigator in the state of Missouri before joining the CIA, was ultimately given three and a half years in prison at Englewood, Colorado after falling afoul of the Obama administration’s use of the Espionage Act.[5] Sterling’s wife told Kiriakou that, despite his education, prison racial segregation barred Sterling from socializing, watching TV, or eating with white inmates because he was Black.[6]
Kiriakou says Sterling called him four times the day before Kiriakou left for prison, each time saying he was going to kill himself that day.[7]
A harsher yardstick
John Kiriakou says he attended the sentencing hearings of fellow whistleblowers including Jeffrey Sterling and Daniel Hale, where a judge used his own light sentence as a baseline — offering “Kiriakou plus 12 months” — because the Justice Department was angry his attorneys had negotiated so short a term.[8][9]
Standing to challenge the Espionage Act (Scott Horton, 2021)
John Kiriakou says Jeffrey Sterling was one of only two people — with Chelsea Manning — who had legal standing to appeal an Espionage Act conviction to the Supreme Court, because both had gone to trial and been convicted. Sterling “was excited about it for a short while,” Kiriakou recalls, then found “the whole process was so depressing he just wanted to get past it”; once he lost at the appellate level in the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, “that was the end of it.”[10][11]