Jeremy Hammond is an American hacker, sentenced to ten years under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, who was later held in contempt for refusing to testify against Julian Assange before a grand jury. John Kiriakou has raised his case chiefly to identify a punishment that went unremarked.
What he exposed
Kiriakou’s view of the underlying offence is that it was not one. Hammond, he says, is a former Anonymous hacker and whistleblower who revealed the scope of the private intelligence industry — and “when Jeremy Hammond, god bless him, did what he did, I was so shocked at the way the boom was lowered on him, because he didn’t reveal anything. He didn’t reveal anything that was dangerous. What he did, though, was expose a very Washington kind of phoniness.”[1][2]
The phoniness is Kiriakou’s description of what the leaked firm actually did: analysts sitting around reading newspapers, watching CNN and MSNBC, jotting down notes, telephoning the press officer at the embassy of Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Jordan, and writing the result up as intelligence.[3]
He also thinks the severity had a petty cause. The material Hammond released, in his account, was less embarrassing to the company than the fact that it lost all of its customers’ credit card numbers and had to go back and apologise to everybody. They were embarrassed, they were humiliated, “and they wanted to take it out on Jeremy Hammond.”[4]
The espionage court
When Hammond was called in 2019 before the grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, Kiriakou said he was very concerned — not only for Julian Assange and the conduct of that grand jury, but for Hammond specifically, and for a number of reasons.[1]
The first is the venue. The Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Alexandria, is “notorious in the federal system” and known as the espionage court, both because most espionage cases are tried there and because the district is home to the CIA, to the FBI training centre and to the Pentagon.[5]
The second is that refusal was a foregone conclusion with a price attached. Hammond “has a history of not testifying”, and would therefore likely be held in contempt — which could be added consecutively to the remainder of his term, plus a further year. “The bottom line is this is onerous, it’s heavy, nothing good can come of something like this.”[6] The Jeremy Hammond Support Collective said as much within hours, in a statement Kiriakou’s interviewer read out: just as Hammond had no intention of cooperating with the government during his original trial, he had no intention of testifying before this or any other grand jury he might be called in front of.[7]
The perjury trap
Kiriakou’s third reason is that he does not believe testimony was the object. He reads the subpoena as an attempt to catch Hammond in a lie, on the model he says was used against Chelsea Manning — where prosecutors were furious that her sentence had been commuted at seven years when she was supposed to serve thirty-five, and where a perjury charge would supply the excuse to add five more. “They’re gonna try to do the same thing to Jeremy Hammond.” His agreement that this was the plan was unhedged: “without a doubt.”[7][8]
Underneath it he identifies what the prosecution actually needed. To take down Assange as a working journalist — a man who has been awarded journalism awards, which he calls a slippery slope over the First Amendment — the government needed help from Manning and Hammond in proving that Assange is not a journalist. “And they’re not gonna get it from those two.”[9]
That confidence he has stated as a matter of character rather than tactics. Neither Manning nor Hammond, he says, will ever break: “I’m so proud of both of them.”[10]
The indefinite grand jury
Kiriakou groups Hammond with Chelsea Manning: both were held without charge for refusing to testify, and “these grand juries are renewed even after their term runs out — and as a result people like Chelsea and Jeremy can be held literally indefinitely.”[11]
He identifies a legal problem in that, since Assange had already been charged: “there’s a law in the United States saying that a grand jury cannot continue to be impaneled once the charges have been levied. Well, this tells me that either the Department of Justice is breaking the law in continuing to hold Chelsea and Jeremy, or they intend to add additional charges on to the two dozen plus charges they’ve already filed against Julian.”[12]
The eighteen months
The part Kiriakou says was missed is what the transfer to the Alexandria holding centre cost. Hammond had been in RDAP, the Bureau of Prisons residential drug and alcohol programme, which takes off up to eighteen months of a sentence — “but you have to complete the whole year before you get the reward.”[13][14]
“Jeremy had two months left to go in his RDAP counselling. They yanked him out of RDAP to send him to Alexandria jail … That means that they have effectively added 18 months to his sentence. So even if he had agreed to testify, this was just a way to screw Jeremy Hammond and to lengthen his sentence.”[15][16]