Jesselyn Radack is an American national-security attorney who heads the whistleblower-defense practice at the Government Accountability Project (GAP). Per John Kiriakou, Radack was director of ethics at the Justice Department immediately before and after September 11, 2001, and was herself forced out for whistleblowing in the case of John Walker Lindh, the American citizen captured fighting for the Taliban: she told the FBI it had to read Lindh his rights during his 2001 interrogation, then disclosed that the FBI had elicited a confession the government could not use in court after failing to do so.[1][2][3] Kiriakou says that for this, her “crime,” the Justice Department purged its file on the matter and deleted the related emails from her computer; when she anonymously leaked the two surviving emails to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, he ran them without redacting her name. She was escorted out of the Justice Department, placed on the no-fly list, accused of being a terrorist sympathizer, threatened with an espionage charge, and referred for disbarment before moving to GAP to represent national-security whistleblowers for no pay.[4][5][6][7][8]
Representing Kiriakou
Kiriakou says he first learned of Radack from a Washington Post article about his own case in which she was quoted defending him; a friend called him about the article and urged him to reach out. He called her office around 6:30 a.m. and she answered immediately, telling him: “Oh, thank god you called. Please come into the office.” He met with her and her colleague Kathleen McClellan for two to three hours.[1] When Kiriakou told her he wasn’t really a whistleblower and didn’t want to take a case she reserved for whistleblowers, she replied: “You’re the poster boy for whistleblowers.”[9] She told him the legal definition of whistleblowing makes the motive irrelevant — only the act of exposing “waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety” matters.[9]
Radack was not courtroom counsel in Kiriakou’s case; her role was media outreach, countering what he describes as a Justice Department that was “leaking like a sieve” to portray him as a dangerous criminal. Kiriakou credits her work with gradually shifting press coverage in his favor — part of the process that led CNN to eventually switch from calling him a “leaker” to a “whistleblower,” a shift he says took her a full year of hard, unpaid, full-time work.[10][2] When the day came for Kiriakou to report to federal prison, Radack was one of the people who drove him there, along with NSA whistleblower Tom Drake and Daniel Ellsberg.[11]
Connecting Kiriakou to Edward Snowden
Kiriakou says that after Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures broke, he emailed his friend Radack asking whether she had a path to reach Snowden. She told him she had two: her own friend and attorney Bruce Fein, who went on to represent Snowden, and Kiriakou’s former CIA colleague Ray McGovern, who immediately reached out to and personally visited Snowden in Moscow.[12]