Jim Jordan is a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. Kiriakou calls him powerful and identifies him as the chairman of a major committee, in one telling declining to be certain which — “the Judiciary Committee or the Homeland Security Committee in the House. Something like one of the very big committees” — though elsewhere he names the House Judiciary Committee without hesitation.[1][2][3]
His view is explicitly divided — “I sort of have a love-hate thing going with Jim Jordan” — and the first criticism is one of effectiveness: “He talks a tough game. But he doesn’t really get a whole lot of things done.”[1][4]
One of four
The favourable half of the divided view is specific and unusually generous. Asked who a whistleblower can turn to on Capitol Hill, Kiriakou names four people out of five hundred and thirty-five. The most important is Chuck Grassley, “the one guy that you can expect support from.” Then: “Another one on the House side is Jim Jordan, the congressman from Ohio. He’s chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He’s more politicized on this issue, but he is a friend of whistleblowers.” Rand Paul and Ron Wyden complete the list.[3][5][6]
He treats that as a measure of the problem rather than of the solution: “There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. There are 100 senators. We’re talking about 535 people, and we can name four who support whistleblowers.” It is, he says, still an uphill struggle, but better than it was ten years earlier.[6]
The practical value of that friendship, in his account, is limited by which agency a whistleblower works for. If you work for the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Labor or the Federal Trade Commission, you go to Senator Grassley or Congressman Jordan, you fill out the form, and they protect your job. “If you work for the intelligence community, you’re screwed.”[7][8] He has nonetheless advised people to work Jordan’s office: pressed on how a target of federal law enforcement should get high-powered support, his answer was to engage Grassley’s office and “maybe Jim Jordan’s office.”[9]
The Weaponization subcommittee
The unfavourable half concerns the body Jordan chaired in 2023, formally the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and informally “a Church Committee 2.” Kiriakou’s position is that he is “1,000% in favour” of creating a second Church Committee, and that this is not one.[10]
His objection is about subject matter. Jordan’s subcommittee would look at the FBI’s targeting of conservatives — parents speaking at school board meetings, Donald Trump, anybody deemed conservative. The original Church Committee was bipartisan, with intellectual heavyweights on both sides, and looked at crimes committed by the deep state: the CIA’s international assassinations programme, the Army’s infiltration of anti-war groups, the FBI’s warrantless surveillance under COINTELPRO, and MK-Ultra, in which unwitting American citizens were dosed with LSD and people died. “This new subcommittee isn’t going to do any such thing.”[2][11][12][13]
He also gives its arithmetic: nine Republicans appointed, six places allowed for Democrats who had already said they would not participate, and a creating vote of 221 to 211 along strict party lines.[14]
The sharpest charge came from inside. A staff member associated with the new subcommittee told Kiriakou to expect Thomas Massie as a member, and warned him that Jordan had already begun staffing it with CIA officers on loan from the agency, on detail to go after the FBI.[15][16]
Kiriakou’s reaction was to refuse the choice on offer. Given the mutual loathing between the two agencies since 1947, an oversight body of CIA officers investigating the FBI struck him as “like professional wrestling, in that there’s just no good guy” — a contest he compares to Hulk Hogan against the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI, where he had not wanted to pick a side either. Forced to choose, he would take scrutiny of the CIA, on the ground that it is responsible for more misery around the world; the FBI’s oppression happens at home.[17][18]
What decides the grade
What settles the assessment is older than any of it. Before Congress, Jordan was the wrestling coach at Ohio State University, and “wrestlers repeatedly went to him and said, ‘Coach, we’re being sexually abused by the team doctor.’ And he did nothing to help them. Nothing.”[4] Kiriakou converts that into the operational judgement the segment calls for: as a case officer “he probably couldn’t be trusted to live within the confines of the rules,” and the grade is a D.[19]