Ken Dilanian is the chief national-security correspondent at NBC News and its sister cable network MSNBC, having previously held a prominent front-page reporting role at the Los Angeles Times.[1] He is documented — through correspondence forced into the public record by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Jason Leopold against the Central Intelligence Agency Office of Public Affairs — to have sent his own articles to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor, with the agency then removing and adding information to the piece.[2][3]
John Kiriakou’s framing: “He was writing articles about the agency and then he was sending the articles to the agency for clearance before he sent them to his own editor. That is absolutely unacceptable. So they don’t need to recruit anybody in the media — they already own everybody in the media.”[2][4]
Clearing stories with the CIA
John Kiriakou says a Freedom of Information trove obtained by Jason Leopold showed Ken Dilanian, NBC’s chief national security correspondent, sending his articles to the CIA for clearance “before sending them to his own editor” — the agency editing lines and paragraphs. “That’s propaganda,” Kiriakou says.[5][6] Recounting the same disclosure again, he renders the arrangement as a question the correspondent was effectively putting to the agency — “Is it okay, guys, if I write this about you? Because if it’s not okay, just tell me and I’ll kill it” — and states the consequence he thinks should have followed: “Number one, scandalous. He should have resigned.”[7][8]
Sending drafts to Langley before the editor (Kiriakou, 2026)
On The Jason Jones Show in March 2026, John Kiriakou said the investigative journalist Jason Leopold — labelled a “FOIA terrorist” by George W. Bush’s Pentagon spokesman for the volume of his Freedom of Information Act filings — was bored one week between Christmas and New Year and filed a request for all correspondence between the CIA and American journalists over a two-year window. When the agency failed to respond within the sixty-day statutory deadline, Leopold’s lawyer filed a federal suit on day 61 and won, forcing the release. Most of the correspondence was routine interview requests, but the finding that stood out, in Kiriakou’s telling, concerned Ken Dilanian — then NBC News’s chief national-security correspondent — who was writing articles and “sending them to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor,” asking “is this okay, you guys? Are you cool with it? Cuz if you’re not, just let me know and I’ll take stuff out.”[9][10][11][12]
Consortium News Live 2023 retelling
On Consortium News Live in February 2023, John Kiriakou restated for a panel of Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges and Joe Lauria that the Jason Leopold FOIA of CIA-journalist correspondence documented Ken Dilanian — then of NBC News and MS Now — sending pieces to Langley “for their clearance before sending them to his own editor.” Kiriakou’s verdict: “that’s not national security journalism — that’s essentially doing what Bob Woodward has always done for whomever happens to be sitting in the White House.”[13][14][15]
Clearance before the editor
Kiriakou raises the case as the answer to the question of what kind of national security reporting the state is prepared to tolerate. The evidence he cites is documentary: Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed filed a Freedom of Information Act request “for all emails between the CIA’s office of public affairs and national security journalists,” and what came back showed that Dilanian, “the chief national security correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC, was sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before he sent them to his own editor.”[16]
His objection is definitional rather than personal: “it’s not journalism if you take a CIA press release and gist it and then put your name at the top in the byline. That’s not journalism, that’s certainly not investigative journalism — I would argue that that’s not national security journalism.”[16][17]
The question he attaches is the one he says the profession is avoiding: if the approved kind is the only safe kind, then a reporter who “actually develops sources inside the CIA, the NSA, the NSC, the Pentagon” has to ask whether they are next in the dock at the Eastern District of Virginia — “and I don’t understand why every journalist in Washington isn’t asking himself or herself that question.”[17][18]