Opening an interview in February 2021, John Kiriakou was asked about legal victories and gave an answer that was deliberately incomplete.
‘I’m going to start going after people’
It is a slog, he said. But over the course of the last thirteen years or so he had had his detractors, and in some cases these detractors went too far. He had connected with some really amazing attorneys over the previous few years — people like Harvard law professors and Georgetown law professors — and now, after being reactive and responsive for the last decade, he was going to start going after people. [1]
He then closed the subject himself: I wish I could go into more detail. Things are turning around, and I’m very excited about it. [1] His interviewer thanked him for the generosity of saying anything at all. [2]
Where it sits
The thirteen years Kiriakou refers to run back to the December 2007 ABC News interview and cover the whole sequence of investigations, charges, imprisonment and supervision recorded in the John Kiriakou task force, federal plea coercion and supervised release travel restrictions.
What he says about his own detractors elsewhere makes clear which categories he has in mind. He has described losing friends and family members before any charge was filed, treated in the culling of friendships; the recurring approaches he reads as bait, treated in consulting job entrapment offers; and the threats that follow television appearances. [3]
Kiriakou did not name a defendant, a court or a cause of action in the interview, and the article records only what he said.