The Kiriakou pardon request is John Kiriakou’s public effort to obtain a presidential pardon from Donald Trump for the 2013 felony conviction under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act that stripped him of his CIA pension, his federal firearm rights and, until an unsolicited pardon from Terry McAuliffe as governor of Virginia, his Virginia voting rights.[1][2]
What a pardon would restore
The pension and the gun rights
Asked what a federal pardon would actually change, Kiriakou reduced it to two items: “It would give me my pension back … and give me my gun rights back, Pat. I want my guns back.”[1] He said he lost his federal voting rights for life on top of that but has already recovered them at the state level: unprompted, Terry McAuliffe sent a courier to his Virginia house at seven in the morning with a hardcover envelope containing a state pardon decree bearing the gold seal, without Kiriakou ever meeting the man.[2][3] He notes the state pardon restores his Virginia gun rights but does not shield him from the federal felon-with-a-firearm charge, which carries a five-year mandatory minimum.[4] If pardoned, Kiriakou said, he and his children have already planned to “pile in the car” and drive to the gun show at the Dulles Airport Expo Center “with wads of cash” to buy firearms.[5]
The arithmetic of the pension
The stake he names is specific: the conviction cost him a $700,000 CIA pension, “and as things stand right now, I’m going to have to work until the day I die.”[6][7] A May 2026 exchange put numbers to the loss that Kiriakou usually gives as a single total. The $700,000 figure is cumulative; the annual pension underlying it is “just under $50,000” a year, and his understanding is that a restoration would be paid retroactively rather than going forward only — “I would get all of it back.”[8][9]
He set that against what the job had paid while he held it. On leaving the CIA in 2004 his salary was “maybe 110, 112” thousand — less than the stress of the work would suggest, in his interviewer’s view, and Kiriakou did not dispute the characterisation so much as reframe it: “in 2004 that was good money,” and in any case “you don’t do it for the money. You do it cuz you’re a patriot.”[9][10]
The Obama-era attempts
The letter before trial
The first organised appeal for clemency came before the case was resolved at all. Seventy former CIA and FBI officers signed a letter to the president asking him to pardon Kiriakou, while he was still facing forty-five years and before he had gone to trial — and the president in question was Barack Obama, whose administration was prosecuting him.[11] Kiriakou is plain about what the exposure did to him at the time: with forty-five years in front of a fifty-year-old man, the most important conversation he had with himself was whether to kill himself.[12]
Biden at the Resolute desk
A later attempt on the record also ran through the Obama White House. A very wealthy Greek-American businessman close to Joe Biden asked the then Vice President to press Kiriakou’s case; Kiriakou took the train to Biden’s house in Delaware to meet them, and Biden argued the case to Barack Obama at the White House the following day. The refusal, as relayed to Kiriakou, was that the president would do one thing or the other but not both: “it’s either him or it’s Manning.” See “It’s either him or it’s Manning”.[13][14][15]
The first Trump administration
What was in the file
Kiriakou lists the support assembled behind the Trump-era request: a letter from seventy former CIA officers, a letter from the author of the law he was convicted of violating, a floor statement from his own congressman, a floor statement from Senator John McCain, and a letter from Alan Dershowitz. “And it wasn’t good enough.”[16][17] He believed at the time he was close, largely because Tucker Carlson “went to the mat for me a couple of times” and had him on air repeatedly.[16] Kiriakou describes the seventy-officer letter in both settings — as an item in the Trump-era file and as the pre-trial appeal to Obama — without reconciling whether these were one letter or two.
The Lil Wayne call
The end came by telephone on the administration’s final day. “Tucker said, listen, I have bad news from the White House. I said, oh no, what’s happening? And he says, he’s going to pardon effing Lil Wayne. Can you believe this? And I said, I’m not exactly sure who that is, but if somebody named Lil Wayne can get a pardon, certainly I can get a pardon. And he said, well, you can come back on the show tonight.” Kiriakou went on that night and, by his own description, “practically begged Donald Trump to pardon me — and nothing happened.”[18][19]
The second Trump administration
The Mar-a-Lago encounter
Kiriakou said he went to Mar-a-Lago with a friend for lunch about a year and a half before the April 2026 interview and found himself in the same room as Trump, who was dining with Mark Zuckerberg.[20] When Trump rose and approached his table, Kiriakou stood up and used what he called his “go-to line”: “Mr President, my name’s John Kiriakou. I’m the CIA torture whistleblower. Barack Obama and John Brennan ruined my life, and you’re the only person who can give it back to me.” Trump replied “Tucker Carlson told me about you” and instructed him to “talk to Pam Bondi, she’ll get the paperwork done.”[21][22] Kiriakou said he never obtained direct access to Bondi and worked instead through “a friend of a friend of a friend” and through the US pardon attorney, Ed Martin.[22] He has described the encounter itself as pleasant — “honestly, he was lovely” — and summarised his position on the pardon in five words: “I hope he does. I’m waiting.”[8] See Mar-a-Lago pardon pitch for his direct approach to the president.
Kiriakou credits Tucker Carlson, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Dr Phil with writing letters of support for the pardon petition.[22]
The two routes
Asked in June 2026 where the pardon stood, Kiriakou set out the mechanics as a pair of parallel processes. “There’s sort of an official way to ask for a pardon. There’s an unofficial way. The official way is you go to the website of the US pardon attorney. You fill out the form. You hit send and you hope for the best. And then the unofficial way is you lobby lobby lobby lobby constantly every day people who are close to the president and then hope for the best.” His own position: “I feel like I’ve done literally everything that I can do.”[23][24]
Later the same month he described the unofficial track in more mechanical terms than the general injunction to lobby. It runs through a document: you lobby as many people as you can who are personally close to the president, and you ask them to sign a letter asking him specifically to pardon you.[25] He confirmed that he had done both halves. “I have asked … Yes, I’ve asked formally”, alongside “some very powerful, very important people who have also asked on my behalf.”[26] He credited colleagues at Covert Action Magazine with taking up a petition on his behalf, and rested the case on a statistical hope rather than a legal one: “This president for better or for worse has pardoned more people than any other president in American history. And I’m hoping that my name is going to be among them one of these days.”[24][27]
The answer relayed back
What came back was neither refusal nor progress. He has been told that the president has read the letter, and “has been told in no uncertain uh no uncertain way that this is something that these people want” — and then the qualification that leaves him where he started: “He knows where we stand but we can’t force the man. It could happen in 6 hours, it could happen in 6 months, it could happen never. Maybe he doesn’t like your face.”[28] His own summary of the position is a stock phrase he says he falls back on: “From your lips to God’s ears is what I usually say.”[29]
The paper, and the price
Asked whether he would ever go back to the agency for one last mission, Kiriakou admitted he would consider it, and then volunteered something he said he had not made public before. About six months earlier he had met a cabinet member about the pardon, and had been asked to write something very specific; he did the research, took it seriously, wrote it and submitted it. Word came back that “the person that I was trying to impress appreciated the paper.”[30]
Kiriakou then named his condition. He had been happy to write the paper, he said, but he had a request: if John Ratcliffe were ever to resign as director of the CIA — “even if it’s on the last day of the Trump presidency” — he wanted the job. “I want to be the one to walk in that hallway and say, ‘Guess who’s back?’ Even if it’s for one single day.” His own gloss on the request: “But I’m not bitter.”[31]
The CIA’s veto
’Never getting a pardon’ (July 2026)
In an episode of Dead Drop released on 27 July 2026, Kiriakou reported a message relayed to him that day. A colleague at Bison Media who is close to the White House Chief of Staff called to tell him that the Chief of Staff had said he is never getting a pardon.[32]
The reason given was not personal. In Kiriakou’s account of the message, the only thing standing in the way is not a person at all but an organisation — the CIA. The agency was reported as saying that it does not care about Kiriakou himself, but that pardoning a CIA officer convicted of a crime would set a precedent it does not want set. His response, in the same passage, was to ask what else he could do but keep working — the remark introduces a discussion of why he could not simply keep his head down in prison either.[32]
Transcription note: the auto-caption renders the Chief of Staff’s surname as “Miles”. The name is retained here as transcribed rather than corrected, per the standing rule on misheard proper nouns.
The congressman’s finding (August 2026)
By the summer of 2026 Kiriakou described the campaign as having exhausted its political options and run into the same institutional opposition. He had, he said, “enlisted the help of every Republican in Washington who has the ear of the president.” One congressman volunteered to help — “only out of the goodness of his own heart. He’s not asking anything of me” — and, on being shown everything Kiriakou had, drew the obvious inference: “My God, if you’ve got all this support and you’re not pardoned yet, you’re probably not getting pardoned.” Kiriakou’s answer was that this was roughly what he had assumed.[33]
The congressman then investigated and came back with a specific finding that matched the message relayed the week before: “the CIA absolutely positively does not want you to get pardoned.” It remained possible, he said, but “we’re going to have to go head-to-head with the CIA on this.” Kiriakou’s response was to lengthen his own timeline rather than abandon it — Trump would be president for another two and a half years, “And so I don’t feel any particular rush. I’m getting all my ducks in order and I’m hoping for the best.”[34]
The Kalshi contract
On 22 April 2026 Kiriakou discovered that the prediction market Kalshi had opened a contract on whether Trump would pardon him.[35] He said his implied odds were about 20 percent one day, 19 percent the next, on $152,000 of trading volume, and that when he tried to place a twenty-dollar bet on himself the platform blocked the trade for “conflict of income.”[36][37]
Who is backing the application
Asked in June 2025 whether a pardon was plausible, Kiriakou confirmed he had applied and named his support: “I’ve got some really fantastic support in Tucker Carlson, Judge Napolitano, Dr. Phil — the current head of the Make America Great Again Foundation, the former US attorney in Utah.”[38]
It is the last of those he quotes directly, because of the framing it supplies: the man “said that my case was the template — these were his words, the template for the Democratic Party’s policy of lawfare.”[38]
His own expectation was modest and procedural: “I’m hopeful that I’ll get a fair hearing in the White House.”[38]
February 2026: still waiting
Asked by Judge Napolitano — who had helped with the application — how it stood, Kiriakou described the frustration as one of proportion rather than delay. “It just pains me that the process is so difficult, because the issues seem so clear in my mind. Either there’s a right or there’s a wrong.”[39]
“And I think that history has vindicated me — and still just kind of waiting for my day.”[39]
January 2026: close, and mystified
Asked directly in January 2026 where the pardon stood — with the questioner adding that if it were better not to comment, he should not — Kiriakou answered anyway, and in two registers at once. On progress he was positive: “I feel like I’m very close. I’m talking to all the right people.”[40]
On why it had not happened he offered no theory, only the word he keeps returning to: “I am mystified as to why it hasn’t happened.” The comparison that supplies the frustration is with who has succeeded — “reality TV people and crooked politicians, and actually crooked politicians who don’t just not like Donald Trump but have complained in the media about Donald Trump even after they received pardons from him.”[40]