Leaking versus whistleblowing is a distinction John Kiriakou makes repeatedly and insists is not a matter of preference. “There’s a legal definition of whistleblowing, and that is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety.”[1][2][3]
Everything outside that definition he calls leaking, and he does not treat leakers charitably.[1]
“Leaking is just leaking, and there are lots of motivations for leakers. Some people like the thrill of speaking with a journalist. Some people like to feel important, that they’re on the inside, they have this information and they just have to share it with somebody. Some people do it for revenge, just because they’re angry at a boss, angry at the president perhaps, angry at a supervisor. But leaking is not whistleblowing. They are mutually exclusive.”
The list is stable across tellings, with one addition: elsewhere he specifies revenge against bosses “who may have passed them over for promotion.” The dividing line he draws there is purpose — “whistleblowing is done in the public interest. It’s for the public good.”[4]
Motive is not the test
That said, when Kiriakou states the rule most precisely he removes motive from it altogether. The definition is satisfied by the act: “why you did it, why you went to the press, is irrelevant. All that matters is that you did it.”[5]
The two formulations sit together uneasily in his own telling and he does not reconcile them: purpose is what separates the whistleblower from the leaker, but purpose is not what the statute asks about.
The exception he allows
He has also, at least once, allowed the categories to overlap. Asked in 2017 about the volume of disclosures coming out of the Trump White House, he said he did not doubt that there were people inside it so offended by what was going on around them that they were calling friends in the media — “because it’s their way to whistleblow on what’s happening.”[6]
He noted that presidents have been obsessed with leaks before — Barack Obama, and Richard Nixon famously — but that having been in Washington since 1982 he could not recall anything approaching the sheer volume.[7]
Nobody thinks they are one
Kiriakou learned the definition from the lawyer who took his case, and only after arguing with her about it.
He had never really heard the word whistleblowing before, he says. Seeing an attorney quoted supportively in the Washington Post, he telephoned her office at six in the morning; she answered, agreed to see him, and agreed to represent him for free.[8][9] On the way out he thanked her and added a correction: “I know that you represent whistleblowers, and I’m not a whistleblower.” She answered that he was. He said no — “I’m just somebody who said something.”[9]
Her reply is the passage he returns to: “this is a theme among all whistleblowers. No whistleblower thinks he’s a whistleblower. None of them do. You don’t wake up one morning and say, today I will be a whistleblower — that’s just not the way it works.” Then she gave him the legal definition.[5][10]
Applying the test to himself
The definition is also Kiriakou’s account of why his own disclosure was lawful, and he builds it as a syllogism. Torture is illegal in the United States under the Federal Torture Act; the United States is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, which also defines it; and the United States wrote that convention. So torture is plainly a crime.[11]
From that: “for me to go on TV and say we’re torturing prisoners — well, you can’t commit a crime by exposing a crime. It’s not a crime to expose a crime.”[12] He adds the related rule that it is illegal in the United States to classify a crime in the first place.[3]
He notes that the FBI reached the same conclusion: having investigated him from December 2007, it determined in March 2009 that he had not committed a crime — at which point, he says, the CIA told it to keep looking.[13][12]
Applying the test to others
Kiriakou uses the same definition as a working test rather than a rhetorical one, and it produces judgements that are not uniformly flattering.
Edward Snowden satisfies it outright: he brought to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to public safety, and has done the country “a great national service” — Americans would have no idea their government was spying on them if he had not told them.[14][15] Kiriakou has separately called him “the very definition of a whistleblower.”[16]
Chelsea Manning also meets the legal definition, but with a qualification he states plainly: “I think that she went about it in kind of a roundabout way.” What she revealed, he says, was war crimes that were never prosecuted — and yet, “if I had been Bradley Manning, I wouldn’t have leaked every diplomatic cable.”[17]
Why the distinction matters to him
The distinction does the work of separating his own case from the disclosures a crackdown is usually announced against. Elsewhere he applies the same statutory test when telling members of the public where to take evidence, and treats official leaks — the ones that come out of the White House and are never prosecuted — as a third category again.[18][19]