Leonie Brinkema presides in the Eastern District of Virginia, which John Kiriakou described as “the Espionage Court” — the home jurisdiction of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security. No national-security defendant has ever won a case in that district.[1][2] A jury consultant who reviewed Kiriakou’s case for free told his defense team that in any other federal district they would have a real shot at acquittal, but that an Eastern District of Virginia jury would be drawn from people who worked for the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, or intelligence-community contractors, or who had relatives who did — “you don’t have a prayer.”[3] Kiriakou identifies her as a Ronald Reagan appointee and calls her “a hanging judge” — “everybody said it, everybody knew it.”[4] In a separate interview, however, he described her instead as a Bill Clinton appointee, calling her “dangerous” and noting that, still on the bench in her 80s, she is “wrecking people’s lives each and every day.”[5]
Kiriakou described Brinkema’s practice of self-assigning national-security cases. Cases are supposed to be randomly distributed among judges via a judicial wheel; Brinkema, he said, reserved major national-security matters for herself. Her docket included Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Edward Snowden, Zacarias Moussaoui (the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker), and the Julian Assange extradition proceedings — with every defendant who came before her found guilty.[6][7] In an earlier interview, however, Kiriakou said Brinkema had not taken the Assange case — that Assange instead drew a judge who was formerly on the FISA court.[8]
In Kiriakou’s case, Brinkema ruled on 100 defense motions to use classified discovery documents at once, denying all of them from the bench before arguments were heard: “I’m going to make everybody’s day much easier and I’m going to just deny all 100 of these motions.” When Kiriakou’s attorney said the classified documents constituted the entire defense, Brinkema replied: “Classified is classified.”[9] In a separate telling, Kiriakou put the number at 150 motions for declassification, out of 15,000 pages of classified discovery, and said the judge denied every one of them in a single five-minute hearing: “Let me make this easy for everyone. I’m denying all 150 motions.”[10] Kiriakou also said Brinkema would not permit an affirmative defense and would not require the prosecution to show either damage to national security or criminal intent.[11]
The judge further ruled that the word “whistleblower” was itself classified and could not be used in court. Kiriakou and his attorneys were required to use substitute language.[12]
Brinkema’s legal definition of espionage — that it required only the provision of national-defense information to a person not entitled to receive it, with no requirement of harm or foreign recipient — differed from a ruling in the Tom Drake case in the District of Maryland, which required a showing of harm to national security. Brinkema refused to apply that precedent.[13] When Kiriakou’s attorneys cited the Drake precedent to argue he lacked criminal intent, Brinkema said she had chosen not to respect it; his lead attorney then asked whether that meant a person could accidentally commit espionage, and after she confirmed it, she looked at Kiriakou directly and said, “you either did it or you didn’t do it, and I think you did it.”[14][15]
At Jeffrey Sterling’s sentencing, Brinkema stated she was giving Sterling “Kiriakou plus 12 months.”[16]
Plea agreement and sentence
At the close of the case, all three original espionage charges against Kiriakou and the false-statements charge were dropped, leaving only a single charge under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, for which sentencing guidelines called for roughly four years and four months.[17] Kiriakou’s attorneys negotiated a binding “11(c)(1)(c)” plea agreement — a fixed-time deal Brinkema could only accept or reject outright, rather than modify. Brinkema, a federal judge since 1986, told Kiriakou it was the first such plea agreement she had ever seen, and that she would have given him ten years if she had the discretion to do so.[18]
Sentencing day
Kiriakou describes sitting in Brinkema’s courtroom on his own sentencing day, going last because his case was high-profile. She sentenced twenty to twenty-five other people first that day — mostly drug cases — issuing what he calls draconian terms of 20, 30, and 50 years while, after each one, declaring the sentence “fair and appropriate,” breaking up families as children and spouses in the gallery cried.[19] Kiriakou says she had “a bad habit of reserving all national security cases for herself” — Zacarias Moussaoui, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, and Jeffrey Sterling among them — sending every one of them to prison, including him.[20][21]
‘You either did it or you didn’t’ (News Beat)
John Kiriakou describes Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Reagan appointee who reserved most national-security cases for herself — his, Jeffrey Sterling’s, Zacarias Moussaoui’s, and the still-open Edward Snowden and Julian Assange matters.[22] When his lawyer noted he had no criminal intent, she said she would “not respect that decision”; asked whether a person could “accidentally commit espionage,” she answered, “that’s exactly what I’m saying,” then denied all 110 of his declassification motions, leaving him unable to defend himself.[23][24]