Mark McDougall is a U.S. criminal defense attorney and was a member of John Kiriakou’s defense team in the 2012–2013 Espionage Act prosecution alongside the Plato Cacheris-led firm Trout Cacheris. Kiriakou identifies him as “one of the best attorneys I’ve ever encountered in my life, and the one that I liked and respected the most.”[1][2]
Standing
The credentials Kiriakou recites for him are consistent across a decade of tellings, if not always identical in their superlatives: chairman — elsewhere director — of the white-collar defense practice at Akin Gump Strauss, and a professor of law at Georgetown.[3][2] The firm itself he variously calls “arguably one of the five best law firms in America,” “one of the biggest law firms in the world — not just in America,” and “the fourth largest law firm on the planet Earth.”[3][2][4]
The detail Kiriakou returns to as proof is a record rather than a title: “he’s done 13 death penalty appeals and he’s won all 13 of them.” He describes McDougall’s office as “like a museum of awards from every civil liberties organization in America” — from the NAACP to the Brennan Center for Justice.[5] McDougall joined the defense team pro bono, at a moment when Kiriakou’s leads were billing at two thousand dollars an hour and he could not pay them.[6][2]
”The meanest man in Washington”
The reputation arrived twice in one day, from two people who had no idea the other had spoken. When McDougall volunteered, Kiriakou mentioned it to Ambassador Jonathan Winer, John Kerry’s personal attorney and a supporter of his, who answered: “Mark McDougall — he’s the meanest man in Washington.” Winer had gone up against him once, lost, and remembered chiefly how mean he was. Kiriakou’s reaction was “well, I’m glad he’s on my side.” Later the same day he mentioned it to the whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack, who said the same sentence back to him word for word — “you’re the second person that told me that today.”[6][7]
Kiriakou’s own experience of him was the opposite, and he treats the gap as the reason he trusted the advice when it came: “he was like a brother to me. He was never mean to me, he was nothing but kind — and because he had that reputation for toughness and meanness, frankly, I trusted him. I trusted his judgment.”[7][8]
The decisive argument
On the morning of the final plea-deal decision — after Kiriakou emailed the team at six or seven in the morning to say he and his wife had been up all night and were turning the offer down — the attorneys called back to say “put a pot of coffee on, we’re going to be there in a minute,” and drove straight to the house.[9] Bob Trout, whom Kiriakou describes as “sort of an elegant Southern gentleman,” made the appeal in terms of family: “John, if you were my own brother, I would beg you to take the deal.”[4] McDougall then put his finger in Kiriakou’s face and delivered the line Kiriakou cites as the one that broke through:
You know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice — and it’s not about justice. It’s about mitigating damage. Take the deal.[1][8][10]
It was also McDougall who supplied the framing Kiriakou has used ever since — that the case could be “a blip in your life or the defining event — make it the blip” — and, elsewhere, put a number on the alternative: conviction at trial risked twelve to eighteen years against a thirty-month plea.[11][12][13][14] Kiriakou reports friends had independently described McDougall to him as “the meanest man in Washington” before that morning, which is part of why the shouting landed.[11]
Kiriakou took the deal: thirty months, of which he served twenty-three at FCI Loretto.[15][10] He says he is glad he did, having since learned that the Justice Department wins 98.2 per cent of its cases.[10]