Michael Hastings was a U.S. investigative journalist whose 2013 death in a single-vehicle Los Angeles car crash is invoked by John Kiriakou — with a deliberate hedge that he is reporting “the conventional wisdom among the bloggerosphere” rather than asserting a fact — as the canonical real-world referent for the Central Intelligence Agency car-remote-takeover capability disclosed in the 2017 Vault 7 WikiLeaks documents.[1]
The Vault 7 connection
Asked in a November 2025 Julian Dorey appearance whether the agency’s documented technical capability to remotely take over an internet-connected vehicle had ever been used operationally, Kiriakou’s full response:
We did not. But the conventional wisdom among the bloggerosphere is that, you know, we should ask Michael Hastings what happened to him.[1]
The framing is characteristic — Kiriakou does not directly attribute Hastings’s death to the CIA, but he is the source of the most widely circulated public mapping of the published technical capability to a specific real-world case.
Kiriakou’s ultimate conclusion: not murder
In a fuller discussion of the case, Kiriakou says he ultimately concludes Hastings’s death was not the result of a car-hack assassination, citing an interview Hastings’s brother gave describing his severe PTSD and a meltdown around the time of the crash; the brother did not believe for a minute that it was murder.[2]
The Rolling Stone article and the death threat
Kiriakou says it is documented that an SAS operative embedded with General Stanley McChrystal and Michael Flynn’s team during the Afghan surge told Hastings to his face that he would kill him if Hastings trashed them in his article — a threat Hastings did not take as a joke. Hastings’s Rolling Stone piece, which directly quoted McChrystal’s team disparaging Barack Obama and Joe Biden, forced McChrystal to resign and pushed Flynn out of the war into a Defense Intelligence Agency post.[3][4]