Mike Huckabee is the United States ambassador to Israel appointed by Donald Trump, and a figure John Kiriakou has publicly demanded be removed.
The Pollard meeting
Kiriakou’s objection is to a single act: Huckabee’s reception of Jonathan Pollard for a private meeting at the American embassy in Israel. He went on Twitter to say that he believed “quite strongly” Huckabee should be forced to resign “solely for inviting Jonathan Pollard to a private meeting in the American embassy.”[1]
The grounds are Pollard’s record as Kiriakou describes it — a traitor to the United States who “has called for the use of Israeli nuclear weapons against the United States” and “has called on every American Jew with a security clearance to spy for Israel against the United States” — and who was nonetheless “feted at the American embassy and treated like a VIP visitor.”[2] Kiriakou’s first reaction on reading the report was that somebody was playing a joke: “unfortunately it wasn’t a joke.”[2] He calls the episode a serious violation “of well, not just protocol, but common sense.”[3]
The diagnosis
Kiriakou’s account of why it happened is about temperament rather than loyalty. “Mike Huckabee was a popular governor of a small, lightly populated state. He thinks that he’s still governor, and that he can make these decisions independently of the State Department or the National Security Council. He can’t, and he needs to be reprimanded for not falling into line.”[1]
Asked directly whether Huckabee was a traitor, he declined the word and offered a blunter one: “no, I don’t think he’s a traitor against the United States. And excuse me for being blunt — I think he’s an idiot, and he just didn’t think that this was any big deal.”[4] Asked whether people inside the CIA wanted him gone, his guess was that “everybody at the CIA wants him gone for this.”[3]
On the ceasefire
The same passage carries Kiriakou’s position on what Huckabee represents in the region. “I say at every opportunity, in every interview that I can get myself scheduled on, that there is no peace deal. There is not even a ceasefire — at least not a well-maintained one.” The Emiratis, Qataris, Bahrainis and even the Saudis may be satisfied, he says, but the Palestinians are not, because dozens still die every day, and Israel continues to bomb southern Lebanon and south-western Syria.[5]
”They should just take it”
During the 2026 Iran war, John Kiriakou described Huckabee — whom he calls “the fascist evangelical American ambassador to Israel” — telling Tucker Carlson that he had no problem with Greater Israel, and saying of the Arab land from the Euphrates to the Nile: “They should just take it.”[6]
Kiriakou’s objection is to the office rather than the man: “if that’s the attitude of the representative of the president of the United States, then I think we should all be living in fear.”[7]
He does not, however, treat the position as American policy. Pressed on whether the United States would support such a project, he was dismissive of both the possibility and the ambassador: “the United States wouldn’t support such a crazy position. Mike Huckabee is a fluke in the system” — and “he’ll be gone soon.”[8]