Correcting a prediction he had made four years earlier, John Kiriakou produced a number to measure how far the situation for national security whistleblowers had deteriorated.
The number
“We know from Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, and his big mouth,” he said, “that there are 123 active national security investigations going on right now.”[1]
The attribution is characteristic. Kiriakou does not present the figure as leaked, sourced or obtained; his account is that the attorney general said it out loud.
The named cases
Around the number he set two prosecutions then in train. Reality Winner, the National Security Agency whistleblower, was serving five and a half years. Terry Albury, the FBI whistleblower, was due for release within a week of the conversation.[1]
His conclusion drew on both the count and the outcomes: the situation was “far worse than Barack Obama” and “the sentences are longer than they were under Barack Obama.”[1]
What the figure is doing
The comparison matters because Kiriakou’s own case is the one he generally uses to indict the Obama administration — he attributes his prosecution to that White House, and to John Brennan and Eric Holder in particular. The 123 investigations are the datum he offers to prevent that grievance from becoming a partisan position: on his account the practice not only continued after 2017 but expanded.
The remedy he proposes
Asked what could be done for whistleblowers, Kiriakou gave a two-part answer, and called the question far tougher than it sounds. First, it is incumbent on everyone to keep talking about these issues publicly, because people need to hear them. Second, “we have to ride our elected officials” — call them, write them, email them, demand that they support national security whistleblowers, and demand real congressional oversight of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI “and the rest of them.” Otherwise, he said, by their very nature they run roughshod over civil liberties.[1]