Phil Donahue (1935–2024) was the American daytime talk-show host whom John Kiriakou describes as the anonymous benefactor of his post-prison writing career. Kiriakou told the story in August 2025 as an illustration of what kind of man Donahue was, and volunteered that he had never paid Donahue much attention while he was famous.[1]
The arrangement
When Kiriakou got out of prison he took a call from Mark Ash at Reader Supported News, who asked whether he wanted to write a column. Kiriakou’s answer was blunt: “Yeah, I really need the money.” Ash asked what the Washington Post paid him. Kiriakou had written only two pieces for the Post, but they had paid him $400 apiece — so Ash said he would give him $400 too.[2]
Kiriakou is careful about the scale of the figure in context: $400 was a lot of money for an op-ed in 2015.[2] Ash then paid him $400 per column, once a week, for the next nine years.[2]
What he was not told
Seven years into the arrangement, Ash told him that he had not actually been the one paying. Phil Donahue had.[3]
Kiriakou’s account of the reason is unsentimental about his own circumstances. Donahue felt bad that he was broke, that he had been imprisoned, and that his wife had left — the whole storm that had fallen on his head at once. So Donahue put up $1,600 a month to make sure that Kiriakou did not end up sleeping in his car.[3][4] His verdict on it is one sentence: “That’s what a good guy he was.”[4]
Donahue and the Iraq war
The money is not the only thing Kiriakou credits him with. Donahue, in his account, stood up against the Iraq war when he could have moderated his public position and saved his show, and did not — he knew it was corporate stupidity from the very beginning and simply said so.[5]
Kiriakou set that against a rule he says held in American broadcasting until roughly the 2000s: if you had the ratings, you could say anything you wanted and be anything you wanted — hammers and sickles or swastikas, it did not matter, as long as the ratings were there. Donahue had the ratings and lost the show anyway, and Kiriakou says that change “kind of blew my mind.”[6]