Prosecutorial careerism is John Kiriakou’s answer to the question of why a federal prosecutor would press a national-security case that the evidence does not support.
Asked in 2021 what drove Gordon Kromberg, the prosecutor in the Julian Assange extradition case, and why he was unmoved by the weaknesses in it, Kiriakou prefaced his answer with a disclaimer and then gave it anyway: “i hate to sound cynical but the truth is that that so many of these u.s attorneys or resistant u.s attorneys especially the senior ones like cronberg you know they see great futures for themselves as partners in a-list firms as congressional candidates maybe as candidates for governor someday there’s always something bigger something better on the horizon.”[1]
The mechanism he describes is a sequence rather than a temptation: “if they can pull a rudy giuliani uh and and prosecute a big name uh in a big case then the next thing they do is they announce their candidacy for for congress or they uh make a call to um you know aiken gump and strauss and say hey i’m available right now at 10 times what i make with the justice department.” His conclusion: “so it’s a selfish motivation it’s all about self-promotion shameless self-promotion.”[2]
Where the sentence goes on the résumé
Kiriakou returns to this point often enough to flag the repetition — “one of my complaints, and I say this all the time, but I think it bears repeating” — and states it as a career pathway rather than a character flaw. Long sentences are “how these prosecutors get promoted. This is how they end up going to the A-list law firms. This is how they end up basing their congressional campaigns, their campaigns for governor, which they all eventually want to do.”[3][4]
The illustration he offers is his own. “In my case, when it came to negotiating a sentence, there was one assistant US attorney that was just adamant — adamant — that I get five years in prison. I ended up with 23 months. And what is she doing now? She”s the deputy attorney general for the criminal division.” His summary of the incentive: “their job is to get you the longest possible sentence.”[4][5]
The scoreboard
The institutional expression of the incentive, in Kiriakou’s account, is that the Justice Department keeps and publishes its own win rate. It tracks trial victories “like it’s a sport” — and he was on the count himself: “I was on their little ticker at the bottom of their website for years afterwards.”[6]
He offers Thomas Drake as the case that shows what the number is worth. Drake was charged with what Kiriakou reckons at a hundred and fifty years’ worth of crimes; all of it was dropped in exchange for a plea to accessing his own Facebook page from an NSA computer — and that, in the end, was what went on the ticker, recorded as the conviction of an NSA officer for misuse of an agency computer.[6]
His proposed remedy is structural rather than cultural: bar the department by statute from doing press beyond a release upon conviction, and remove the “careerist statistical rankings” altogether, on the ground that “the number of convictions does not equal justice.”[7]
The stacked room
He argues the imbalance is physical as well as statistical. Every federal court he has been in has had Justice Department offices inside the courthouse, and a large majority of federal judges — he puts it “upwards of eighty something percent” — are former federal prosecutors. Walking in as a defence lawyer, “it’s automatically stacked against you, and that’s what you have to overcome, among a million other things.”[8] Set beside charge stacking, venue shopping and what he calls the department’s “literally unlimited budget,” his conclusion is that “people don’t stand a chance.”[8][9]
The same reading extends to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is “supposed to be independent of the Department of Justice.” It was meant, he says, to sit in the White House and later in the Old Executive Office Building; instead it has “always been at DOJ.” The separation is nominal — “there is supposed to be a Chinese wall between DOJ and the Office of the US Pardon Attorney, and there’s not.”[10][11]
Underneath both points is a general one about where law actually lives. Reading decisions at a desk, he says, misses most of what is happening, because so much of it “is not textual, it’s not anywhere on paper” — the part he calls inside baseball.[12]