Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, and Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, are bound together in John Kiriakou’s account by a single exchange before a Senate committee, in which Paul asked whether the president may order the killing of an American citizen and Holder conceded that he may.[1] Kiriakou returns to it as his standard illustration of how far American civil liberties have eroded: “When Eric Holder tells Rand Paul with a totally straight face that the president has the authority to kill an American citizen on American soil without benefit of trial, you know, we have a problem. That is a direct and dangerous threat to our civil liberties.”[2]
The exchange
Kiriakou dates the hearing to the very end of the Obama administration and places it before the Senate Judiciary Committee.[3][4] The questioning came in two stages. Paul asked first about killing American citizens abroad — in one telling specifically “with drones” — and Holder said yes.[5] Elsewhere Kiriakou renders the first answer as conditional: “Are you saying that the president has the right to kill anybody he wants?” — and Holder replied, “If that person presents a clear and present danger.”[6]
The second stage — the same authority exercised on American soil — is where his tellings diverge. In the fullest version, Paul asked whether the president may kill an American citizen on U.S. soil “if he believes that that citizen is a threat to public safety or to national security,” and “Eric Holder said yes, that the president has the right to kill American citizens not just overseas but on American soil.”[7] In other tellings Holder declined to answer that half of the question on the record, offering only to address it in closed session — “and the Attorney General wouldn’t respond to that question.”[5][8] Years later Kiriakou still frames it as an open question with a silence where the answer should be: whether the government may kill an American citizen “on his ranch in Idaho, we don’t know,” because Holder “wouldn’t even answer that question.”[9] In another retelling he attaches the confirmation to the National Defense Authorization Act rather than the hearing’s drone framing.[10]
What does not vary is the consequence he draws. The claimed authority rests, he says, on the Patriot Act — “it’s not specifically laid out like that in the Patriot Act, but that’s the excuse they’re using” — and it “has never been challenged in the courts.”[7] He treats the doctrine as of a piece with the effect of torture on a domestic population: a citizenry frightened into following its leadership “like lemmings right off the edge of the cliff.”[5] “What kind of country do we have?”[11][12]
Paul and the Haspel nomination
The longest-running Rand Paul story in the corpus is the fight over Gina Haspel’s nomination as CIA director. The Washington Post asked Kiriakou for an op-ed opposing her, held it for the Sunday edition — five times the weekday circulation — and gave him an unusually large and in one account unlimited word count, running it across the paper’s Outlook section.[13][14] The morning it appeared, at about ten o’clock, Paul telephoned and asked him to come to Capitol Hill and help strategize on how to block the nomination. “I said, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”[15][16]
The scene he describes is the senator, four or five senior staffers and a whiteboard, counting votes — “who’s yes, who’s no, who’s maybe, who can we lobby” — with lines and arrows and the names of senators who might be persuaded to vote against.[17][18][19] Paul had already announced he would vote no and would filibuster, and Kiriakou at the time treated him as “the only hope” — though he noted that Paul was not on the intelligence committee, that Haspel’s confirmation hearing would be held in secret anyway, and that the previous time Paul filibustered a nominee “he only lasted a day or two.”[20][21][22]
A week later Paul voted to confirm her. “It was shocking to me.”[17][23] Kiriakou offers no explanation he is confident in — “why? Wow, because the CIA is…” — and settles for the observation that “that’s Washington”: “the CIA is in charge here. Donald Trump’s not in charge. Rand Paul is not going to throw a wrench into the works.”[19][23] In his telling of the wider defeat he assigns the decisive failure to the Democrats — “the likes of Mark Warner and Joe Manchin, they went soft” — and records that after the vote “the story just went away, it just went away quietly.”[24] Another of his attorneys had approached Ron Wyden about joining Paul’s filibuster; Kiriakou’s judgement was that Wyden lacked “the wherewithal” to bottle the nomination up in committee.[25][22]
A rare ally in Congress
Kiriakou’s complaint about congressional oversight is that the intelligence committees behave as “cheerleaders” or “lemmings” rather than overseers, and that nobody on Capitol Hill has “the guts to stand up to the CIA.”[26][25] Against that background Paul is one of the few exceptions he will name, alongside Wyden.[27]
Asked directly which members of Congress have actually helped him, he narrows the list to two: “Chuck Grassley is the champion of whistleblowers on Capitol Hill… and the other is Rand Paul.” He has met with both, and says they “put their own reputations on the line” for whistleblowers including himself, Bradley Birkenfeld, Thomas Drake and Bill Binney — “no other 536 members of Congress have ever said anything supportive.”[28][29] The practical form that took was legislative: a Republican congressman “with strong libertarian leanings” volunteered to write a bill in the House, to be co-introduced in the Senate by Paul, that would vacate Kiriakou’s conviction and reinstate his pension.[30] On civil asset forfeiture — which Kiriakou calls a due-process violation, “a constitutional violation… appalling to me” — his objection to a critical article was that it failed to mention Paul’s bill on the subject, which he thought should have been its foundation.[31][32]
Politically Kiriakou places Paul in a libertarian-Republican tradition opposed to the Iraq war and to “many of these foreign adventures” — a movement inside the party that “just abhors overseas entanglement.”[20][33] In 2016 he named Paul, “as crazy as it sounds,” alongside Bernie Sanders as a serious candidate he would trust, while conceding Paul was polling at two per cent and could not win a Republican primary.[34] His recurring strategic argument is that civil-liberties progress runs through such Republicans rather than around them — Paul, Mike Lee of Utah, Mark Meadows of the House tea party caucus — because “they’re the ones who can really influence the president much more effectively than we can,” including on a pardon for Julian Assange.[35][36] He has also warned against depending on so short a bench: Wyden “is not gonna be around forever, and we can’t put all of our eggs in the baskets of Ron Wyden and Mike Lee and Rand Paul.”[37][38]
His estimate of Paul’s reliability has cooled with the Haspel vote behind him. Asked in 2025 to name legislators who vote on principle, he gives Thomas Massie as the genuine article — “picked right out of the 1980s and put down in today’s Congress” — cannot name a Democrat at all, and allows only that “Rand Paul will do it a little bit… on the big issues.”[39] Asked who will say so publicly rather than privately, he answers that “Rand Paul and Ron Paul are the only ones that come to my mind.”[40]