Sheldon Adelson was an American casino magnate and major Republican donor. He appears in John Kiriakou’s account of the Jonathan Pollard case: when Pollard completed his full thirty-year sentence, Kiriakou says, Adelson sent his private jet to pick him up at prison and fly him to Tel Aviv.[1] On arrival Pollard was met by Benjamin Netanyahu, kissed the ground, and was bestowed with Israeli citizenship.[2] In a later telling Kiriakou carries the sequence one step further, saying Pollard then went on to advocate that Jewish Americans use violence against the American government.[3]
In a separate discussion of the Pollard case, after a co-guest noted that Adelson had given Donald Trump a hundred million dollars, Kiriakou remarked that “even in death, Adelson is influencing” American politics — through his widow, Miriam Adelson.[4]
The embassy
Kiriakou treats the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as Adelson’s purchase rather than the administration’s policy. It was Adelson, he says, who paid out of his own pocket for the move.[3][5]
He treats Donald Trump’s claim at the Knesset to have had no idea about the move as absurd — “Please. Sheldon Adelson paid for it” — and offers the building itself as evidence: a large bronze plaque now stands at the embassy thanking Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelson for moving it.[6]
The relocation bill, he notes, had passed Congress during the Clinton administration with a provision allowing the president to halt the transfer until there was a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians — leverage the United States gave away when Trump “just said, ‘Ah, screw it, we’re going to move,’ and just did it.”[6][7]
Adelson as the price of office
Adelson recurs in Kiriakou’s account of campaign finance as the archetype of the donor whose money sets the terms. His claim is that anyone wanting to run for office in the United States must be “not just Zionist, but an unquestioning, down-the-line, 100% Zionist,” and his evidence is that Trump’s three presidential campaigns received hundreds of millions of dollars from Miriam Adelson and from Sheldon Adelson before her.[8]
He states the conclusion in the strongest terms he uses on the subject — “I feel like we’re practically occupied. Our politics are occupied, because of the role of money in our elections” — and renders the transaction as a line of dialogue: “if it’s worth it for you, I’ll give you a hundred million dollars, but you have to do what I say when it comes to Israel.”[9][10] Elsewhere he describes the same mechanism as millions upon millions going into campaign coffers “with the likes of Sheldon Adelson whispering in the ear of whoever happens to be” in office.[11]
He couples the surviving half of that fortune with the reach of AIPAC, which he says operates not only in Washington but in all fifty state legislatures and down to individual school board races — a claim he attributes to a Texas state senator who had to cancel a planned John Kiriakou Day because AIPAC objected. Set alongside a donor like Miriam Adelson spending “literally hundreds of millions of dollars,” that is what he means by depth in government.[12][13][14]
The Adelson a third party never had
The same name serves Kiriakou as a measure of what independent politics lacks. Travelling twelve western states in 2016 introducing Gary Johnson at campaign stops, he was told by the candidate himself why the Libertarian Party would never amount to anything nationally: it had no “financial rabbi.” What it had was a man Johnson called the canned tomato king of California, who had donated a couple of hundred thousand dollars, with which they bought a motor home and drove from state to state.[15][16]
“But there was no Sheldon Adelson giving money to the Libertarian Party. And so there was no advertising.”[17] The observation belongs to his wider argument about third parties.
Widow, the Sands, and suspected intelligence ties
Discussing Adelson’s widow Miriam, who operated the Sands Casino, Kiriakou compares her to the casino’s previous owner, the gangster Meyer Lansky, calling her likely “mobbed up” and, like Lansky, “a major Zionist” and “a criminal.”[18] He cites court filings showing that when the CIA hired a Spanish surveillance company to spy on Julian Assange during his time in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, it was the Sands Casino and its Israeli-led security staff who contracted that firm on the CIA’s behalf — and notes that China has banned its officials from staying at Sands casinos in Macau, believing Adelson ran a CIA blackmail operation there.[19]
Kiriakou says Adelson paid, probably illegally, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and that he gave more than one hundred million dollars to the 2016 Trump campaign, with his widow giving another hundred million in 2024.[5] He believes Adelson likely worked as a middleman feeding information to both Israel and the CIA — giving the Israelis information on the United States and the CIA information on China — motivated not by money, which he had more than enough of, but by power, control, and a misguided patriotism toward Israel.[20]