The AIPAC “Holy Land” trip offer is John Kiriakou’s account of being approached by AIPAC shortly after taking up the post of chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job he held from 2009 to 2011.[1]
He had been in the job three or four days, sharing an office with three other people, when two men “clearly, obviously from AIPAC” came in and welcomed him to Capitol Hill. He replied that this was not his first stint there. They identified themselves in full — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and he answered that he was aware of what AIPAC is.[1][2][3]
They then offered him an all-expenses-paid trip “to the Holy Land” — and Kiriakou’s emphasis falls on the phrasing: “They didn’t say Israel.”[1][4]
The refusal
He declined, saying he could pay for his own vacations. The offer was pressed — it was all expenses paid, and they would take him to all the Christian holy sites — and he declined again: “Guys, I’m not taking AIPAC’s money. I’m not interested.”[5][6] In the version he gave Joe Rogan he adds a flatter reason for refusing the itinerary: “Thank you, I’ve been. I don’t want to go.”[7]
The closing argument they used is the detail he finds most telling. It would not cost him a thing, they said, and it was approved by the Senate ethics committee. His answer was that he knew it was.[4] Put to him that this amounted to “total legal bribery,” he agreed that this was exactly what it was.[4]
His own stated reason for refusing is not about legality: “I don’t want to be beholden to the Israelis.”[8]
Who went
Kiriakou is consistent that he was the exception rather than the rule, though the scale varies between tellings. In one, three or four of his colleagues took the trip.[4] In another it is the whole staff: “everybody else on the staff went. I didn’t go… everybody else said yes.”[9][8] Speaking to Rogan he puts it more loosely still, saying some of his colleagues went for their all-expenses-paid trip courtesy of AIPAC.[7]
What surprised him was not that the approach was made but how it was made. He had always heard they did things like this because they want to get you right at the outset — but not that they would be “so public and obvious and blatant about it.”[6]
A permanent presence
Kiriakou’s point in telling the story is that the approach was not a one-off but a fixture of the building. “I don’t think a single day went by where I didn’t see those two. They practically had offices up there.”[5]
He reports the same arrangement inside individual members’ offices, on the account of House members themselves: AIPAC representatives would come to the office every day and sit on the couch, and when constituents arrived to meet staff or the member, “these guys will get up like it’s their office and say, ‘Remember Israel. Israel, Israel, Israel. Remember.’” His verdict: “That’s not the American way.”[10]
What he does not claim
He is careful not to present the practice as unique. AIPAC were simply the first of a stream — a parade of lobbyists coming in every day asking for something, on international shipping or whatever else.[11][12][3]
Asked whether he was condemning AIPAC specifically, his answer was that he was not saying anyone should refrain from doing it, “because every lobbying group does that” — the Armenians do it, the Greeks do it, the Turks do it, and the emerging spender he singles out is Azerbaijan, whose lobbying budget he describes as massive.[13]
The electoral mechanism behind that access is set out at Democratic silence on the Iran war.