Asked directly whether he had any confidence in the assertions contained in the October and January assessments about Russia’s attempt to manipulate the election in favour of Trump, Kiriakou answered: no, and said he had been quite vocal about it in the columns he wrote for Reader Supported News.[1]
The rule
The first objection is a general one, and Kiriakou states it as a standing principle rather than a judgment about this case. Any time the intelligence community or the FBI lays out a story and then says “take my word for it”, he said, don’t take their word for it.[1]
The undefined term
The second objection is narrower and, in his view, fatal. The whole notion of hacking, he said, is overblown, because no one has ever actually defined what they mean by hacking.[1][2]
He then supplied the definition that would matter and tested the claim against it. Did the Russians somehow steal the election from Hillary Clinton? No — in his assessment Clinton was a terrible candidate, and he added that she had stolen the primary election from Bernie Sanders. But if the accusation is that the Russians hacked voting machines and changed votes, or somehow stole the election for Trump, then that is a serious charge: lay out the evidence and let us take a look at it.[2]
The evidence, he said, had not been laid out. What had been provided told us literally nothing.[3]
The alternative account
Kiriakou also raised the account given by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job after blowing the whistle on the Uzbek torture programme. Murray told the Guardian that a DNC staffer had printed off the Podesta emails and given them to him, and that he personally delivered them to WikiLeaks — that there was no Russian hack and that he was the middleman between the DNC staff and WikiLeaks. Kiriakou’s complaint was that the mainstream media had ignored the assertion.[4][5]
He did not present Murray’s account as established. The point he pressed throughout was procedural rather than substantive: that a claim of this magnitude had been circulated without the evidence that would let anyone outside the government test it, and that his own experience of official narratives was reason enough not to supply the missing confidence himself.