The Bureau of Prisons polos is an incident John Kiriakou says he witnessed on the morning of 6 January 2021, offered on the DeProgram programme in July 2025 as evidence for his broader claim that federal prison officers are not law enforcement and do not behave as though they are.[1]
The errand
Kiriakou had business on Capitol Hill that morning with his attorney, Bruce Fein. He says the timing was deliberate and the visit was meant to be brief, because the day’s events were already anticipated: “I had to go up to Capitol Hill to meet with Bruce Fein. And we knew all hell was going to break loose later in the day. So I wanted to, you know, get into Bruce’s office, sign this document, and get the hell out.”[1]
What he says he saw
The incident happened before he reached the office. “When I parked my car, there were all these guys taking off their Bureau of Prisons logo polos and putting on black shirts,” he said.[1] His response, by his own account, was to shout at them: “Shame, shame, shame. You clowns aren’t law enforcement.”[2]
Kiriakou does not claim to know who the men were beyond the logo on the shirts they removed, and he offers no account of what they did afterwards. What interested him was the act of changing clothes itself — the deliberate shedding of an identifying uniform before joining a crowd.
Why he tells it
He raised the story in the middle of a discussion about masked, unidentified immigration agents operating in American cities, and the two things function in his argument as the same phenomenon. Federal officers who conceal which agency they belong to forfeit, in his account, any claim to be treated as officers at all: “no, not as soon as you do that,” the host agreed, and Kiriakou’s assessment of the whole business was “it’s gross.”[2]
The anecdote sits alongside his standing insistence, made in the same conversation, that his own federal badge and academy training never made him a law enforcement officer either.[3]