John Kiriakou has recorded one prediction he made publicly and got wrong, and returns to it as a caution rather than a defence.
The question
In the week Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he says, he gave an interview to a Chilean newspaper. The paper put the same question to three people: to him, to Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency, and to Edward Snowden. All were asked whether they thought things would be better or worse under Trump for national security whistleblowers.[1]
His answer
“I foolishly said that I was cautiously optimistic,” he recalls, “because they couldn’t possibly get any worse than they were under Barack Obama.” His own verdict on the reasoning, delivered four years later: “Never say that. It was a stupid mistake, because of course things got worse almost instantaneously.”[1]
What he counted afterwards
He supports the correction with cases. Reality Winner, the National Security Agency whistleblower, was serving five and a half years. Terry Albury, the FBI whistleblower, was due out within a week of the conversation. And, he says, the country knew from Jeff Sessions — “the former attorney general and his big mouth” — that a large number of national security leak investigations were then open.[2]
His summary was blunt: “it’s far worse than Barack Obama,” and “the sentences are longer than they were under Barack Obama.”[2]
Why he keeps the error on the record
Kiriakou’s public position is that the prosecution of whistleblowers is a bipartisan practice, and he has argued the point with statistics on both sides — noting in the same conversation that George W. Bush killed a handful of people by drone in his final month in office while Obama killed several hundred in his. The Chilean prediction is the counter-example he supplies against himself: an occasion when the bipartisan analysis he now applies would have saved him from an optimistic forecast, and did not.