Kiriakou has been consistent that he did not believe the intelligence community’s account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was equally clear that this did not settle the question of whether the Trump campaign should be investigated, and on that he parted company, as he put it, with a lot of his friends on the left.[1]
Why he backed a special counsel
He supported the appointment of a special counsel, he said, not because he thought there was anything to the Russian issues, but because he thought crimes had been committed by senior members of the Trump campaign.[1]
The distinction matters to the shape of his argument. The offences he listed require no theory about foreign intelligence services at all; they are failures of registration and disclosure, each of which he enumerated as a discrete crime.
The list
Michael Flynn, he said, was known to have failed to register as an agent for a foreign government while lobbying for Turkey. That is a crime. He also failed to register as an agent for the Russian government while taking money from the Russians to lobby. That is a crime. He did not report the payment — a figure Kiriakou gives with explicit uncertainty, as either forty thousand or sixty-five thousand dollars, saying he has seen both. That is a crime. And he filled out incorrect, improper information on his ethics report, which is also a crime.[2]
That, Kiriakou said, was what he wanted to get to the bottom of: Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, possibly Roger Stone. He wanted to see what was going on inside that campaign.[3]
The company he did not keep
His endorsement of the office did not extend to the man appointed to it. Kiriakou has said plainly that he is no fan of Robert Mueller — it was Mueller who headed the investigation that put him in prison, and Mueller who created what the FBI called the John Kiriakou Task Force — but that he nonetheless thought a special counsel was needed.[4]