The Hall of States is the office building at 444 North Capitol Street in Washington which John Kiriakou, a frequent guest across the political spectrum, described from memory in August 2025 while explaining that Newsmax could not plausibly afford a $67 million settlement.
The floors
Asked whether Rall had ever been to the Newsmax studios in Washington, Kiriakou gave the building and then the stack. NBC and MSNBC are on the ground floor. Fox is on the fifth floor. PBS and Democracy Now are on the sixth. Newsmax is in the basement.[1]
His description of the Newsmax facility is precise about its scale: it is literally a one-room studio. It is a nice studio, with a little green room and a “little teeny weeny” make-up room, but it is small.[1]
RT
The comparison he reached for was the Russian state broadcaster’s Washington operation, which he rated above all of them: RT “was first class. They were in an A-list building. It was really nice.”[2]
What it explains
The point of the inventory was financial. Newsmax had just agreed to pay Dominion $67 million in three tranches over its coverage of the 2020 election, and Kiriakou’s answer to whether the company could afford it was flat: “Ted, no, they’re not.”[3] He noted that the network’s owner, Christopher Ruddy, is a billionaire who lives in Palm Beach very near Mar-a-Lago and is a close friend of Donald Trump — with plenty of money in his own pockets — but that the limited liability company that is Newsmax is a different matter.[4]
He was careful to separate the operation from the output. He has been on Newsmax three or four times, and found the people there always lovely, very nice, and enjoyable company; their politics he calls nutty, they are told what to say, and they are far to the right of Fox News — though not as far as One America News. They also have, he added, fewer viewers than Al Jazeera America had when it went under.[5]