Among the effects of being investigated that John Kiriakou enumerates — the surveillance, the lost friendships, the support group that falls away because nobody wants to make the FBI angry — the one he ends on is money.
The figures
In the interview he gave two days before sentencing, he put the total at “approaching now a million dollars,” adding that “it would take multiple lifetimes to pay off a million dollar legal bill.”[1] A report filed two days after the sentencing gave the figure as “more than half a million dollars.”[2] In later accounts he describes having been “more than a million dollars in debt” by the time he took the plea.
The variation is not reconciled in his tellings, and he does not distinguish between billed, paid and outstanding amounts. He has said he was represented by eleven attorneys.[3]
Why the number matters to him
Kiriakou’s interest in the sum is structural. In his account of federal practice, the prosecution stacks charges not because it expects to prove them but because defending against them costs six to twelve months and everything the defendant has; once he is bankrupt, weak and desperate, the offer arrives to drop all but one count.[4][5]
“It becomes an economic decision,” he says of the plea — not a decision about guilt.[6] The alternative he sets out is going to trial, losing, and drawing a far longer sentence while still owing the lawyers.
What it cost besides money
Asked what the investigation had done to his ordinary life, he called it devastating, and put the financial damage last in a list that began with round-the-clock surveillance — agents following him grocery shopping with his family, to restaurants, to a doctor’s appointment — and with the loss of a natural support group, not because friends thought he was a bad man but because they did not want to get involved.[7][8]
A contemporaneous report noted what the sentence itself would cost: in prison he would miss birthdays, christenings and anniversaries.[2]