Interviewed on 23 January 2013, John Kiriakou was described by his host as the sixth whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration for allegedly mishandling classified information. He agreed, then added a correction.
The correction
“There’s actually been a seventh person charged,” he said — “a man who was a translator at the American naval base in Bahrain.”[1] Kiriakou did not name him.
The arithmetic
He then set the number against the historical baseline: “in the entire history of the United States, until Barack Obama was elected president, there were only three people charged with espionage. And just since Obama was elected president there have been seven people charged with espionage.”[2]
From that he drew a conclusion about intent rather than coincidence: “the Justice Department can deny it all it wants that they’re targeting whistleblowers. I think the evidence is quite clear that they are targeting whistleblowers.”[2]
The count over time
The figure is one Kiriakou has given variously as the prosecutions accumulated and as he has recounted the period from different distances. Speaking to an audience in New Zealand in 2017, he put it at eight Americans charged under the Obama administration for speaking to the press, against three between 1917 and 2009.[3] In a 2016 telling he gave the total as nine since Barack Obama became president.[4] The Bahrain translator is the only one of them he identifies by posting rather than by name.
In each telling the point is the same: that a 1917 statute written, as he puts it, “to target German saboteurs during the First World War” had been repurposed against people who had spoken to reporters, none of them accused of passing information to a foreign government.[4]