Tucker Carlson is an American broadcaster and former Fox News host. John Kiriakou describes him as “a great friend” of years’ standing, having appeared on Carlson’s Fox show roughly a dozen times before the two ever recorded a podcast together, and having had dinner at Carlson’s house the night before one such taping.[1]
The friendship
The Fox years
The acquaintance long predates Carlson’s independent network. Kiriakou appeared on Carlson’s Fox News programme roughly a dozen times — Carlson, he says, “loves when I criticize the agency” — and the two became friends out of it, well before they ever recorded a podcast together.[2] In December 2019 he was on the programme to discuss the John Durham investigation into John Brennan, and was introduced by Carlson as “a former CIA officer and the whistleblower who went to jail for doing less than John Brennan has done.”[3]
Life in Maine
Kiriakou describes visiting Carlson at his home in rural Maine, where Carlson lives without security despite Kiriakou’s suggestion that he needs it. On one visit, Carlson was a half hour late to record a podcast with Kiriakou because he had been fly fishing — an avid, accomplished angler — and had a stand-off with a 1,000-pound moose on his way back to the car.[4]
Where they agree, and where they do not
Kiriakou says Carlson told him in 2025 that the two now agree on close to 100% of issues — a shift Kiriakou attributes to Carlson becoming more libertarian over time.[5] By August 2026 he was describing the relationship the other way round, as a friend he has come to know “very, very well”, with the two of them making the same observation about each other — that they disagree on a great many issues.[6][7]
Lobbying Trump for a pardon
Carlson personally went to Donald Trump on Kiriakou’s behalf to lobby for a pardon, telling him Trump had agreed to do it.[2] On the last day of Trump’s first term, Kiriakou says Carlson called him to report that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had killed the pardon: Trump’s original plan had been to pardon Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Kiriakou together, but McConnell told Carlson that pardoning Assange and Snowden would cost Trump control of the Republican Senate caucus, who would then vote to convict him on his pending impeachment charges — so Trump dropped all three pardons.[2]
The presidency he keeps declining
Kiriakou relays that Glenn Greenwald believes Carlson could win the presidency, and that Kiriakou himself has told Carlson he would support a run. But per Kiriakou, Carlson privately dismisses the idea whenever it comes up, brushing it off and saying flatly that he is not interested.[8]
In July 2026 Kiriakou put his own position more strongly than support: “I’ve begged him. I’ve begged him to run for president.” He says Greenwald has done the same, and that Carlson’s answer has been consistent — “I’m not interested at all,” and, as recently as a week before, “I’m not going to run. It’s not going to happen.” Kiriakou’s reply was an open offer: “If you change your mind, I’m all in and I will do whatever you want me to do to help get the word out.”[9][10] His assessment of the hypothetical is unqualified: “I think that he would be an absolutely brilliant presidential candidate and president.”[10]
The Nick Fuentes interview
Why he defended the booking
Kiriakou intervened in the conservative split over Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes on the side of the interview, while making clear he would not have conducted it himself. His objection is to the premise of the boycott: “Why wouldn’t you interview Nick Fuentes? If you think he’s a turd with repulsive positions, then expose him as a turd with repulsive positions.” Refusing to speak to someone, in his account, is worse than the conversation — “talk to him and let him destroy himself with his repulsive positions.”[11] The subsequent demand that Carlson be cut off, and that the head of the Heritage Foundation resign for saying something kind about him, drew his sharpest line: “What’s wrong with you people?”[12]
He attributes the booking itself to Carlson’s changed circumstances rather than to sympathy: since leaving Fox News, Carlson “feels liberated… unencumbered by corporate structures and policies” and now books anyone he thinks will give him two or three hours of interesting conversation. Kiriakou notes the interview was, by his interviewer’s account, a normal Tucker conversation in which Carlson freely disagreed.[13][14]
Why he would not have booked it himself
Kiriakou’s own reason for declining such a booking is not principle but futility, and he states it as bias: “I see him as just some kid. He’s just some loudmouth kid.” Many of Fuentes’s positions have been definitively debunked by historians — “there are still people alive who liberated Dachau” — and his support, in Kiriakou’s estimate, cannot grow beyond “a bunch of angry white guys in their 20s.” He concedes Fuentes is a good speaker, bright, funny, and disarming at first glance.[15][16][17]
The argument about listening
He places the episode within a broader argument that Americans have lost the ability to listen to people they disagree with, illustrated from his own family — a royalist grandmother and a republican grandfather who both became Democrats, uncles who voted for George Wallace in 1968 — and from his high-school friendships, split between Republicans and Democrats, in which “it never mattered to any of us.” It is the same reason he gives for going on Fox News: “maybe I can educate a Fox News viewer.”[18][19][20]
Part of a realignment, not an exception
Discussing the American right’s turn against Israeli policy in October 2025, Kiriakou declined to treat any one figure as the story. Pressed that it was not only Marjorie Taylor Greene but Carlson and Candace Owens, he agreed — “that’s right” — and added Steve Bannon’s position that if the United States wanted to expand the war in the Middle East, Israel should go alone.[21] He reads the pattern as confirmation that ideology, not party, now organizes American politics.[22]
Worry over the cost of the position
Across three appearances between November 2025 and July 2026, Kiriakou’s account of what Carlson’s independence exposes him to escalates from professional risk to physical risk.
‘Genuinely worried’ about being cancelled (November 2025)
At the Consortium News 30th-anniversary panel in November 2025, Kiriakou said Carlson “genuinely is worried” about being cancelled or targeted over his independent-media output, and that the worry is “new” for Carlson personally — whereas the friend Kiriakou also cites, Judge Andrew Napolitano, has been living with the same worry for five years. Kiriakou linked the shift to a public break the same day between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, in which Trump publicly “called her a traitor and withdrew his political endorsement of her.”[23][24][25]
’Noted anti-semite’ and the 2026 FARA referral
Kiriakou has recounted a running private joke with Carlson that turns on the shifting semantic weight of “anti-semite”: Kiriakou — described in a scholarly journal by the Israeli foreign minister’s political director as “noted anti-semite John Kiriakou” — mentioned the label to Carlson, who topped it: “that’s nothing — I’m anti-semite of the year.” Kiriakou says the term “used to mean you hated Jews” and now “means you refuse to hate Arabs or Muslims.”[26][27][28]
In March 2026, when that joke had become a legal matter, Kiriakou treated Carlson’s FARA referral as legally weak — Carlson had “great lawyers” and did not fear prosecution — but singled out Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham as “dangerous tools of Israel” and warned Carlson that the real risk was the Charlie Kirk pattern of physical attack from “a lot of crazy people out there."[28][29][30]
"I’m genuinely worried for his safety” (July 2026)
By July 2026 the warning had hardened into concern. Describing Carlson as a friend he has appeared with a couple of times and expects to again within four or five weeks, he says plainly: “I have to tell you, I’m genuinely worried for his safety.”[31] The reason he gives is what Carlson does rather than who threatens him: “Tucker is one of those rare truth-tellers. He speaks whatever happens to be on his mind, but it’s always very well thought out. He’s not afraid to call important people on the carpet for things that they’ve said or done.”[31]
Kiriakou’s assessment
The character verdict
Kiriakou calls Carlson “utterly fearless” and possibly the most brilliant, best-informed person he has ever encountered, adding that what audiences see on camera is genuinely who Carlson is: a nice, devout, family-oriented person who loves the country.[32] The judgement is of character rather than politics, and he repeats it twice in the space of a sentence: “you can disagree with his politics, but he is one of the most honest and decent people I’ve ever known.”[7]
Graded as a CIA director
Asked in his case-officer rankings to place Carlson on the scale, Kiriakou moves the category rather than the man: “A CIA case officer? I don’t know. CIA director? Is an S. I would put him right up there at the very top. I think Tucker Carlson would be a fantastic CIA director.”[33]