The USS Abraham Lincoln crisis is the September 2026 collapse of conditions aboard the U.S. Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier that John Kiriakou aired on his own show, reports of sailors attempting to jump overboard, a plumbing system in ruin, prison-grade rations, and the messages sailors were leaving on their own aircraft.
The reporting
“Last week, reports emerged describing conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is an aircraft carrier, that sound extraordinary. Sailors allegedly attempting to jump overboard because their mental health is cracking; shortages of fresh food; broken toilets, and not just toilets, but the whole plumbing system; and at sometimes 45-minute or one-hour-long waits just to use the bathroom. That sounds like prison. All of that is what I experienced in prison.”[1][2]
The socks-in-the-toilet theory
Kiriakou’s reading of the plumbing failure is not accident but sabotage-by-exhaustion. “Many people suspect all of this is happening because soldiers are stuffing socks into toilets. They’re desperate to be sent home. They’ve had enough. This is the second-longest deployment since the Vietnam War.”[2]
The Pentagon’s denial
Kiriakou treats the swiftness of the pushback as evidence. “When three senior officials immediately deny reporting, run in front of a camera to deny reporting, that’s often a sign that the reporting is true. You had Pete Hegseth, for example, say that it was false. Then Donald Trump said it was false. Then the Secretary of the Navy put out a statement saying it was false. All while immediately moving to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln with another aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, and trying to tell people that this is all just part of a normal rotation. Well, if it was part of a normal rotation, why did we cancel joint maneuvers with South Korea to pull the George Washington out and send it to replace the Abraham Lincoln?”[3][4]
The prison-food comparison
USA Today obtained photographs of galley meals, “beans and some canned carrots. I don’t even know what the meat is, but this is what we were served in prison. Like literally, I could take this picture and show it to somebody I was in prison with and they’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s from the Chow Hall.’” A subsequent photograph, offered as “fresh food”: “two hard-boiled eggs and, I don’t know, grits, something. I can’t even tell what that is.”[5][6][7]
The messages on the wing
The line Kiriakou returns to is the aircraft-wing photograph, “a wing of a US aircraft covered in dust and soot and smog. But look at some of the messages people are writing: ‘Peace deal number 64 incoming.’ ‘All this for the Holy Land.’ ‘Operation Epstein Fury.’ ‘Be a good boy and do what Israel tells you to.’ ‘I love flock cameras.’ ‘BB’s cucks.’”[8][9]
His message to Israeli readers: “You’ve lost the American public. You’ve lost the American military. You’ve got to stop. The United States is not going to fight your wars for you indefinitely. Donald Trump isn’t going to be president forever, and you’re not going to be able to push around every American, and you cannot intimidate the rest of us into silence. It’s not going to work.”[10][11]