Transcript of John Kiriakou’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

If you see a politician lying, you can say that person’s lying.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Call them on it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. That’s right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because it is America, after all.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just want to make sure. Okay, so the FBI spends a year investigating you because you say the President is lying.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally normal. And you don’t know that they’re investigating you because they never contacted you or your lawyer.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Never contacted either one of us.

The Obama Administration

TUCKER CARLSON: So then 2008 rolls around, Bush leaves after two terms, Obama gets elected, and he’s very much the peace candidate. He’s for transparency.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, I like to say that it was Saint Obama that came down from the heavens into the White House.

TUCKER CARLSON: Black Jesus returned.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And, but he’s very much, I mean, I remember in fact being on, on television saying, you know, he was this wild eyed peacenik lefty guy.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, no, he wasn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, he wasn’t.

How the CIA Influences Presidents

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, this is something that I’ve puzzled over for a long time and I’ve come to the conclusion that the CIA at the top levels of the CIA, they really love it when a new president is elected and he has no background in intelligence or foreign policy. Usually. Donald Trump is a very unique figure in this scenario. Very unusual. But Barack Obama, two years as a senator. Two years as a senator, no experience in Foreign policy, no experience in intelligence.

The day after an election, the Director of the CIA authorizes a President elect to begin receiving a PDB, a President’s Daily Brief. And so the day after the election, they go with this 16 page document marked at six levels above top secret. And they say, Mr. President elect, wait till you see the cool things we’re doing all around the world. And they’ve sucked him in. They made him one of the guys. And every day they’re like, wait till you see the update on what we told you yesterday. It’s incredible. And then we get the feedback at the CIA. Oh, the President loved this. The President had a follow up question on that. Oh, the President said, oh my God when he read this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s almost sounds like they’re psychologically profiling the President.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, I think, I think that’s exactly what they do. And don’t forget they have an entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists that do exactly that.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so they use the tools that they have employed for decades to subvert foreign governments. To subvert their own government.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, but they smile while they’re doing it and they say, no, no, we’re just trying to forge a good working relationship with the President. In fact, for a while in the 90s, they didn’t even call him the President. They called him the first customer. Swear to God.

The Deep State Reality

TUCKER CARLSON: Is. I know we’re getting far afield and we will get back to your story, but doesn’t sound like. So if you look at the org chart, the President controls CIA. Yes, but you’re describing a situation where CIA kind of controls the President.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, this is another problem. It’s that presidents come and go every four years, every eight years. But these CIA people, they’re there for 25, 30, 35 years. They don’t go anywhere. And so if they don’t like a president or if a president orders them to do something that they don’t want to do, they just wait because they know they can wait him out and then he’s not going to be President anymore and they can continue on with whatever plan the blob or the deep state wants to implement.

You know, Donald Trump took a lot of guff in his first term when he used on a regular basis the term deep state. And I argued from the very beginning it is a deep state. Maybe you don’t like the terminology. You don’t have to call it the deep state. You can call it the federal bureaucracy, you can call it the state, but the truth is that it exists.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would say, by definition, I mean, you just described it. The president and by the way, the elected representatives who are the instrument of the population through which they control their government, you know, are perennial. They come and go, but the people who carry out those orders remain. So over time, they are the ones with the power. Right.

Congressional Oversight Failures

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then when they get caught, they scramble. I remember Jane Harmon. She was a congressman, congresswoman from Venice, California. She was the chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee during the Iraq War, and she was briefed on the torture program. Well, when I went public on the torture program, reporters had questions. Well, did Congress approve this? Of course Congress approved it, and Congress appropriated money for it. So she’s the chairman. And reporters went to her and said, hey, what about this torture program? And she said, I didn’t know anything about the torture program.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s a liar.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: She was lying. And I said, and I remember saying it to the New York Times, I said, she was in the room when it was briefed, and when she was challenged, she said, oh, yeah, I remember that day. But you know what? I got up and I left early, and I left one of my aides as a note taker, and he never briefed me, which is also a lie.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, she was just a pure tool of the intel agency. That was it, and of foreign government.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And that’s an ongoing problem on Capitol Hill, is rather than being overseers, they’re cheerleaders for the intelligence.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how that is absolutely true. And I’ve known them all. And, you know, if you criticize any of the intel agencies, particularly CIA, which obviously the most powerful, they’re immediately defensive about it. You know, like it’s their job to defend these agencies, when in fact, their job, as you said, is to oversee these agencies and to keep them within the boundaries of the Constitution. How does that happen?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, I say all the time that we really did have real oversight for a while from the 70s into the 1980s, a decade, a decade and a half, where people really did exert influence over intelligence policy by really examining some of these covert action programs. But Pat Moynihan is dead and Barry Goldwater’s dead, and all these other senators and Congressman Otis Pike, they’re all gone. They’re all dead. And now we’ve got people who just egg on the intelligence communities. And I’ll give you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know them.

# Confronting the Intelligence Community

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’ll give you an example. When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador’s residence, and I went, and there was a senator there, a Democratic senator there was, who’s a member of the Intelligence Committee. And so he came up to me and he said, “Hey, welcome home. We were really worried about you.” And I said, “Oh, thank you. I said, senator, I’ve got to tell you, I was disappointed that you didn’t say anything. You didn’t express any support or anything related to my case.” And he got very angry and he said, “Listen, it took everything I had just to not lose my security clearance.” And I said, “So you’re afraid of them. That’s what this is.” And he walked away.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s disgusting. That’s disgusting. I think you can go through, certainly in the Senate, you can go through the roster of the hundred members of the Senate and then compare it to the list of the Permanent Committee on Intelligence. And those are the worst. Those are the most dishonest people.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, they are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, they are the most rotten, the most morally compromised, the most dishonest by far.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I have to agree. That was my thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does that happen? Like, sitting on the Senate Intel Committee is like just a sign that, you know, you’re one of the in crowd.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Of the in crowd.

TUCKER CARLSON: Worse than that. Like, you’re not someone I would invite to dinner at my house.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, I agree.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do they identify the most morally compromised people?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I wonder if this began with 9/11. I think that it didn’t. I think it began earlier than that. Like during the Clinton administration where the intelligence community was seen as a force for good.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Which was odd to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, that’s how I grew up thinking that for sure. I mean, it was not even questioned.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: When I first joined the agency, they were still sort of getting over the whole Church Committee era. And then when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, we were told that there were going to be big changes at the agency. And indeed, one of the things that Clinton did was he ordered what they called a cull. So we had to go through the files of literally every recruited agent in the CIA, and if they had any human rights problem, they were fired. Right. We just cut off contact with them. And I remember thinking, wow, they’re actually serious about this. I’m very pleasantly surprised. But then 9/11 happened. And not only did that go out the window, the pendulum swung so far to the other side that it has yet to go back to its point of equilibrium.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then just naturally, inevitably, predictably, the tactics that and other agencies used against foreign governments were used against the US Government, the elected government, and the population of the country.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I know you and I agree on this. We’ve talked about this in the past. But the CIA is forbidden by law from spying on American citizens, as is NSA. It’s a part of NSA’s charter that it may not collect the communications of American citizens or U.S. persons.

TUCKER CARLSON: NSA spied on me and leaked the information to the New York Times.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And leaked the information. I remember it very well.

TUCKER CARLSON: To control me, right? Oh, it’s illegal. Guess what happened? Nothing.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And here again, Congress just says, well, what are we going to do?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, we’re afraid of them too.

Obama Administration and John Brennan

TUCKER CARLSON: So we’ll get back to all this, but I just want to return to the thread of what happened to you. So Obama gets elected and you’ve got to think, because your real crime was calling the president a liar, George W. Bush, you had to have thought that once he was gone, it was going to be forgotten because what you said was true.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right. And when my attorneys received this declination letter, my wife and I actually went out and celebrated that night. We went out and had dinner. I had no idea that three weeks later, when Barack Obama became president, that’s when my trouble was really going to start. Obama initially named John Brennan as the CIA director. Liberals were up in arms at the time, and so that nomination was withdrawn, you may recall, and he named Brennan instead, the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John Brennan and I always hated each other. I don’t know why he hated me. I hated him.

TUCKER CARLSON: He seems like such a marvelous guy.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Such a sweetheart. I found him to be a very dark figure, very dangerous, willing to take risks that no one should take without appropriate congressional oversight. And frankly, I said this on your show one time, and I don’t mean to sound like you know that guy, but I thought he was in over his head intellectually in that position.

TUCKER CARLSON: When did you meet him?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I met him in 1990. January of 1990.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over 35 years ago.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so it’s fair to say you knew him very well.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, I knew him very well. In fact, when I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, John was the he first. He was the deputy executive director and then executive director of the CIA. So he was the number three officer in the CIA while I was the assistant to the number four officer in the CIA. So I briefed him every single morning. And we just did not like or respect one another.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why didn’t you like or respect him?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: First of all, I thought he was unqualified. Number one, John made a life in analysis, but he struck up a very close friendship with George Tenet. When George was at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, George became the deputy CIA director and then CIA director. And every time George got promoted, he promoted Brennan, but he promoted him into jobs that he simply wasn’t qualified for, like the station chief in Riyadh. This is a guy that had been an analyst for, you know, 20 something years, and you’re going to make him the station chief. Not only has he never recruited an agent, he’s never even met one. And that’s who you want in charge of operations in Riyadh? In Riyadh, one of the most important places in the Middle East. Complicated place, Very complicated. And then when he went back, he named him the deputy executive director. So he’s running the day to day operations of the entire CIA. The whole thing, it just didn’t make sense to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you thought that he was unqualified, but it sounds like you thought that he was morally unqualified also.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, I always believed he was morally unqualified. John had a reputation as being vindictive. He had once worked for a woman who didn’t like or respect him, and she let him go. He got a job briefing George Tenet at the National Security Council. And then when George was promoted, he promoted John to the point where he called this woman in and he fired her. Like, was that really necessary? You could take the high road. There’s no reason to be that guy that you just go in and start trashing your enemies, but that’s what he did. And there was a group of guys that came of age with him, and he promoted all of them with himself, with his rising boat. They all went to the top. And I’ll tell you, too, I was in operations at the time, working for people who had spent 30 years in operations, and they disliked him with a special kind of passion. And it was because they didn’t respect him either. It was clear.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. You said he was dangerous.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I always thought that he was dangerous.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why? That’s a strong thing to say about somebody.

The Torture Program

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. You know, I’m going to get on my soapbox again, so forgive me, but we’re a nation of laws, right? We’re a nation of laws. And whether you like the law or you don’t like the law, you have to respect it or you work to change it. You can’t just pretend that the law doesn’t exist, right? Oh, we’re the good guys.

So let’s talk about the torture program for a second. Here he is, the number three in the CIA, and the leadership wants to implement a torture program. Okay? We’ve got this thing called the Federal Torture act of 1946 that says you can’t do that. In 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs. We executed. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. In January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The day that that picture was published, the Secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth. But then in 2002, like magic, it’s all legal.

TUCKER CARLSON: So waterboarding’s been around a long time.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, it’s been around a long time. The Chinese actually invented waterboarding in, like, the 15th century.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you explain waterboarding for a moment?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure. So a prisoner is strapped to a board with his feet elevated compared to his head. There’s something put in his mouth, like material, a cloth, burlap, whatever. And then water is poured on his face. So it’s supposed to give you the feeling that you’re drowning. In fact, in many cases, you are drowning because a lot of water is getting past that cloth. In the case of Abu Zubaydah, and we can talk about him later if you want. We drowned him. His heart stopped beating and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more. That’s what waterboarding is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why is it done?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The idea is – this is a term that the CIA came up with – the idea is to instill the feeling of learned helplessness in the prisoner so that the prisoner is so terrified of you, so terrified of what you can do to him, that he’ll whimper as soon as you walk into the room and just confess everything that you want him to confess to. But the problem is that torture just simply doesn’t work. This is a proven fact that decades of scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists have proven it doesn’t work. And so the prisoner will tell you what he thinks you want to know just to get you to stop torturing him. You know, we know from prisoners held in North Vietnamese prisons, American prisoners, that when asked, well, who was on your ship? What were the names of the men on your ship? They would recite, like, you know, the Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line from 1968, or just make up names or childhood friends just to get them to stop torturing. So it just doesn’t work.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what was the process post 9/11 for waterboarding? I mean, I noticed that in the later reports, some of these guys were waterboarded. KSM, for example, 187 times. 187 times. So was he coming up with the offensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers every time? Like, why would they keep doing that?

The Torture Program’s Ineffectiveness

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, they were convinced that he knew the location of Osama bin Laden and that he knew what the plans were for the next attack on the United States. Well, there were no plans for the next attack. Sometimes there would be, you know, 10 or 12 guys sitting around a campfire in Afghanistan saying, “We should attack the Chicago stock exchange.” Oh, yeah, that’s what we should do. Okay, that’s not a plot. That’s just some guy at a campfire just throwing it out there.

So they were convinced that there was another plot planned and they wanted to get it. But 187 times and KSM ended up confessing to the Daniel Pearl murder, which we know for a fact. He wasn’t even in Pakistan when Daniel Pearl was murdered.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he confessed to it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He confessed to it. And then when they showed him the video showing that it wasn’t his arm that was sawing off Daniel Pearl’s head, he’s like, “No, look. Look at the hair on that arm. My arm’s that hairy. That’s my arm.” No, you didn’t kill Daniel Pearl. Stop saying that.

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of hairy people in the region.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: But 187 times.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And Abu Zubaydah 83 times.

TUCKER CARLSON: They waterboarded him 83 times.

Deadly Torture Techniques

JOHN KIRIAKOU: But it was worse than that. You know, there’s this conventional wisdom that waterboarding was the worst. It was sort of the top of the list of torture techniques. There were worse techniques. We killed people with other techniques.

For example, the cold cell. So you’re stripped naked, you’re chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can’t sit or kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way. Your cell is chilled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And then every hour, a CIA officer goes into your cell and throws a bucket of ice water on you. And people died of hypothermia. The Justice Department didn’t say we could murder people. They said we could use these different techniques. They didn’t say we could use this cold cell that was just made up and people died.

There was another one. Well, sleep deprivation. The American Psychological Association, the APA, has published studies saying that people begin to lose their minds at day seven. With no sleep, they begin to die. At day nine, their organs begin to shut down. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days. And people just drop dead as they’re being kept awake. With that eye bolt in the ceiling again and strong lights and hard rock, you know, death Metal music 24 hours a day on a loop, you go crazy, and then your organs just don’t work.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do we have any idea how many people died under torture?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The CIA has never said. It was in the Senate torture report, but it was redacted, so we don’t know the number.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s your sense?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: At least a half a dozen.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re tortured. To death.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, to death.

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Torture vs. Effective Interrogation

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think? Obviously you’re very much part of this story. You went to prison because of it. So it’s kind of hard to, you know, you have an interest in this, sure. But as objectively as you can. Do you think there was a lot of useful information produced by all this torture?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, not by the torture. Listen, it’s like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI. It really is. You know, when I’ve had 22 FBI agents raiding my house and taking all my stuff. But if there’s one thing that the FBI is really good at, it’s interrogations. And they proved it with Abu Zubaydah.

They proved that if you treat a prisoner with respect and engage in rapport building and take some time to build this relationship, the prisoner will tell you everything that you want to know. And that’s what happened with Abu Zubaydah. But every time the CIA would step in and begin torturing him, he would clam up, like completely clam up. And then the FBI would have to go back in, try to reverse the damage and start the whole thing over again.

John Brennan’s Vendetta

TUCKER CARLSON: So you gave that interview at the end of 2007 in which you said really just. It was pretty spare interview.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was.

TUCKER CARLSON: You didn’t go into any detail.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Investigation happens. It’s dropped. Obama gets elected a month later. John Brennan. I interrupted you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I had no idea that John Brennan asked Eric Holder to secretly reopen the case against me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think he did that? Of all the problems that were going.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: On in the world, there are other problems in the world, right? I think for two reasons. Number one, he genuinely disliked me. And he has this history of going after people using Lawfare, which now we all know what that means, using Lawfare to take down his enemies. Number one, lawfare understates it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Violence. I mean, they came to your house, they cuffed you, they threw you in a cell.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like those are acts of violence, physical force they’re using. Right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you’ll do that, if you’ll take a man from his five children and lock him in a cell for years.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And they fired my wife just because she was married to me. She was a senior CIA officer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so you’ve answered the question. How is John Brennan a dangerous man? So he goes to the then Attorney General, Eric Holder, and says, we need to reopen of all the problems that we’ve got. We need to make sure John Kiriakou goes to jail.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. We received 15,000 pages of classified discovery in my case, but we found in that discovery three memos. There was a memo from John Brennan to Eric Holder saying, charge him with espionage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Espionage.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Espionage. Which can be a death penalty charge, I might add. Who are you spying for, exactly?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, did they allege you were spying for somebody?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. What they said is that I told the media that the CIA had a torture program. And so because the media published it, our enemies knew that we had this top secret program.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how is that espionage?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I know it’s not. So Holder writes back and says, my people don’t think he committed espionage. And then Brennan wrote back and said, charge him anyway and make him defend himself.

The Japanese Diplomat Incident

TUCKER CARLSON: Try not to use the F word. This is my new thing. Self improvement journey I’m taking. But it’s making me mad hearing this, because, I mean, you were in. I happened to be in Pakistan around the time you were. Very dangerous country. I wasn’t doing anything dangerous. Oh, no, it was super dangerous. The most dangerous place I’ve ever been on Earth time.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so you’re. It’s not an overstatement to say you’re risking your life, father of all these kids, to fight the war on terror against the Islamic terrorists, and now they’re accusing you of aiding the enemy.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It gets worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s really over the top.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this story, but when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was the senior investigator. And so one of the great things about that job is you get to have lunch with diplomats from around the world and just talk about the issues of the day.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were working for CIA at the time?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, I was working for John Kerry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: When he was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. When was this, 2009 to 2011.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I got a call from a Japanese diplomat, and he said, hey, let’s have lunch. I said, great. So we meet at a restaurant on Capitol Hill. His English was so bad that we had to do the lunches in Arabic. Right. He was an Arabist, and I’m an Arabist. And so we would have our lunches in Arabic. And I remember what we talked about in that first meeting. I know, it’s absurd, isn’t it?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s you and the Japanese guy speaking Arabic.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Surprised somebody didn’t call the cops. So we talked about the Israeli election, the Turkish election. We talked about the peace process. I remember it very clearly. And at the end of it, he said to me, so, what’s next for you? And I said, I think I’m going to resign soon. I promised Senator Kerry that I would give him two years. It’s been two and a half. And I have five kids that I need to put through college. And he says, no, don’t do that. If you give me information, I can give you money.

And I said, what in the world is wrong with you? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve made that pitch? Shame on you for cold pitching me. And I indignantly got up and walked out, and I went directly, without stopping, to the office of the Senate security officer. And I said, I was just pitched by a foreign intelligence officer. I need to report it. He said, was it that damn Russian again? And I said, no, it was Japanese. He said, Japanese? Well, occasionally they’re poking around looking for trade secrets.

So he said, sit at this standalone computer, write it up, and I’ll send it to the FBI. I said, fine. I wrote the entire thing as a memo. He sent it to the FBI. The next day, he calls me and says, two FBI agents are going to come up. They want to interview you. I said, great. I go back down to the security vault, and these two young FBI agents come. I tell them the story again. And they said, okay, here’s what we want you to do. We want you to call him back and invite him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he’s looking for and what he’s willing to pay for it. And because I’m a patriot, I said, do you want me to wear a wire or something? And they said, no, we’ll just be at the next table. We’ll listen to everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re such a Boy Scout.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I know, right? I look kind of country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Everyone who lives in D.C. get, you know, has had something like what you described, but I’ve never heard of anybody going to the authorities over it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So the morning of the lunch, they called me and said, something came up. We can’t do it. So do the lunch and write another memo. So I did, and I wrote up a comprehensive report. I sent it back to the FBI. Then they asked me to do it a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time, which I did. And in the final lunch, it was at a place in Georgetown.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which place?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was on lower Wisconsin. The famous Italian place.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh. Oh. Where they give you, after dinner, drinks at the end.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. And the ladies in the front window making the pasta.

TUCKER CARLSON: Such a great restaurant. Filamena.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Filamena. Thank you forever. Sorry.

TUCKER CARLSON: I love Filamena.

FBI Entrapment Attempts

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It’s wonderful. It really is wonderful. So I do it. And in that final lunch, he says, I got promoted. I got my dream job. I’m going to be the number two at the Japanese Embassy in Cairo. I said, congratulations. I shook his hand. I never talked to him again. A year later, I’ve been arrested, and we get discovery, and we see that there never was any Japanese diplomat. He was an FBI agent.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Trying to get me to commit actual espionage. But I kept reporting the meetings back to the FBI, and then there was a memo to Peter Strzok, who actually put the cuffs on me in 2012.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Peter Strzok?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The Peter Strzok. He actually—I’ll get to that in a second. But one of the FBI agents wrote to Peter Strzok and said we should end this operation. He’s clearly not going to take the bait.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I said to my lawyer, why would they do this? I’m a patriot.

TUCKER CARLSON: The FBI did that to you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because I hadn’t committed espionage, but I—

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t put the government down. Actually, I mean, that’s—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that’s—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. John Brennan specifically said charge him with espionage. Well, I hadn’t committed espionage, and so they’re trying to get me to commit it so they can charge me. I kept reporting it to them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who was the guy? The Japanese diplomat?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, he was just an Asian FBI agent who didn’t speak a word of Japanese, but he did speak Arabic, so he pretended—

TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’re blowing my mind.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He pretended to not speak English so that I wouldn’t be alerted.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you sure this happened?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: 100%. It was all in the discovery. But Brennan said, charge him with espionage. And they were like, okay, well, we gotta charge him with espionage.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have to create the crime in order to fit the charge.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And what happened? They charged me with three counts of espionage.

FBI’s Pattern of Entrapment

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, how can you believe any—So, like, I have friends who have a lot of interesting information on the Oklahoma City bombing.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Ooh.

TUCKER CARLSON: And my brain doesn’t want to go there. Same with January 6th. Same with a bunch of different operations the FBI has been involved in, where it seems pretty obvious they’re trying to get people to commit felonies, acts of violence, acts of terrorism. And I’m like, I just—I can’t bring myself to believe that that happens in the United States. But you’re describing it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, Tucker. I was in prison with this poor guy. This guy was just a dope. And he and a couple of buddies were in a bar one day in Cleveland, and this other guy was there drinking with them. And he said, hey, you know what would be fun? We should blow up the Route 82 bridge. And they were drunk. They said, yeah, that would be so much fun. I’ll get the explosives. Well, he’s an FBI informant. The FBI gives inert explosives. These idiots go out to the Route 82 bridge and try to blow it up. It doesn’t blow up. And then the FBI comes out from behind the bushes. They got 20, 25, and 30 years in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they do that to this?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Why would they do that? It wasn’t their idea to blow up the stupid bridge.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why were they targeted?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because this is how FBI agents get promoted. They don’t get promoted by not arresting you. They get promoted by arresting you and heaping charges on you so that eventually you go bankrupt and you give up. And then they say, okay, here’s the deal. We’ll drop all the charges but one. You take a guilty plea to a felony, and then you do, you know, two years or whatever. But these guys went to trial because they said, no, it wasn’t our idea. It wasn’t our explosives. It was the FBI’s explosives, and it was the FBI’s guy that talked us into doing it. We were just having drinks that night. We weren’t going to blow up a bridge. But that’s how they get ahead in Washington.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is—But they’re—I mean, they’re targeting American citizens for destruction.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s what they do.

TUCKER CARLSON: You need to shut down the FBI right away.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I would not object to that at all. And in my case, they charged me with three counts of—

TUCKER CARLSON: What is the fucking point of all of this? Pay your taxes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I know, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Hoist the flag on your front lawn. I do those things.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, I do too.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then they try to destroy you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you’re—Because your crime is—You didn’t like John Brennan when you both were junior guys at CIA.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. And I—

TUCKER CARLSON: Said the President, George W. Bush was lying because he is a liar, unfortunately. And so like let’s spend millions of dollars—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: $6 million of the taxpayers money is what they spend on my—

TUCKER CARLSON: To destroy you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: $6 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: We need a pardon right away from Trump.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: But—

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, but—Sorry, sorry. You’re making me emotional. This is just too ridiculous. I’ve known you a while. I didn’t know the details.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, it was, it was ugly.

The Investigation and Raid

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so can we just go back? So Brennan orders this investigation. The second Obama takes office, he goes to Eric Holder. Holder says we actually, our staff attorneys don’t think that he committed espionage. Then what happens? Like, do you know that they’re investigating you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Again, no idea. No idea that I’m being investigated. So I’m going on my merry way. I’m trying to build a business in consulting. I have some big name clients. Things are starting to—In fact, I was going to New York so often that my wife said, you know, maybe we should buy a little pied a terre there. So instead of staying in a hotel. Cause things are going really well right now. You should talk to a real estate agent. It was so exciting. Right? And then 22 FBI agents raid my house.

TUCKER CARLSON: When?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: January 12, 2012.

TUCKER CARLSON: 2012.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: 2012. They investigated me for three years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you know they were investigating you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. And then when we got the discovery—

TUCKER CARLSON: They investigated you for three years. And this is now quite a few years after the only thing you’ve done wrong is you gave an interview to ABC News saying three things. The President lied. We had a torture program. And what was the third one?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And the torture was signed by the President.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, all true.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: All true.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so for five, six years, they investigate you without telling you. Now what were they doing to investigate you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They were—They had my phones tapped.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Actually tapped. Yep. They intercepted all of my emails. And I’ll tell you something funny about that for real. There’s a service that you can pay like $36 a year called readnotify.com so if I want to write you an email, I put, you know, tucker carlson@aol.com and when you access it, it’ll show me Tucker Carlson read your email. He read it for 2 minutes and 37 seconds. He forwarded it, he deleted it, he filed it, whatever. And this is where he was located. And it has a town and it’ll have sometimes geocoordinates.

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I wanted to write a Freedom of Information act request because I was thinking of writing a book about an author, a novelist from the 50s, and I wanted to know whether he had worked at the CIA. So I sent this Freedom of Information act request. Actually, I called a journalist that I knew who writes these things every day, and I said, I don’t want it to get rejected, so can you walk me through the process? He said, yeah, just send me what you have and I’ll correct it for you.

So I sent it to him and I got a read notify notification and I looked at it and it said, accessed in Washington D.C. and I said to him, I called him and I said, you’re not in Washington today, right? And he said, no, I’m in LA. Why? I said, because somebody just accessed the email and it’s in Washington. I said, hold on. Because it has geocoordinates attached to it. So I took the geocoordinates, I put it into Google Earth, you know, Google Earth, it shows you the whole planet, and then it kind of zeros in on the FBI’s Washington Field Office. No way. And he said, are they looking at you or are they looking at me? I said, I haven’t done anything. They’re probably looking at you because you—

TUCKER CARLSON: Didn’t even know you were under investigation.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No idea. But they were looking at me and they were accessing all of my emails. They even followed my family and me into church, into Target, to go shopping. And they would write these stupid reports. Subject and his family went to church, sat in the first pew, hour and 15 minutes later, subject and family went home.

TUCKER CARLSON: All because you called the President a liar.

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JOHN KIRIAKOU: Brennan complained that I had aired the CIA’s dirty laundry, but that was, I think, more of just an excuse to cover up his own, you know, narcissism.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean—Right, but like airing dirty laundry, calling liars liars. Yeah, these are not crimes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, they’re not crimes, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: But am I missing something? I mean, did you kill anybody? Were you dealing heroin at all?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Nope. Nothing.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then you didn’t start some kind of fake cryptocurrency company?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I wish I had thought of it. I’d be rich today.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. I hope at some point we can talk about all the actual criminals who are richer. Living in my neighborhood.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Richer than ever. Okay, so—But you don’t know any of this is going on. When do you—When do you get confirmation that you’re the target of an investigation?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The FBI called me. I was sitting at my computer one morning writing an op ed, and the FBI called me. And I looked at my phone and it said, Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I thought, what in the world is that? So I answered it. I said, hi, this is John, may I help you? And he says, hi, this is Special Agent—I forget what—Do you remember that case that you helped us out with when you were on Capitol Hill? Because, remember, I didn’t know that this Japanese guy was an FBI agent yet. I said, sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is so freaking bonkers. Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And he said, well, we have another case and we need your help. And I said, because I’m an idiot and a patriot. I said, anything for the FBI. What do you want from me? That’s what I told him. He said, can you come down here tomorrow at 10? I said, absolutely. So I went at 10 o’clock and I said, what do you want me to do?

FBI Raid and Arrest

TUCKER CARLSON: Is this to the FBI building downtown?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. I said, is it? What? The Russians? Who is it? Well, you know, before we get to that, he says, I wanted to ask you, you know, I just read your book, which was a lie. I had a book that had come out two years earlier. I just read your book. And I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. And it was all about the torture program. And I’m getting more and more nervous. And finally, what were the questions? Well, when you were in Pakistan and you were describing this, this piece of technology, did you get that cleared by the CIA? I said, of course I got it cleared. I said, it took me nine months to write that book and 22 months to get it cleared at the CIA’s Publications Review Board. Well, you know, what about this guy? You mentioned this guy. Do you remember? You just say John Doe. Do you remember his name? I’m like, yeah, I remember his name. And then I said, what are we talking about here? And then one of them said, well, we probably should tell you that as we’re speaking right now, we’re raiding your house, we’re confiscating all of your electronics, and holy shit, you’re going to be charged with a lot of crimes.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Huh? That’s what he said. And thank God, as you were talking.

TUCKER CARLSON: They were raiding your house.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: My wife later told me that as soon as I got on the Metro to go to the FBI, they just broke down the door. Was she home with our two month old son? Mm. Ah. Mm. Yep. And then one of the. One of the female things.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not strong enough.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. Burn it down. Burn it down. Burn it down.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, this is neither here nor there, because my opinion is not important. But when Kash Patel was named the director of the FBI, I wrote an op ed in a leftist for a leftist news outlet celebrating this appointment, saying, this is exactly what we need to do. We need to tear the place down to its studs. If there’s going to be a federal law enforcement organization, this one needs to be scrapped and rebuilt and nobody else has the guts to do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, let’s build them in headquarters, though.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Yeah, in Kansas maybe.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, Leavenworth.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, excuse me. One final sentence. I thank God that I had the presence of mind to say, I want to speak to my attorney and I’m not saying anything else. And that was the only reason they didn’t put the cuffs on me right there. So I said, I want to leave. And I got up and they said, just a minute, just a minute. I said, no, if I’m not under arrest, that means I’m free to leave. And as I walked out, Peter Strzok was standing there and he said, did he implicate himself? And the guy says, not really, but I’ll tell you about it in a second. And he turned to Me. And he said, you’re free to go.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you have any idea what this was about?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. No idea. No idea. They charged me with.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is like a bad dream.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. I went outside, I called my lawyer. He told me, come to the office immediately. I went, told him everything that happened. He told me, try to take it easy. I said, this is a death penalty case. He said, just take it easy. They’re not gonna seek what was happening.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you call home and ask your wife?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. And she was just wonderful. She. She was as calm as I wished I could be. And she said, the FBI’s here. I said, I know. I said, are they treating you with respect? And she said, well, one of the female agents said, why don’t you sit with that beautiful baby and don’t get up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why don’t you go fuck yourself?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Excuse me.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Talking that way to your wife with a newborn baby.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then within hours, of course, they leak it to the media immediately. So within hours, all four of my clients, and these were like household name clients that I had for this consulting business. I was trying to get up and running. All four of them dropped me that day. That day. And then immediately.

TUCKER CARLSON: Profiles and Courage Award.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, I’ll tell you, the phone we got, we caught. We counted. Actually, we got something like 65 or 67 calls from the media that night. I just shut my phone off. We unplugged the. We had landlines back then. One of the local networks put a truck in front of our house with a spotlight on the house.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, it was humiliating. Just utterly humiliating.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I just want to say for the fifth time, because at this point, I mean, you’re being treated like El Chapo.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Okay?

TUCKER CARLSON: Your only crime was an ABC interview with Brian Ross in 2007 in which you say, yes, the CIA does have a torture program. I know, cuz I work there. And the President authorized it and lied about it in public. That’s your sum total of your crimes?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That was it. I’m gonna cut to the chase here.

Espionage Charges and Arrest

TUCKER CARLSON: This is so unbelievable. So you go to your lawyer’s office, you find out you’re being charged with espionage.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I called my wife. She came and picked me up. And I told her, I’m gonna kill myself. This is a death penalty case. I haven’t done anything wrong. And she’s like, you’re not gonna kill yourself. Let’s just take this one step at a time. What did the lawyers say? And then we started taking it from there. When did you get arrested January, no, four days later. That was on a. So this is another trick that they use. And they did this with the J6 people the FBI loves, loves, loves to make their arrests on Fridays, right? Or Thursdays after 5, because there are no federal arraignments on Fridays. So you get arrested on a Thursday evening and you have to spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in jail. And then you get to go to a. Raymond. No, only because I asked to see my attorney. And so they told me I had to turn myself in at the FBI Monday morning at 10.

Tucker, when I tell you I had these guys on me from Thursday to Monday like white on rice. I mean, six feet off my bumper, everywhere we went. Even one of my neighbors called to say he had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And he looked out the window and he said, buddy, there are like carloads of people out there at three o’ clock in the morning just staring at your house. And I said, I know, I know, it’s the FBI. There’s nothing I can do.

And so they followed us like there were FBI cars on either side of us and behind us as we drove to the FBI that Monday morning. And then when I got out of the car and walked into the FBI headquarters, they broke off. And then they chained me to a metal bench. So I’m like this, actually. With a handcuff. And I said, and Strzok was there? Oh, yeah, he was there. And, you know, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know he was Peter Strzok until I got a call in 2017 reporter for the Washington Post. And he said, hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on Peter Strzok being fired from the FBI. I said, I don’t know anything about Peter Strzok other than what I’ve read in the Washington Post.

He said, no, Peter Strzok arrested you in January of 2012. I said, that was Peter Strzok? He said, yeah, it was Peter Strzok. He was the head of the Counter Intelligence Division. It was Peter Strzok that wrote the reports on your arrest. He’s the one that physically put the cuffs on you. And I said, oh, my God. I said, yes, I’ll give you a statement. He said, what’s the statement? And I said, the statement is that karma’s a bitch. And now it’s his turn. Yeah, so all they printed was, now it’s his turn.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think he wound up getting like a million dollar settlement.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Actually, he did. And there was a GoFundMe. He got richer, and there was a GoFundMe that raised another half a million dollars. Yeah, this is so. It’s a nightmare.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, okay, you’re charged just.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, three counts of espionage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Three counts of espionage, but not specifying who you spied for.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Nope. There was never even an accusation that I had spied for anybody. One count of making a false statement. We were never exactly sure what the false statement was supposed to have been. It had something to do with the clearance process for my book. And one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection act of 1982.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you reveal the identities of anyone?

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act Violation

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Here’s that story. In the summer of 2008, six months after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a journalist who was writing a book on the CIA’s rendition program. I told him, I don’t know anything about renditions. Kidnapping was not my thing at the Agency. I can’t help you. So he sends me a list of a dozen names. He said, can you introduce me to any of these people so that I can interview them? I said, I don’t know any of these people. Then he sent me a second list of a dozen names. And I said, look, you clearly know this better than I do. I don’t know any of these people.

And then he said, there’s a guy that you mentioned on, like, page 165 of your book. You called him John. Can I mention. Can I interview him? And I said, oh, you’re talking about John Doe. I don’t know whatever happened to him. He’s probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. They got me. I confirmed the surname of a former colleague. That was it. That’s the Intelligence Identities Protection act of 1982.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they knew that because they were listening to the call.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, it got worse. They didn’t recognize that as a violation until the journalist who wasn’t really writing a book gave the name to Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch gave the name to the Guantanamo defense attorneys. The Guantanamo defense attorneys wrote a classified motion telling the judge at Guantanamo, we’d like to interview this John Doe. The judge said, hey, this name is probably classified. He gave it to the FBI, they gave it to the CIA. The CIA gave it to John Brennan.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is crazy. What do you mean? The journalist wasn’t really writing a book.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He was pretending to write a book on the Abu Omar rendition from Milan. There really was no book. He was really working for the Guantanamo defense attorneys as kind of a private eye without telling anybody. What? Yeah, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: The level of treachery.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Welcome to Washington. It’s that bad?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m very aware of that. Yeah. I’m so glad I’m not there anymore.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, my God. I can’t wait until the day I can leave.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like nothing is as it seems. Everyone’s lying. Everyone’s pretending to be something he’s not. And underneath it all is the willingness to hurt people, to kill them. I mean. Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not just like, you know, we’re competing and I’m elbowing you out of the way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’m gonna get that promotion before you do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, if you. If I need to make sure you die in prison, that’s okay. That’s really.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Speaking of which, I took a plea to make the first of all. They waited until I went bankrupt and then they dropped all three of the espionage charges.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so what were you facing initially? You get charged, you get 45 years. 45 years in prison.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And one of the attorneys in the Obama holder justice department said to me at the first proffer meeting, they offered me 45 years. And this woman says, take the deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.

TUCKER CARLSON: What. Do you remember her name?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I don’t. I remember she had a vietnamese name like Nguyen or Tran or something like that. But she ended up, like, getting promoted in the Biden justice department. Really, very, very important. Yeah. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope that she becomes famous for that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I hope so, too.

The Consequences of Truth-Telling

TUCKER CARLSON: That level of cruelty to another human being is. There’s no justification for that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They wanted me to die in prison. That was the plan. And so my attorney said, you haven’t done anything wrong. We’re going to go to trial. Right? We’re going to go to trial. And I said, okay, let’s do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I say, did anyone allege that you lied? Ever?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Ever? Never, never. And, you know, that’s a really important point. And we talked about that. We talked about me testifying in my trial because literally everything I said was the truth. In fact, fast forward to December of 2014. I’m going to be released from prison in six weeks. And I called my wife and I was allowed to call her for 15 minutes every other day. And I said, how was your day? And she said, it was great. And I said, great. Why was it so great? And she said, because the senate torture report came out today and it proved that everything you said was true. So I said, you know what? That made it worth it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you went to prison. You were facing life, and actually you’re facing the death penalty. Initially.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. Death penalty.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because you told the truth about other people’s lies.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the truth teller. And I’m just. I want to put a very fine point on this because I think it is a trend and I think it’s a sign of evil. You know, the definition of evil is lies. Lying. And the truth teller faces death. The liars thrive.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s a system that can’t continue. That’s not a virtuous system. That’s an evil system.

The Espionage Act and Persecution of Whistleblowers

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You’re exactly right. And may I add a statistic. The Espionage act was written in 1917 to combat German saboteurs during the First World War.

TUCKER CARLSON: 1917 being one of the darkest periods.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: In American history when it comes to civil liberties. One of the darkest periods.

TUCKER CARLSON: The most anti, almost un American moment, really, with, without any question, probably one of the worst presidents we ever had.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Woodrow Wilson, double, without any question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Destroy Christian Europe for no reason at all. Right. Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The espionage has never been meaningfully updated. In fact, it doesn’t even mention the words classified information because the classification system wasn’t invented until the 1960s.

TUCKER CARLSON: Most Americans didn’t have electricity in 1960.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Exactly right. Between 1917 and the election of Barack Obama, three Americans were charged with espionage for speaking to the press. Under Barack Obama, eight people, almost three times, all previous presidents combined, were charged with espionage for speaking to the press three times.

TUCKER CARLSON: And none of them was charged with lying.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Not a single one of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because lying is not a crime.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Telling the truth is a crime. That’s all you need to know. You can’t support a system in which telling the truth is a crime and lying is rewarded. Sorry.

Taking the Plea Deal

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I mentioned to you last night privately that one of my attorneys really put this whole thing into a couple of sentences. And it was so powerful, so profound, what he said, that it has stuck with me. I decided to turn down the Justice Department’s best and final offer of two and a half years in prison. I said, I haven’t done anything wrong. And I had this stupid idea that as soon as I get in front of a jury, they’re going to see how ridiculous this is and I’m going to be acquitted. Well, that’s nuts.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So he said to me, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice, and it’s not about justice. It’s about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And so I took the deal. What was I going to do? I have five kids at home. Should I take two and a half years, I’m going to do 23 months, or should I roll the dice? And I said to him, I said, if I turn the deal down, what am I realistically looking at here? And he said, 12 to 18 years. Take the deal. So I took it.

TUCKER CARLSON: For telling the truth in an ABC interview. How long was that ABC interview?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: 30 minutes, 40 minutes? If.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you had to replay your life, live it again, would you have done that?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, actually.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I would have. The only thing I would have done differently is I would have had my attorney sitting with me. I had to be reactive by hiring an attorney after blowing the whistle. So we had to respond to the media and respond to the Justice Department. I would have hired the attorney first. But, yes, somebody had to say something. Somebody. It’s these. These Bush people and the Obama people who covered up the Bush administration’s crimes that were the. That were the criminals.

Obama’s Administration and Policies

TUCKER CARLSON: The amazing thing is that Barack Obama. I mean, I was there. I knew Obama. He ran against all that stuff.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, he did.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan was the good war. And he ran a campaign against that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know.

TUCKER CARLSON: But he ended up throwing into prison the guy who told the truth about it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Mark Halpern and John Heileman wrote a book about the. Well, both the 2008 election, the 2012 election, and in the second book, they quote Obama twice, saying things that just put it all into perspective. Number one, he said, I never said I was a liberal. Why are the liberals so mad that he’s a warmongering neocon? I never said I was a liberal. He said. And the other thing he said that really struck me, he was talking about the drone program. He killed 10 times more people with drones than George W. Bush did. And he said, you know, I never realized I would be so good at killing people.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a cold human being.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: What is that? That’s sociopathy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, for sure, you have to.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Be a sociopath to even think that way. Yes, but he surrounded himself with other sociopaths, like John Brennan, who, for sport, would ruin people’s lives to the point where they’re actively considering suicide or making plans to die in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: These are Americans.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He’s doing this to Americans.

TUCKER CARLSON: Clearly a man capable of great violence. And you wonder if he’s involved in plotting physical violence against Americans now. Would not surprise me at all.

Security Clearances and John Brennan

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I would not be surprised by anything anymore. You know, when President Trump. I had to laugh when President Trump stripped him of his security clearance. I went on one of the networks. Well, I went on Fox, but I think I also went on MSNBC that week to say, why does John Brennan deserve a security clearance?

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Why don’t I have one?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He’s a private citizen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have one?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t either.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: See? So why does John Brennan get one?

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I said, of course the President should strip John Brennan of his security clearance. And then when he disallowed Brennan from entering into a government building, I went on Fox and they said, is this legit? I said, of course it is. This guy is so dangerous that he shouldn’t be anywhere near a federal building. With what we know he’s plotted in the past, God knows what he’s cooking up today. No, I wouldn’t trust him in a federal building. I wouldn’t trust him in a position of trust, and I wouldn’t trust him with a security clearance. He’s dangerous.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, all these people have security clearances, which really are the currency in Washington.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Very much so.

TUCKER CARLSON: Conduct business without one in D.C. because everything is classified.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not to protect American national security, but. But for the obvious power advantage it gives the holders of those clearances.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, you know, I think there should be a real attempt to do that to a lot of people. Like a lot of people. But there won’t be.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. No, there won’t be. So anyway, you.

Prison Experience and Saying Goodbye to Family

TUCKER CARLSON: You plead, you get how much time?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I got 30 months. And at sentencing, my attorneys ask that I be sent to a minimum security work camp. There are no bars on the windows. There are no locks on the doors. You’re free to come and go. Most of those guys worked in town at the local university, sweeping the floors or whatever. And there was a possibility that I could get out in 17 months with good behavior and halfway house. Not halfway house, but home confinement. So I said, okay, this will be easy. So I get to the prison. It’s very strange when you go to prison. If you’re not remanded at sentencing, you have to physically drive to the prison and knock on the door and say, I’m here to turn myself in.

TUCKER CARLSON: For the opposite of a jailbreak.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, it’s nuts. It’s nuts. And of course, I’ve got two cars with me. There’s a documentary film crew and my lawyers and my cousin, and we have this caravan that go to the prison with us.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve already said goodbye to your children?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Already said goodbye to my children.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was that like?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They were very young. And so I said, you remember I had that fight with the FBI? And they said, yes. And I said, well, I lost. And so I have to go to Pennsylvania for a while and I’m going to teach bad guys how to read and write because I figured I’d probably teach a GED class or something. And I said, but you’re gonna come and visit me all the time and then I’m gonna come back home and everything’s gonna be great.

TUCKER CARLSON: How old were they?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They were 8, 6 and 1.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were little kids? They were 6 and 1.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: In the visiting room, there was a sign on one of the doors that said inmates only. And my 8 year old said, dad, what’s an inmate? And without thinking I said, it’s a prisoner. And he said, wait a minute, are you a prisoner here or are you a teacher here? And I said, buddy, I’m a prisoner here. But we’re going to get past this. It’s going to go quickly and I’m going to be home and everything’s going to be good again. Ah, it took everything I had not to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ah, it makes me emotional. Yeah. Oh, that’s bad. Yeah, I’m out of adjectives actually for that. So you didn’t wind up in the work camp?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, the CIA under John Brennan, who was.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was director by this point.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, but he was soon to be director and actually 2012. Yeah, he was director at that point. Yes, yes, thanks for correcting me. The CIA objected. They objected to my placement in a minimum security camp.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re vindictive, aren’t they? I guess. Ask Julian Assange how vindictive they are.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And why got there. Exactly. Exactly. Ask Julian Assange. They almost killed him.

TUCKER CARLSON: So under Mike Pompeo plotted his murder.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Literally.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s still free, by the way? Is Mike Pompeo in jail?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I haven’t seen in the announcement that he’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you allowed as an appointee to a government not elected? Just an appointee. Are you allowed to plot the murder of people who embarrass the agency? You are.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You are not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, you’re not allowed. Okay.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You are not.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you can’t use federal funds to murder people who embarrass you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Only if you’re Barack Obama. But anybody else? No, you can’t do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you do that, have you committed a crime?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, a serious crime.

TUCKER CARLSON: A serious crime would be attempted murder, I think, plotting a murder.

The CIA’s Double Standards

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There’s a former CIA officer, Bob Baer, who was given a choice to either be charged with attempted murder or resign from the agency for talking to a Kurdish group about killing Saddam Hussein. So why wasn’t Mike Pompeo arrested for talking about or planning? He did more than talking. They planned to murder Julian Assange.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s a whole different conversation.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think he’s threatening to sue me for saying that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, the facts are a defense.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope he will.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There you go.

TUCKER CARLSON: Discovery would be fun. Anyway, sorry.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I was in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you say goodbye to your children?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Do I say goodbye to my children?

TUCKER CARLSON: CIA makes certain you don’t go to the work camp, you go to a prison.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. It was five days before I got access to a phone at the prison. And I called.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was that?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: My lawyer. The first five days, it was, you know, looking back, I think I was in shock.

Facing Prison Time

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you think about fleeing?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Everybody does.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I don’t know that I would submit to that. I mean, you never know until you’re there.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You find yourself constantly looking at the fences, constantly calculating how bad you’ll get cut up with the concertina wire before.

TUCKER CARLSON: You report to prison. Did you think, like, I served this country, I grew up here. You’re from a middle class family, pro America.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: You never thought about fleeing the country?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. Because I was right and they were wrong. And you know the truth, Tucker always has a way of coming out. Always. Sometimes it takes a while, but the truth always comes out. And in fact, the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA under Brennan, Jose Rodriguez, another notorious murderer, tweeted at me the night before I left for prison. And he said, don’t drop the soap.

TUCKER CARLSON: He actually tweeted that at you?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I tweeted back at him and I said, Jose, I am on the right side of history and you are not.

TUCKER CARLSON: These people are morally diseased. When Michael Avenatti, who I mocked for years as the creepy porn lawyer, went to prison, I felt sad for him.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure, because you’re a human being.

TUCKER CARLSON: I despised him. But he’s in prison. Ever been to a prison? I’ve been to many prisons. You don’t want to be in prison.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You don’t want to be in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: To cheer when a man goes to prison and your only crime was embarrassing them by telling the truth. Whatever happened to the Jose character? CNSNBC contributor.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He took his $6 million book advance and moved to Florida.

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually, doesn’t this. I mean, why are you not insane? I know there’s a lightness to you that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I really believe that I’m on the right side of this, and I’m hopeful that President Trump will pardon me. I have an amazing amount of support.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope that you get a pardon this afternoon. I really do. This is horrifying. His enemies are the people who did this to you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: He ran against this kind of behavior.

Presidential Pardons and Justice

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And he righted it with the J6 people. With Rod Blagojevich. I wrote Rod Blagojevich a letter when he went to prison. This is before I was ever in trouble. I wrote him a letter and I said, you don’t know me. I don’t live in Illinois. But this is a travesty.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was. I remember.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There’s no crime that was actually committed.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then 14 years have people lost their minds. I know, but the president. You know, you and I were talking about this privately. The president has been unlike almost every other president in that he’s not waiting for the political safe period to issue pardons after an election. Right. He just issues them as they come.

TUCKER CARLSON: To pardon Mark Rich because he’s sleeping with his wife.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Precisely.

TUCKER CARLSON: For example.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Precisely. You know who else did that? Historians have told us. Historians have documented that Abraham Lincoln used to sit up late into the night pardoning people by candlelight because he said, for example, that army deserters shouldn’t be executed for cowardice.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He didn’t wait until after a congressional election, and neither does this president.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. The British army disgraced itself by. They. They murdered a lot of their own men.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, they did.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who snapped? Cowardice is contemptible, of course, but you shouldn’t kill a boy because he runs away.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Disgusting. It’s disgusting. It’s like, regain your senses for a second. So anyway, the first five days, you were in shock.

Life Behind Bars

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I was in shock. I was in prison for 40 minutes. And the only thing that the cop who processed me said to me was, if somebody comes into your cell uninvited, that’s an act of aggression. And I said, great, thank you. And then he walked away. And sure enough, these two guys walk in. One of them had a swastika that took up his entire neck. Came up onto his face. The other one had fuck you tattooed on his eyelids.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like kind of a movie.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was nuts. And I jumped up and I said.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you want?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because I thought, it’s two of them, it’s one of me, but I’m going to do my best.

TUCKER CARLSON: You got to. Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And the one with the swastika said, are you the CIA guy? And I said, yeah, so. And he said, are you a fag? And I said, no, I’m not a fag. You know, I haven’t even said that word in so many years.

TUCKER CARLSON: But we’re not in Georgetown anymore.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And he says, are you a rat? I said, no, I’m not a rat. I didn’t have anybody else in my case. And he said, are you a chomo? I said, I don’t know what that word means. And he goes, chomo? Like I’m stupid. Chomo. Child molester. I said, no, I’m not a child molester. And he says, okay, you can sit with the Aryans in the cafeteria. And I said, oh, okay then. And, you know, funny thing. A year later, I lived right across the hall from a senior captain, the number three in one of New York’s five families, right? And he said, good guy. Good great guy. Not even good guy. A great guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would give him the good fellow. Really?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He was a good fella. I’d give him the New York Times every day. He would give me the New York Post. So we traded papers every day. Perfect. So, you know, he got a Christmas card one year from Derek Jeter. That really impressed me.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve met Jared Jeter. Nice man.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sweet guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, absolutely.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So anyway, he said to me, let me ask you something. Why do you sit with those Nazi retards in the cafeteria? I said, I don’t know. My first day here, they told me to sit with them. And he says very dramatically, from today, you’re with the Italians. And so from that day, I was with the Italians.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you’re still friends with some of them.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I was talking about at dinner last night. We. We talk frequently.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good guys. Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was a misapplication of federal power. It’s like, you know, obviously, you don’t want, you know, organized crime, on the other hand, like, if that’s your number one. Well, look at what’s happened to America, Post Mafia. Has it gotten a lot better?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, no, I don’t think so. No, it has.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bensonhurst has not improved.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, it hasn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know. I’m aware. I’m aware. They did a better job with Staten island than the current rulers have.

Finding Support From Unexpected Places

TUCKER CARLSON: At this point, your case is well known. Not well. It’s known. Okay? I was. I’m in the media, so I’m sort of following it, but I don’t really know. It’s a leak investigation. You’ve somehow betrayed your country. That’s all we know.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there are some people who are paying attention and they’re making a lot of noise, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, it’s funny, my support came from people on the hard left.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And people on the libertarian right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It led me to the conclusion that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line. No, it’s a circle. And it meets at a certain point where civil liberties are concerned.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And so I started following other people’s cases that would never have interested me in the past. And it was always cases dealing with government overreach. Like reassessing Ruby Ridge. Right. Or Waco.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, Ruby Ridge was really just absolutely murdered the guys in cold blood. And his wife shot his dog, Randy Weaver, because his shotgun was 2 inches too short or something.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lon Hiruchi, I think was the name of the FBI sniper. I want to say it again.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Lon Horucci murdered them in cold blood.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shot a woman. Really?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. A woman who’s just standing in the.

TUCKER CARLSON: Holding a baby.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Holding a baby. Uh huh. That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And that was. And by the way, that was not only never punished. Lon Horucci was never punished for that. He should have gone right to prison for murder. And his superiors should have gone right to prison for authorizing that murder. But it was like, at the time, it was like, oh, were you a Ruby Ridge person? Like you care.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like you’re a wacko.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You’re some kind of right wing extremist.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, if you. I was a right wing extremist. So I knew about it and I was really bothered by it. Right wing in the sense that I. I believed in the Bill of Rights. I don’t think you should be able to murder women for no reason.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: People began sending me books by John Whitehead, and I remember just blowing through these books saying, why have I never heard of this guy before? I mean, he’s talking sense here about government overreach.

TUCKER CARLSON: He had case after case after case, all documented. I have that book on my shelf in my office, Government of Wolves. It’s unbelievable. But the media. Not to blame everything on the media, but it is kind of the mouthpiece of the blob. Yeah. The Praetorian Guard. Really? The protectors, the bodyguards of the murderers and the liars. They just. Man, they swarmed anybody who expressed concern about these cases.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right. They try to paint you as a radical, a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorist, a term that was created by the CIA, by the way.

From CIA Officer to Professor

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. Shot the man’s wife. So this. So you. Your views. And I should have done a. People can Google you, and I hope that they will, but it’s hard to overstate the departure that this turn is from the rest of your life.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: You weren’t a CIA paramilitary. You were an actual, just, like, officer.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Peace officer. Yeah. Recruiting spies to steal secrets.

TUCKER CARLSON: Multilingual. You speak Greek. You speak Arabic, which is, like, considered basically impossible for native English speakers. You’re a scholar, literally, and kind of an academic in some ways. I mean. Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’m a professor of intelligence studies now at the University of Salamanca in Spain, and I taught for four years at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

The Moral Case Against Torture

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And it’s funny, when they called me to hire me, I said, wow, I’m flattered, but you and I probably disagree on 99% of the issues. Why would you want me to teach in the Jesse Helms School of Government? And the dean said, because torture’s not Christian.

TUCKER CARLSON: It certainly isn’t.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I said, you know what? I’ll take the job.

TUCKER CARLSON: Certainly isn’t.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I love those guys.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m still untouched with unarmed, defenseless people. Is immoral.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It is.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s also just dishonorable in the most secular terms.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: If a man is handcuffed, you don’t punch him in the face because it’s bad for him, but it also degrades you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It does not how honorable men behave.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: PTSD and moral injury are real.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: We damage ourselves.

TUCKER CARLSON: Those are disgusting. Like, what. What is this, anyway? I mean, I sort of believe that the country was good because it was virtuous. And, like, certain things we don’t do because we’re above that. We don’t send our wives to go fight wars for us. We don’t torture people who are chained because they can’t fight back.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is this, anyway? What? What is this?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then what happens when you go in and you say, oh, I accidentally killed him? Oh, well, just bury him out back. That’s literally what they did. Bury him out back. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just hard to make a moral case for the things that you’re doing when you behave that way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Agreed.

TUCKER CARLSON: And to see once again the only man who tells the truth, face the penalty, and the liars thrive is really dispiriting.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It is. I’m confident things are going to turn around.

Prison Time and Political Support

TUCKER CARLSON: I think so, too. I hope so. I pray that. Thank you. So how long were you in prison?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: In the end, 23 months. I didn’t get a single day of halfway house time. They made sure that I did every day of that sentence. They had to take seven months off for good behavior. They had to, because it’s legally mandated. But I was in that prison for every last day that they could get out of me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were any elected officials sympathetic at all?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Well, yes, but none were really willing to go out on a limb. Gus Billarekis, who’s a congressman from Florida, he was very supportive and friendly, I should add. It wasn’t just Gus. Gus is a sweetheart of a guy. It was the whole Greek American community, man.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re cohesive.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They are.

TUCKER CARLSON: We stick to it. I’m aware of.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. So they really went to the mat for me. I got fantastic press coverage in Greece. The Greek government hired me to help them write a new whistleblower protection law. When I got out of prison, it was my first trip. I had to get permission from the judge to travel because I had just gotten out of prison. So that was fun, but really. And Jim Moran, who was a Democratic congressman from. Jim was very helpful. Very, very helpful, but that was it. Besides the two of them, Moran was.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I knew Moran pretty well.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Drank too much. Had a florid and wild private life like Crazy Town. And I disagreed with him on all domestic policy issues, passionately, because he’s very liberal. But his foreign policy views were out of the mainstream. He was not a neocon.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And, boy, watching the job they did on Jim Moran.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: How many times did I marry him, Ran against him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ghouls like that who just. On the merits. So Jim Moran seemed, like possibly hadn’t honored his marriage vows and drank too much. Okay, okay. And he was, like, a loudmouth, and he was always ready to beat people up. He was like this big Irish guy. Okay, got it. Those are his sins. As I understand them, the people who are against him had, like, committed jealousy.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, right, Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was crazy. It was crazy. And they systematically destroyed Jim Moran’s life for asking, like, pretty obvious questions like, why did 911 happen?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right. They don’t want to talk about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: We know. You’d think, assuming that it was exactly what they told us it was, which was this group of 19 Arabs, mostly Saudis, decided to, you know, attack the United States. Whatever. Let’s just say that’s true. I’m assuming it is true. Why did they do that? Why were they willing to die for that? Like, what were they mad about? What Were they mad about. That’s what Jim Moran asked.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I’m like, you can’t ask.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, by the way, Jim Moran. And then they, like, plastered. They. Glenn Greenwald. Him.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, big time. They did.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they kind of drove him out, and I think he lost his seat in the end.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: He retired.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, he did?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Okay. And he’s at a political consulting firm in McLean, Virginia. I ran into him at a conference about a year ago.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. He’s. He’s a lovely man. He really is.

TUCKER CARLSON: I always secretly liked him. I had him on. I interviewed him a lot. And he would get, you know, per his. The ethnic stereotype, he’d get, like, red in the face. Like, spit would come out. But I kind of like. You know, he was like a. I liked him.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Still. Sorry not to.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And Gus Billericis is one of those guys who’s just a genuinely nice guy, and he’s actually. He’s quite an accomplished legislator, which he doesn’t get a lot of credit for, but he’s a good guy. And so, you know, a fellow Greek American needed some help, and he was there to help.

Life After Prison and Government Surveillance

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. Have you ever had any contact with CIA since you got out of prison?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. Well, not other than sending articles and books in for clearance.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No. You know, when I got out of prison, I finished house arrest. I had 90 days of house arrest, and people started calling me, hey, let’s meet for lunch or let’s have a pizza or whatever. And every time I would go to meet them, I’d be under surveillance. And the first few times still.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but from whom?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It had to be the FBI. It could have been the CIA.

TUCKER CARLSON: On what faces could they justify surveilling you? They sent you to prison for an ABC interview.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And it’s done. It’s all done. I’m just going to go have a pizza.

TUCKER CARLSON: And moreover, by this point, a congressional investigation has confirmed that you were telling the truth.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You’re exactly right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And this is just. This is now on Wikipedia, but Barack.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Obama was still in the White House. Now, why is he changed? I don’t think he knew who I was one way or the other. I think that Brennan went to him and said, there’s this very dangerous guy, insider threat from the CIA. He leaked to the press, and Obama just said, vaya con Dios.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, he’s a cold man. He doesn’t care.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, he doesn’t care.

TUCKER CARLSON: So part of the reason this has to be precedent. They cannot allow a CIA officer.

Legal Precedent and Judicial Overreach

JOHN KIRIAKOU: This is what’s very dangerous. There actually was a legal precedent that was set in my case, and it was one of the things used against President Trump in the documents case. I was charged in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is called the Espionage Court, for a couple of reasons.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m aware.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. No national security defendant has ever won a case there, ever. And it’s the home of the Pentagon, the CIA, all the defense contractors. So we made 100 motions to use 100 classified documents that we received in discovery in my defense. And we asked the judge to block off three days to hear our motions. And we walked into the courtroom, and she says, I’m going to make everybody’s day much easier, and I’m going to just deny all 100 of these motions. You can’t use any of these documents in the case.

And my lawyer said, you, Honor, it’s our whole defense. You’re saying that we can’t mount a defense. And she said, classified is classified, so you can’t use the classified documents to defend him. So as we were walking out, I said to my lawyer, what just happened? And he said, we just lost the case. That’s what happened. And I said, well, now what do we do? He said, now we talk about a plea.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the government charges you with the death penalty offense and then gets to decide what you can talk about in court.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: In fact, they made a list of words that I wasn’t allowed to use in court. Like I could not use the word whistleblower. I had to use the words swimming pool. There’s a whole list.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, swimming pool.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because the word whistleblower, in and of itself, they deemed to be classified. And so I couldn’t say I’m a whistleblower.

TUCKER CARLSON: On what grounds?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: How is it classified? They say it’s a secret word. So they invoked something called the sipa, the Classified Information Protection Act. So they would clear the courtroom every time I had a hearing. They would put plastic tarp over the windows and tape it up so nobody could shoot a laser beam at the window and listen to the vibrations and hear classified information. There was the list of banned words, like whistleblower. Yeah, the whistleblower. Absurd.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that the physical security of the United States depended upon you not using the word whistleblower.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, that was it. And so my lawyer said to the judge, well, the judge said his reason for blowing the whistle is irrelevant. The question is, does the intelligence community say that he violated the Espionage Act? The answer is yes. And my lawyer said, your Honor, are you saying that a person can accidentally commit espionage? And she said, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is this judge?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Her name was Leonie Brinkoma. She was a Clinton appointee.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was she not bright or was she just so committed to the status quo, to the intel?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, she’s committed. She reserves every national security case for herself. They’re supposed to go into a wheel, right, and be chosen randomly. She had Julian Assange. She had the Ed Snowden case, which never came. She had my case. She had Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA whistleblower. Every national security. She had Zacharias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker.

So she reserves these cases for herself and everybody gets the maximum. So she said in response to my attorney, she sounds like a scary person. She was. She was terrifying. That the definition of whistle. First she said, I’m not respecting a precedent set in the federal district of Maryland. She’s not respecting it. In the Tom Drake case where the judge ruled that there had to be some harm to the national security. There was no harm in my case. Nobody was harmed. Literally the name that I confirmed was never made public. Never. So nobody was harmed. So she says the definition.

TUCKER CARLSON: And actually you were speaking out against harm.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, I’m speaking out against harm. She says the defense. The definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it, period. So espionage, in her view, I mean.

TUCKER CARLSON: It may be illegal, but it’s not. Espionage is spying for a foreign country. Correct.

Daniel Ellsberg and the Espionage Act Challenge

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Daniel Ellsberg called me. He and I became very close friends over this whole thing. And he said, “I’m going to ask you to do something that’s completely selfless. I’m going to ask you to go to trial because we can only challenge the constitutionality of the Espionage Act if somebody goes to trial and is convicted.” I said, “Dan, I have five kids. I can’t go to trial.” So he asked Jeffrey Sterling to do it. Jeffrey did go to trial, was convicted. The judge saw that this conviction was kind of trumped up, and so he was convicted of nine felonies, including seven counts of espionage. And to use her words, “I’m giving you Kiriakou plus 12 months.” That’s what she said at sentencing. “I’m giving you Kiriakou plus 12 months.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is he alleged to have spied for?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No one. He gave an interview to the New York Times about the racial discrimination suit that he had filed against the CIA. They passed him over for a promotion just because he was black. And then they had the temerity to tell him, “We’re not promoting you because you’re black.” And he said, “When did you realize I was black?”

TUCKER CARLSON: The irony is that there’s a lot of espionage in Washington, apparently.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, well, every intelligence service in the world has its officers in Washington.

TUCKER CARLSON: There are also people who work for the US Government who, without any kind of authorization—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Give highly relevant, classified information to foreign governments.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Every day.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know that for a fact. And I know people who’ve done it. And none of them is in jail?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, no, none of them. None of them is in jail.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s also fair to say the US Government is penetrated by foreign actors.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And it has been for a long time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I’m aware. And I don’t think anyone goes to jail for that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

Pardon Attempts and Political Support

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, I tried a couple of times to get a pardon under Presidents Obama and Biden, thinking that most of my contacts in the Greek American community had access to those presidents. I was laughed out of the room under Obama, and I knew I would be under Biden. There’s a Greek Orthodox priest who very generously offered his access to the White House—

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just note, parenthetically, I don’t think there are a lot of Greek liberals left.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, there aren’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: There used to be.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There used to be. They used to be almost all liberals. And they’ve all moved, notice.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think I’ve met a Greek liberal in a long time.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, they’re just not out there anymore. So he said, “Look, I’ve known Biden since the early 70s. I can help you.” And then nothing. And I called him and I said, “Father, forgive me for being so blunt, but maybe if I had been a crackhead relative of the president, or a Chinese spy or a judge that sold children into bondage in Pennsylvania, maybe then I would have had a chance. But Joe Biden doesn’t want to hear about a case like mine.”

And the truth is, and I mentioned this to you yesterday, my support comes exclusively from the Republican Party, the libertarian movement, and the conservative movement, and I embrace it. People say that’s just wild, though, because they’re the ones thinking about civil liberties now. They’re the ones thinking about individual freedoms.

You know, what’s his name? Hakeem Jeffries, the other day said, “Vladimir Putin is an avowed enemy of the United States.” No, he’s not. That’s a neocon position. When did he take a vow? He said he was an avowed enemy. When did he take a vow that he was going to be an enemy of the United States? No, stop trying to lie us into a war or trick us into a war. But that’s today’s Democratic Party.

CIA Actions Against American Citizens

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m aware it’s. Are you, do you think. I mean, the kind of casual cruelty and violence in the CIA that you describe, I haven’t seen any meaningful attempt to stop it.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, no, no, no, no. I agree very strongly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you believe that the CIA has hurt other American citizens?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, I’m sure of it, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about physically?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, there are two very well documented cases where Barack Obama used a drone to murder Anwar Al Aulaqi.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And whether you like the man’s politics or not, he was an American citizen who had never been charged with a crime. And then a week later, Obama droned his 16-year-old son and 14-year-old nephew who were sitting in a coffee shop having a cup of tea. Also American citizens who had never been charged with a crime and they were children. So yeah, the CIA does all kinds of things like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about domestically?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, you know, I keep thinking back to Eric Holder’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when Rand Paul asked him, “Does the President have the legal authority to murder an American on U.S. soil?” “Well, Senator, you know—” “Just answer the question. Say yes or no.” “Yes, he has the authority.”

Now has he done that? We didn’t know. But the Attorney General of the United States said that the President can murder an American citizen in the United States if the President believes that he presents a clear and present danger to the national security. That’s sick.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s unbelievable.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It’s anti-constitutional. Not just unconstitutional, it’s anti-constitutional.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do people who work at the CIA have a sense that maybe they’re not serving good?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Generally, no. Generally these are… I mean, at the working level, these are hardworking, really smart, patriotic people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Some of them are really smart, I can confirm that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Really smart. At the upper levels, you know, they believe they’re the smartest people in the room. They’re smarter than whoever happens to be President at any given time. And if they don’t like this President, they just wait him out. He’ll be gone in four years. They’ll still be there in their still senior positions and they’re going to do exactly what they want to do. You know, this is why they panicked when Ronald Reagan named an outsider as the Deputy Director for Operations. Remember?

TUCKER CARLSON: Do I remember?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They lost it because they were like, “Oh my God, okay, you appoint your campaign manager the director, that’s one thing. But now operations. You’re going to bring a friend from Wall Street or wherever he was.” He was an attorney. Yeah, yeah. I would—

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s when they called in Bob Woodward to blow them up. Right. The former naval intel officer Bob Woodward.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, I’ll tell ya, not the only—

TUCKER CARLSON: Time Bob Woodward has been called in by the… By the national Security state to destroy it.

Bob Woodward at the CIA

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, when I was… When I was the deputy director, the executive assistant to the deputy director for operations, I had just finished writing a cable. I had this lovely private office, and it looked out past the secretary into the hallway. So I finished writing and I leaned back like this in my chair, and I happened to be looking at the hall and Bob Woodward walked by.

And I said to the secretary, “Was that Bob Woodward that just walked by the office?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Without a security escort, like he owns the place.” And she said, “You didn’t see the memo?” I said, “What memo?” She said, “George Tenet… George sent a memo saying that Woodward’s writing a book and we’re all ordered to cooperate with him.” I said, “I’m not talking to Bob Woodward.” I couldn’t believe it.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s just a great reporter. Come on, John. He’s free to shoe leather. He’s not—

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You’re talking about people that have been undercover or deep cover for decades, and he’s just walking the halls.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s not an instrument of the government. He’s a… He’s a counterbalance. He’s a check against their overreach.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a journalist.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They’re going to run with that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So absurd.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I was shocked.

CIA Leadership and JFK Assassination

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you think of Bill Burns?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I wrote an op-ed when Bill—

TUCKER CARLSON: Burns was appointed former ambassador to Russia.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then up until January, the CIA director.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I said that I disagreed with his position on Russia, as I think every free thinking American should. But we needed an outsider in that job. Having insiders is a mistake. You know, Obama proved that having insiders. Clinton proved that it’s just a mistake. It’s incestuous. And they feed on each other.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So you needed an outsider. Bill Burns was one of the most highly respected ambassadors that we had in the State Department.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is true.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I called him the adult in the room. And I thought, you know, if we have to have a Washington insider in that position, he was a good choice.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep. That, that’s. That sounds right from everything I know about him. When you worked there, did anyone ever talk about the murder of the president in 1963?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Oliver Stone and I got into quite a spirited argument about this one time because I made the mistake of saying that I didn’t think we had given enough thought to the involvement, the possible involvement of Santo Trafficante and the mob. And he said, “Oh, you’re so full of shit,” he says. And he just started yelling at me.

I came to my own conclusion. I talked to Bobby Kennedy about this too, actually. He’s the one that pushed me over the edge and led me to this conclusion. I believe that elements of the CIA were responsible for the assassination of the President. I don’t agree when people say it was a CIA operation because John McCone was the head of the CIA and he was Bobby Kennedy’s best friend.

TUCKER CARLSON: A name forgotten to history.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right. And a good and decent man. But there were a lot of people, unfortunately, one was a Greek American who very famously, very famous Greek American, his name does not bear repeating, who hated John Kennedy for not providing air cover for the Bay of Pigs and wanted revenge against Kennedy. And these guys were still in constant touch with the Dulles brothers, who were also just dark stains on American history. And so I… I came to the conclusion that, yeah, there were CIA officers who were responsible for carrying this—

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you think that when you worked there?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, I didn’t. In fact, I thought it was so absurd, I couldn’t believe people were even talking about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, yeah. It’s like we’re the good guys.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Why would we kill the President?

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought the same. Why haven’t all the files been released?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I genuinely don’t know. For JFK, I think they have been.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, they have not.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They have not?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That frightens me. You know, there were a couple of explosive revelations in the last tranche. The fact that James Angleton, the Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, wanted to recruit, to formally recruit Lee Harvey Oswald is exactly the opposite of what the CIA has been telling us for so many years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: For 60 years. Why? If the Russians came to the conclusion that he was just a nut when he was living in Minsk and didn’t want him to come back, why was the CIA interested, rather in recruiting him? What was he doing in Mexico City in October of… of 1963? He said. Or not? He said, but the CIA has said over the years that he was there to go to the Cuban and Soviet embassies to try to get visas. Why was he meeting with Americans? And were those American CIA officers? Of course they were. Why else would he have gone to Mexico City?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’m actually more interested in the RFK and the MLK documents. There is so much that we don’t know about those two, especially RFK. They recovered one more bullet than Sirhan Sirhan’s gun held. And Thomas Noguchi—

TUCKER CARLSON: And this is confirmed.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. And Thomas Noguchi.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well then that’s the case closed then.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right? I mean, we don’t know what happened. We know the official explanation is untrue.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It’s untrue.

TUCKER CARLSON: So because it was a revolver. It was a .22 caliber revolver.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like a nine shot. That’s right .22s fit a lot in the cylinder. Is that. I did not know that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. And Thomas Noguchi, the coroner, said that the death shot came from behind at an angle from down on the ground. But Sirhan was in front of him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: There was a security guard there who was not associated with the Kennedy campaign or with the Ambassador Hotel. Named Caesar. He was a well known racist and white supremacist. On video you see him lifting a gun out of his belt and then you hear bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And he puts it back in the belt. He never got it fully out.

In the 90s, the National Geographic Channel tracked him down to Mississippi or Alabama or something and they interviewed him and they said, did you shoot Robert Kennedy? And he said, no, I was going to, but that Arab fella got him first. Well, we know that there had to be somebody else in the kitchen at the Ambassador. And we know that the shot came from behind. We know that there was a second gun because there were too many bullets. So why hasn’t this been released?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, and it raises the really obvious question which was, I mean, we know Sirhan had a gun.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes. Fired the gun.

TUCKER CARLSON: Film.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lots of people there, including lots of famous people.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Rosie Greer and Rosie Greer. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So Kennedy had just won the California primary. Johnson had announced a few months before that he’s not running. Bobby Kennedy clearly is going to be the Democratic nominee. He’s murdered that night after his victory speech walking through the kitchen of this now demolished hotel in Los Angeles.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian from a very poor family was arrested for it. His apartment is searched and there are all kinds of papers where he writes, RFK must die. RFK must die. Over and over again. He has said he’s still alive, by the way.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh yeah. And still in prison.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, he is. And, and I mean that was before I was born and I’m 56, so it was quite some time ago. What was that?

MK-Ultra and Mind Control

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Well, that’s the $64,000 question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Because now there are rumors that when he was at Whatever it’s called Los Angeles Community College or whatever the community college there was, that he may have participated in experiments that fell under a CIA operation then known as MKUltra.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So what’s the truth now, Director Helms? During the Nixon administration, or during, I guess it was the Ford administration, ordered that the MK Ultra documents be destroyed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which they were.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Which they were. After being specifically told it’s a crime to destroy federal documents.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. They don’t belong to you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right? Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it’s. And this is a debate about, you know, a lot of different people in Lewis, Drill and West and the CIA affiliated psychiatrist.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn’t otherwise commit?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: You do?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I do.

TUCKER CARLSON: You said there are a lot of shrinks at CIA.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, my God. There are offices where everybody is either a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and they’re operational psychiatrists and psychologists. So you take them with you on an operation to consult with them on how do you get this guy to crack? You want him to just lose his mind? What do I need to do to push this guy over the edge? Right. Or what do I need to do to convince this guy to do something that he definitely doesn’t want to do?

I used those shrinks on operations. We even hypnotized one guy. He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours. Never saw anything like it in my life. And then when he took him out of the hypnosis, his arm fell down, he looked around, he said, what happened? And then he vomited. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

So people, did it work? It did work. We asked him. I’m getting a little off the subject, but we asked him about the subject, a political assassination that had taken place that he had claimed to see. So the guy didn’t speak any English. So the shrink is asking questions, and I’m translating the questions as softly and as gently as I can in Arabic. And I’m asking, what did you see?

Well, the guy had stopped at a mosque, at this little, small roadside mosque to relieve himself. So he’s behind a tree and a car pulls up and it’s these people who had been identified as the shooters in an assassination that had just taken place. And I said, so describe the guys. And he’s describing what they’re wearing. And I said, what kind of car are they driving? They’re driving a van. I said, does the van have a license plate? He said, yes, I said, can you see the license plate? And he goes. His eyes are closed. He goes like this. And then he reads off the numbers and letters to me.

So I hand it to another officer that was in the room, runs into the next room, does a cable to the country intelligence service. It comes back stolen plates. I said, my God, he actually did see the plates. The plates were stolen specifically for use in that assassination.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So you can convince people to do things that they otherwise would never dream of.

TUCKER CARLSON: So mind control is not a sci fi fantasy?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, no. MK ULTRA did far, far more damage. Caused just grief and misery to hundreds of people, maybe more. And there are subsets like MK Chickwit, and there are like five or six other sub operations that were part of MK Ultra that just, you know, caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide. Jump off bridges.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the Defense Secretary did.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, he did.

TUCKER CARLSON: James Forrestal.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yep. Committed suicide.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sure he did. Yeah. Quite. That’s quite an amazing story. I don’t think that’s on Wikipedia.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: So. But I would encourage people to look into that because that is definitely worth knowing about. Is it possible to infect people with cancer?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Not while I was there. People talked about it a lot, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: They talked about it a lot?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Like, do you think it’s possible? Can we do it? I mean, you know, if we could do it, what would we do with it? This is something that the Venezuelan government and the Cuban government have both accused us of doing when I was there.

TUCKER CARLSON: And many governments around the world believe that that is real.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Now, remember, I left 20 years ago, so who knows? I don’t know.

The CIA’s Changing Mission

TUCKER CARLSON: Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Not anymore, no. It used to be. The deputy director for whom I worked was very fond of saying. And he used to say this all the time, the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets so that our policymakers can make the best informed policy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so I thought that was the whole idea behind creating the agency right there.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, that was it until 9/11. And then it became a paramilitary organization. You know, the director gave a speech the other day in which he said that we need to focus on human source intelligence. True, every director says that when he becomes the director. But the truth is what they would rather do is fancy high tech, you know, science stuff. Satellites and drones and, you know, computer intrusions and stuff like that. They’re not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets. They should be, but they’re not.

9/11 and Intelligence Warnings

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not directly related, but we know because it’s public information that somebody bet big against United Airlines and American airlines right before 9/11. So people knew it was coming now, the people who planned it knew it was coming? Yes. Do you think that those bets, those stock bets shorting those airlines, that al Qaeda did that?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, I don’t think al Qaeda did it. I think that.

TUCKER CARLSON: In other words, who else knew it was coming?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I think there were intelligence services out there, foreign intelligence services that knew it was coming, but it was in their interests for the US to be at war. I think that’s where this came from.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you think that when you worked there?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, and I’ll tell you why. On July 6, 2001, totally normal day, I was entertaining a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers, which we did every day. They come in, we do a day of briefings, we exchange gifts. They get a photo op with the director, and then we take them out to a fancy dinner.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is at Langley?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes, at Langley. So I had this group of Arabs that day, and I had gone to this very young junior analyst on al Qaeda at the Counterterrorism center. And I said, hey, I’ve got this delegation. Can you come in and give us 30 minutes on Al Qaeda? He said, sure. So it comes time for the briefing, and instead of this junior analyst showing up, Kofer Black shows up with the chief of operations.

TUCKER CARLSON: And who’s Kofer Black?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Kofer Black was the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Later, Ambassador Kofer Black. He was the special coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department. Then he went on to Blackwater and great, great wealth.

So I jumped up and I said, oh. I said, gentlemen, this is Kofer Black. He’s the director of the Counterterrorism center. And this is the chief of operations for the Osama bin Laden group called Alexstation. And, I mean, I had no idea why somebody is important. And as busy as Kofer would come in, he sits down and he says. He starts off by saying something terrible is going to happen. We don’t know exactly when or where, but we’re hearing communications from Al Qaeda that tell us that something big that we’ve never seen before is going to happen.

We’re hearing code words for a huge attack. The honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey. There’s going to be an enormous wedding. There’s going to be a great football match. We’re hearing al Qaeda camp commanders on the phone with their students, and they’re crying and saying, I’ll see you in paradise. He said, we have no idea when and where this attack is going to come. He said, I’m begging you. If you have any sources inside al Qaeda, please help us. And they just kind of sat there and looked at each other. And he got up and he shook their hands and walked out.

So at the end of the day, I’m thinking about this all day. At the end of the day, I send them back to their hotel. I said, I’ll pick you up at the hotel. I’ll take you to dinner. But I went back to Kofer’s office, and I said, kofer, I want to thank you for coming and talking to those guys, but I have to ask, were you serious, or was that for their benefit? And he said, oh, I’m dead serious. Something terrible is going to happen. And then it happened.

On the morning of September 11th, Kofer and I had a meeting scheduled with Condoleezza Rice for the stupidest idea. Now, in retrospect, the Government Printing Office was going to print a volume of declassified cables called Foreign Policy of the United States, 1949-1967. Greece, Turkey, Cyprus. Nobody’s ever going to read this thing, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Not. Not one person?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Even the Cypriots will ignore it.

9/11 and Its Aftermath

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Not interested. But it mentioned three people who were still alive who had been informants for the CIA. And the law says that if they are outed, we have to offer them resettlement. So rather than go through that whole rigmarole, we made an appointment with Condi to ask her National Security Advisor to just remove those three cables. Nobody’s going to miss them. Cause nobody’s ever going to read this book. But just in case. So I walked over to Cofer’s office to tell him that our car was ready and his secretary.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you were at Langley that morning? Early.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I was. I was there early. And his secretary had a small TV on her. You couldn’t watch TV on your computer in those days. And I said, what happened? The World Trade Center. And she said, a plane flew into it. And because I’m an idiot sometimes, I said, you know what? That happened once before, in the 1930s. A plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really foggy and raining that day. It’s so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you’re flying into the World Trade Center? And then the second plane hit. And she turned to me and she said, did you see that or did I imagine it?

And I ran back to my office. I said, guys, we’re under attack. Two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. We all ran up to the front where Cofer’s office was. And you have to imagine this big bullpen where there are maybe 150 or 200 people in partitioned, you know, cubbies. And then there are private offices all around the perimeter. And then there are TVs hanging from the ceiling above Cofer’s office on, you know, BBC, CNN, Fox, Canal Plus, RT, from all over the world. And they’re all showing the same thing. And there’s silence.

And then somebody behind me shouts, will somebody please lead? And Cofer said, oh, yes, you go to the director’s office and tell him this. You go to security, you go to operations. And the rest of us are like, what do you want us to do? Evacuate. Nobody’s evacuating. Literally, not a single person evacuated. Finally, the CIA cops came in and said, if you don’t evacuate, you’ll be arrested. So we evacuated. I got about halfway home, had to abandon my car, so I started walking. Why? It was gridlock, like World War Z, like the end of the world, you know, I mean, on the George Washington Parkway, which is four lanes, it’s like 12 cars wide, and everybody’s just parked.

TUCKER CARLSON: That parkway passes right by the Pentagon.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And that’s right, right by the Pentagon. When I got to the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge. I lived just up from the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge. I saw the deputy national security advisor with no shoes evacuating. And I said to this guy next to me, how could this happen? That’s the national. The deputy national security advisor. He ran out of the White House without shoes to save himself.

I ended up. My. My. My ex wife and I, we climbed to the roof of my building. We. We were engaged at the time, and we watched the Pentagon burn for a little while. And finally I said, this is ridiculous. We. We have to get back to work. And so I walked back to my car, drove across the median, went back to CIA and. And stayed there for the next four days. I just slept under the desk hour, two hours in.

TUCKER CARLSON: And your fiance also worked at CIA?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: She did the same thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, and then, you know, the world changed and your life in particular changed.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I could never, ever have predicted the changes, either for me personally or for the CIA in the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you didn’t think. As one of the only Arabic speakers at the counterterrorism center at CIA in Langley, of course you knew you would play a significant role in what came next.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I expected that I would.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you did. But you never expected you’d go to prison.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Never, not in a thousand years would I have said, I’ll do the prison experience for a little while, see how that works out.

Questioning Government Narratives

TUCKER CARLSON: So I just want to ask you one last question. Of all the things you’ve said, which. I’ve known you for a while and we just had dinner last night, but I’m shocked by some of the things that you have said, actually. And I grew up around this stuff.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I’m still shocked.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So the story that you’re told about the fake Japanese diplomat trying to set you up is remarkable. That’s a remarkable story.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sick.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it is sick. It’s unbelievable that they would do that to an American citizen, particularly one with a demonstrated record of serving the country at personal risk. But outrageous side. It does sort of reframe your understanding of how things actually work. That happened to you. That’s a real thing.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Provable. And you said that it had, in fact, changed your view of how things actually worked and you’d reassessed your understanding of things that had happened in American history. And maybe they’re not exactly what they seem to be.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you go into a little more depth about what you’re thinking now?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The short version is I have come to believe very strongly that Ronald Reagan was right when he said that government is the problem, it’s not the solution to the problem. He was right. He recognized it, and the rest of us failed to see it. So now when I hear about standoffs, let’s say, between American citizens and the Bureau of Land Management, for example, or ATF or DEA, I no longer believe what is reported in the media. I no longer believe the strategic leaks that come from whatever bureau or agency to spin the story. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m obsessed with doing my own investigations.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And I read all source material because the truth has to be out there somewhere. I just feel like I have to put it together for myself. So now when we talk about the Kennedy assassinations, or RFK, I mean, or MLK, or as we said earlier, Ruby Ridge or Waco, whatever it is, I default to doubting the government account.

Waco and Government Overreach

TUCKER CARLSON: So you worked for the government during Waco? That was my first day working at a newspaper. So I remember the chaos in the newsroom when that happened. So that was 93.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: 93.

TUCKER CARLSON: That must have been the spring of 93. Correct? Is that right?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, boy, over 30 years ago. But you worked for the government then.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I was at the CIA at the time. And it was on every TV in the CIA. And I remember looking at it, not really having an opinion, and my boss saying, well, it’s about time they finally moved on that operation.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what was that? Boy, that’s really a forgotten moment in American history. So there was a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians, or that’s what we called them.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: A guy called David Koresh. That was his cult name, anyway. And they were accused of mistreating children.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which maybe they were. I have no idea.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Hoarding weapons.

TUCKER CARLSON: And hoarding, of course. And hoarding weapons. And they were surrounded by federal agents at their compound in Waco, Texas. And that standoff culminated in a shootout in which federal agents were killed.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And most of the occupants of that compound were burned to death.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was something like 27 of them and half of them were children.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Like young children.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I think it was maybe more than 20.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: More than 27.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it was.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It was a lot.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was awful. But what was it? Was that more than what we were told? It was. Do you think?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I. Well, the spin was this was a dangerous lunatic and he had to be stopped before he used those guns to go out and kill people. The truth of the matter is you’re allowed to buy as many guns as you want.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve proven that. Yep, I have.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Good.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not allowed to buy guns because you’re a convicted felon.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’m a convicted felon.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you’ve done nothing wrong. And I really hope you receive that presidential pardon soon.

Personal Cost of Speaking Out

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you. And on top of losing my gun, I lost my pension. The Obama Justice Department seized my federal pension. 20 years of proud service. $770,000. I’m going to have to work until the day I die. Only a pardon.

TUCKER CARLSON: How could you have worked at CIA for all those years and not wound up rich?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I have to say, that is the story that no one ever tells. And I just know it from my personal life. Just living in D.C. my whole life. They’re all rich. Have you noticed this?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: They are all rich.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are there all these former CIA officers who are rich?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Some of them. Excuse me. Some of them get enormous book advances. Others make this odd transition into venture capital or consulting or butts in the seats, kind of, you know, Booz Allen style firms. A lot of them go overseas and stay overseas. So the CIA pays for everything. The only thing you pay for is your phone bill. And they just invest, invest, invest for 30 years and come out with plenty of money.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve lived in nice neighborhoods for a long time. And they’re always CIA people on my street.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Always.

TUCKER CARLSON: Always.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Half of McLean, Virginia is CIA.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And the District of Columbia and Florida. And it’s just like. Like legit. Rich.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Rich.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that. That’s not a good sign.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, no, it’s not a good sign because you’re not supposed to capitalize on. On a position.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not when you have the power of life and death over people. That’s what bothers me. It’s not just like people from the labor department or commerce who are, like, leveraging their skills to riches. It’s like people who have information that they’re the only ones legally allowed to possess. True inside information. And the power to kill people.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, that’s one category with no questions asked.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: May I add one thing?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I recently received. I recently received an email from someone I had never heard of, but this is the third such email that I have received and I wanted to mention it. So, of all things, I received it through eBay. Right. I was selling something on eBay and somebody saw that because I’m an open book. So I’m just like John Kiriakou on eBay.

So I received this thing through eBay and it says, “Dear John, it’s so nice to finally speak to you. I’ve been watching your YouTube videos and I love all the content and I’ve been wanting to reach out to you for many years. I’m one of the FBI agents who wants to personally apologize to you for the disgraceful way that the FBI and our federal government treated you. I worked on your case with both headquarters and the Washington field office team, and I know many of the personnel that you’re familiar with. Unfortunately, that case was directed and driven by senior most officials. Many mid level and street personnel were against it, but nevertheless, we just followed orders. Anyway, I’ve always felt bad about what we did to you and for the way you and your family were treated. And I want to personally apologize.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, God bless that man. Do you think that’s real?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yeah. Yep. Two other FBI agents sent similar emails to my attorneys. They’re sorry they did as they were told. It’s nice.

TUCKER CARLSON: But do you worry about anything further happening to you?

Life After Prison and Surveillance

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I did. For a long time, yes. There were people inside the justice department with whom I was friendly who said, “Ooh, the CIA is really mad that you only did 23 months. Like, they really wanted you to die in there, so be on your best behavior because they’re watching everything you do.” And then that wore off. About two years out of prison. I didn’t see the surveillance anymore, never got any funny emails.

As soon as I got home, I was home for a couple of days from prison and I got an email from a guy who claimed to be an attorney saying he had some classified information that showed a crime and he wanted to send it to me. And I said, don’t you dare. I don’t want any classified information. Call the FBI and give it to them. But I figured it’s just some nut trying to set me up. So anytime I had a question, I would just call the lawyers, refer people to the lawyers. And then it ended up just going away after a while.

Finding Peace and Forgiveness

TUCKER CARLSON: So the story that you just told over the last couple of hours is very distressing to hear as someone who grew up in this country, believes in the country, loves the country, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be you. And yet you tell it completely without bitterness and no self pity whatsoever. How have you been able to maintain emotional equilibrium, wisdom, perspective, and peace in the middle of everything you’ve been through?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you for asking that. When I was in prison, I read constantly, including biographies of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And I thought, wow, what these guys went through. And they just forgave over and over Nelson Mandela, especially the way he was treated and kept in solitary confinement on Robben island. And he forgave.

And then there was a biography of a 20th century Greek Orthodox saint called Saint Nectarios, Nectarios of Aegina. And he had been the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt. And other priests who were jealous of his rapid rise accused him of having an affair with a nun. And so he was stripped of his office. He never attained high office again. But he forgave everybody for what they had done to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he hadn’t done it?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: No, he hadn’t done anything. And I thought, you know what? These people went through so much more than I did. It was so much worse for them.

And I’ve become friendly with one of the former prisoners at Guantanamo, Mohammadu Oul Slahi. The CIA kidnapped Mohammedu from Mauritania while he was attending his cousin’s wedding. We tortured him mercilessly for 14 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: 14 years.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: And then we decided, eh, wrong guy. Let him go, actually, yeah. Which happens with more frequency than you might think. And so when he got out, he went onto Twitter and I tweeted at him and I said, “Muhammadu, you don’t know me, but my government will never apologize for what it did to you. So I want to apologize. I am so sorry for what happened over the last 14 years.”

And his attorney called me and said, would you be interested in a conversation? I said, absolutely. We’ve been friends ever since. He actually lectures to my grad school class at the University of Salamanca. He comes on Zoom. The poor guy couldn’t go back to Mauritania. He was afraid they’d kill him. No country wanted him because he had been in Guantanamo for 14 years. Finally, the Dutch said, we’ll give you citizenship. And so he has gotten married, he has children, he got an education, living happily ever after in the Netherlands and zero bitterness.

And I said to him one day, he said to me in front of my class, what you just said, “You’re not bitter at all. For what?” And I said, “Me? I said, you. You’re like Mandela. How can you not be bitter after what we did to you? 14 years. I was 23 months.” And he said, “What would bitterness accomplish? Nothing,” he said, “bitterness would put me right back into that cage and I don’t want to live in there.” So that’s the position that I’ve come to take.

The Power of Forgiveness

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s a very… That’s a rational explanation of it. And I think. I think it makes total sense. I think it’s true. But forgiving people is kind of the next step, which is also done. And I like, what’s the purpose of that?

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I’ve forgiven for myself. I’m sure that John Brennan doesn’t give two shits if John Kiriakou forgives him. But I feel better having that monkey off my back.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: So I did it for myself. I don’t care what John Brennan’s feelings are.

TUCKER CARLSON: And John Brennan, as you described as a grudge holder, is the opposite.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Oh, yes, he is.

TUCKER CARLSON: And a prisoner of that.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: John, I really appreciate all the time that you’ve taken to tell your story.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: I appreciate giving me the opportunity.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I hope that you are vindicated in the…

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: To the fullest extent.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very, very attention back.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Truth telling should be rewarded, not it should be.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: You know, like I said, I’m very, very fortunate. Blessed to have the support of people like you and Dr. Phil and Bruce Fine and Brett Tolman and Doug Deason and people who understand the import, not just to me, but the import to all Americans of protecting our civil liberties from a government out of control. We have to make sure that we never go back there.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have to reward the truth and punish lies. And if you invert that, then it’s a system. You can’t live under.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it’s evil.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: It is. It’s evil.

TUCKER CARLSON: John. Thank you.

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Thank you very much.

A Note About YouTube Suppression

TUCKER CARLSON: So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. On one level, that’s not surprising. That’s what they do. But on another level, it’s shocking. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars we’re on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more. And that is totally wrong. It’s immoral.

What can you do about it? Well, we could whine about it. That’s a waste of time. We’re not in charge of Google. Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive. The way to do that on YouTube, we can think, is to subscribe to our channel. Subscribe. Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video. That way you’ll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information. So we hope that you’ll do that.

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