John Kiriakou: CIA’s Secret Torture Programs, MK-Ultra, 9-11, and Jailing Political Opponents

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Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?

I do.

MK Ultra caused people to jump out of windows and commit suicide.

Yeah.

You said there are a lot of shrinks at CIA.

I used those shrinks on operations.

We even hypnotized one guy.

He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for two hours.

Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?

Not anymore.

It used to be until 9-11.

And then it became a paramilitary organization.

What they would rather do is fancy high-tech satellites and drones.

And they're not really in the business anymore of recruiting spies to steal secrets.

I get a call from a Japanese diplomat.

And he said, hey, let's have lunch.

I said, great.

He said to me, so what's next for you?

And I said, I think I'm going to resign soon.

And he says, no.

If you give me information, I can give you money.

He was an FBI agent.

What?

Trying to get me to commit actual espionage.

The FBI did that to you?

They're going to put it in.

But John Government down, actually.

I mean, your only crime was an ABC interview in which you say, yes, the CIA does have a torture program.

I know because I worked there, and the president authorized it and lied about it in public.

That's your sum total of your crimes.

That was it.

It's pretty unbelievable you went to jail.

I think when 9-11 happened, you were one of how many CIA officers at the Counterterrorism Center spoke Arabic?

Oh, at the Counterterrorism Center?

Two?

Two.

So you have this distinguished CIA career.

No one outside the CIA has heard of you, but in the CIA, you're very well known.

Helped capture an

al-Qaeda operative

in Pakistan, risked your life as an operations officer.

And then you leave CIA and you mention in an ABC News interview in 2007 that the CIA is torturing people, which it was.

Yes.

Illegally.

Yes.

And is a stain on the country, didn't didn't make the country safer.

You say that,

and you wind up in jail.

I sure did.

Did any of the people who were torturing other people wind up in jail?

Not a single one.

The torturers.

It's so crazy.

It's nuts.

It's nuts.

The torturers didn't go to jail.

The people who conceived of the torture, the people who funded the torture, appropriated taxpayer money for the torture, the people who implemented it.

Nobody went to prison but me.

And I guess what's so funny is when you think of whistleblowers complaining about something like torture, you think of like,

I don't know, some profession, you know, the Berrigans or some professional peace activist, but you were

like a...

I was a true believer.

You were a CIA operations officer.

Yes.

Like doing the war on terror.

Specifically a counter-terrorism operations officer.

Yes.

And so you were hardly.

You were hardly some like

now type.

Right.

No.

And you went to jail.

Amazing.

So can you just

just to come to the point of the story where you're you're out of the CIA, you're working at Deloitte.

Yes.

And

you give this interview to Brian Ross at ABC.

Right.

One of the few, I think, pretty honest ABC reporters who, of course, left ABC.

Agreed.

Too much honesty for them.

And what happened then?

This was 2007, during the Bush.

Right.

It was in December of 2007.

Yes.

So I went on this interview with Brian Ross, and I said three things.

I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.

I said that torture was official U.S.

government policy.

And I said that because President Bush had specifically said, we do not torture.

I knew that wasn't true.

Where did he say that?

He said that in a press conference at the White House in December of 2007.

And I said that the torture had been personally approved by the president, which was also true.

And so within 24 hours, the CIA.

How did you know that, by the way?

Oh, because I was...

Were you just guessing?

Oh, no.

I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations.

So I was intimately involved in the planning for all of this nonsense, not just torture, but the Iraq war as well.

And I was watching the rule of law just be thrown to the dogs almost on a daily basis.

And I decided whatever Brian Ross was going to ask me, I was going to tell the truth.

That's what I did.

So that was in late 2007?

late 2007 december of 2007 so the president uh authorized this um again didn't make the country any safer no the whole thing really hurt the country but um and then lied about it in public which you're not supposed to i mean let's you're not supposed to do that and no you're just not supposed to do that you said those three things which are factually true yes yes and then what happened well the fbi began investigating me the next day and they investigated me for a full year from december of 07 to december of 08.

Did they tell you they were investigating you?

No, I read about it in CNN.

So

how are they investigating you?

You know, I don't know.

They never sought to interview me.

I ran out and I hired an attorney and

we leaked that to the press that, oh, I'm represented by this legal giant in Washington, D.C.

It was

Plato Kacheris, who's

no longer living.

But one of the most famous lawyers in the United States.

One of the most famous lawyers, the greatest in Washington.

And they never contacted him.

I really don't know what constituted an FBI investigation.

But a year later in 2008, they dropped the case and they said that I had not committed a crime.

But when they investigate you, what is that?

Do you have any sense of what that means?

Like, are they...

In the subsequent investigation, which we can get to, it was very clear what it meant.

But in that year,

I think what they did, and I'm speculating here, is that they went over the ABC News interview and a subsequent interview I did with the New York Times.

They parsed it and they decided that I had not committed a crime.

Now, in the declination letter that they sent to my attorney declining to prosecute me, they said that it was illegal to classify a program if the program is illegal.

Wait, can I ask you, is it a federal crime to say the president is lying?

No.

Oh, it's not.

So you're allowed.

In the United States, you're allowed.

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

Call them on it.

Okay, that's right.

Just want to make sure.

Because it is America, after all.

Right.

Just want to make sure.

Okay.

So

the FBI spends a year investigating you because you say the president is lying.

Yes.

Totally normal.

And you don't know that they're investigating you because they never contacted you or your lawyer.

Never contacted either one of us.

So then 2008 rolls around.

Bush leaves after two terms.

Obama gets elected.

Yes.

And he's very much the peace candidate.

He's for transparency.

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

Last safety's return.

That's right.

But he's very much.

I mean, I remember,

in fact, being on

television saying, you know, he was this wild-eyed, peace-nick lefty guy.

Oh, no, he wasn't.

Oh, he wasn't.

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.

Well, that's almost

psychologically profiling the president.

Oh, 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.

And so they use the tools

that they have employed for decades to subvert foreign governments, to subvert their own government.

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.

Go on.

Swear to God.

I know we're getting far afield, and we will get back to your story, but

it 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.

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.

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?

And then when they get caught, they scramble.

I remember Jane Harmon.

She was a

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.

She's a liar.

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.

Yeah.

Well, she was just a pure tool of the Intel agency.

That was it.

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

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 I was 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?

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 is dead, and all these other senators and congressmen, 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 a very

simple thing.

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, 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.

That's disgusting.

That's disgusting.

I think you can go through, certainly in the Senate,

you can go through the roster of the, you know, the hundred members of the Senate and then compare it to the list of the permanent, you know, the Committee on Intelligence.

And those are the worst, those are the most dishonest people.

And they are.

They are.

The most rotten, the most morally compromised, the most dishonest by far.

I have to agree.

That was my How does that happen?

Like sitting on the Senate Intel Committee is like just a sign that

you're one of the in crowd.

Worse than that, like you're not someone I would invite to dinner at my house.

No.

I agree.

How?

How do they identify the most morally compromised people?

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 everybody just,

where the intelligence community was seen as a...

as a force for good,

which was odd to me.

Well, I mean,

that's how I grew up thinking that.

For For sure.

I mean, it was not even questioned.

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.

And then just naturally, inevitably, predictably, the tactics that that and other agencies used against foreign governments were used against the U.S.

government, the elected government, and the population of the country.

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.

NSA spied on me and leaked the information to the New York City.

And leaked the information.

I remember it very well.

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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,

you know, it was going to be forgotten.

Because what you said was true.

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 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 Advisor for Counterterrorism.

John Brennan and I always hated each other.

I don't know why he hated me.

I hated him for what we're very curious about.

How weird, he seems like such a marvelous guy.

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.

He was not

in position.

I met him in 1990, January of 1990.

Over 35 35 years ago yes okay so it's fair to say you oh i knew him you're not meeting very very well in fact um 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.

So, why didn't you like or respect him?

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 Tennant 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 of the world.

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.

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

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 Tennant 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, you know, trashing your enemies.

But that's what he did.

And

there was a group of guys that...

that came of age with him and

he all promoted all of them with with himself, with his rising boat they all went to the 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 with a special kind of passion and it was because they didn't respect him either it was clear interesting

you you said he was dangerous I always thought that he was dangerous what yeah

that's a strong thing to say about somebody.

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.

So waterboarding has been around a long time.

Oh, it's been around a long time.

The Chinese actually invented waterboarding

in like the 15th century.

Can you explain waterboarding for a moment?

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 His heart stopped beating, and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more.

That's what waterboarding is.

Why is it done?

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.

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?

Well, he even, 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, you know what, we should do, we should attack, you know, we should attack the Chicago Stock Exchange.

Oh, yeah, that's what we should do.

Okay, that's, that's not an, 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, like...

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.

And he confessed to it?

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.

A lot of hairy people in the region.

Yeah, exactly.

But 187 times?

And Abu Zubaydah, 83 times.

They waterboarded him 83 times.

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 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 eyebolt 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.

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

The CIA has never said.

It was in the Senate torture report, but it was redacted.

So we don't know the number.

What's your sense?

At least a half a dozen.

We're tortured to death.

Yeah, to death.

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do you think um obviously you're very much part of this story you went to prison because of it so it 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 usable information produced by all this torture?

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 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.

So you

gave that interview at the end of 2007 in which you said really just, it was a pretty spare interview.

You didn't go into any detail.

No.

Investigation happens.

It's dropped.

Obama gets elected.

A month later, John Brennan, I interrupted you.

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

Why do you think he did that?

Of all the problems that were going on in the world.

Of all the 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 violence I mean, they came to your house, they cuffed you, they threw you in a cell.

Oh, yeah.

Like, those are acts of violence, physical force they're using against you.

Right.

That's right.

So if you'll do that, if you'll take a man from his five children and lock him in a cell for years,

and they fired my wife just because she was married to me, she was a senior CIA officer.

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 Kiriku goes to jail.

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.

Espionage.

Espionage.

Which can be a death penalty charge, I might add.

Who are you spying for?

Exactly.

Who?

Well, did they allege you were spying for somebody?

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.

But how is that espionage?

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 him.

I'm trying not to use the effort,

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.

It wasn't doing anything dangerous.

Oh, no, it was super dangerous.

The most dangerous place I've ever been.

On earth.

Yes.

At the time.

Yep.

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 those terrorists.

It gets worse.

That's really over the top.

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.

You were working for CIA at the time?

No, I was working for John Kerry when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

When was this?

2009 to 2011.

Yes.

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?

You and the Japanese guy speaking Arabic.

I'm 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.

You're such a Boy Scout.

I know, right?

I've got kind of

everyone who lives in D.C.

has had something like what you described, but I've never heard of anybody going to the authorities over it.

And 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.

Which place?

It was

on Lower Wisconsin, the famous Italian place.

Oh,

where they give you after-dinner drinks at the end.

Yes.

And the ladies in the front window making the pasta.

Such a great restaurant.

Philomena.

Philomena.

Thank you.

Sorry, forever.

Sorry.

I love Philomena.

It's wonderful.

It really is wonderful.

So

I do it.

And in that 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.

What?

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 20 2012.

The Peter Strzok?

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.

No way.

And I said to my lawyer, why would they do this?

I'm a patriot.

The FBI did that to you?

Because I hadn't committed espionage.

You're going to put John Greman down, actually.

Yeah.

I mean, that's.

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 back to them.

Who was the guy?

The Japanese diplomat.

No, he was just an Asian FBI agent who didn't speak a word of Japanese, but he did speak Arabic.

So he pretended.

No, you're blowing my mind.

He pretended to not speak English so that I wouldn't be alert.

Are you sure this happened?

100%.

It was all in the discovery.

But Brennan said, charge him with espionage.

And they were like, okay, well, we got to charge him with espionage.

We have to create the crime in order to fit the charge.

And what happened?

They charged me with three counts of espionage.

Wait, how can you believe any?

So like, I have friends who have a lot of interesting information on the oklahoma city bombing oh 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 i can't bring myself to believe that that happens in the united states but you're describing it oh tucker i was in prison with this poor guy this guy was just a 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 him.

And he said, hey, you know what would be fun?

We should blow up the Route 82 Bridge.

And they were saying 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 and 30 years in prison.

Why would they do that to this?

Why would they do that?

It wasn't their idea to blow up the stupid bridge.

But why were they targeting it?

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.

That is, but they're, I mean,

they're targeting

American citizens for destruction.

Sure.

Sure.

That's what they do.

You need to shut down the FBI right away.

I would not object to that at all.

And in my case, they charge me with three counts of.

What is the fucking point of all of this?

Pay your taxes.

I know, right?

Hoist the flag on your front lawn.

I do those things.

Yeah, I do too.

And

then they try to destroy you?

Yeah.

And you're because your crime is you didn't like John Brennan when you both were junior guys at the CIA.

Yeah.

And I think you correctly

said the president, George W.

Bush,

was lying.

He was lying because he is a liar, unfortunately.

And so, like, let's spend millions of dollars on the bank.

$6 million of the taxpayers' money is what they spent on my to destroy you.

$6 million.

You need a pardon right away from Trump.

But 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.

Yeah, it was, it was ugly.

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 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 look up.

In fact, I was going to New York so often that my wife said, you know, maybe we should buy a little pied dere there.

So instead of staying in a hotel, because 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.

When?

January

12th, 2012.

2012?

2012.

They investigated me for three years.

Did you know they were investigating you?

No.

And then when we got the discovery.

But 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?

And the torture was

proved by the president.

Yes.

All true.

All true.

And so for five, six years, they investigate you without telling you.

Now, what were they doing to investigate you?

They were, they had my phones tapped.

Actually?

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, tuckercarlson at aol.com.readnotify.com.

And when you access it, it'll show me Tucker Carlson read your email.

He read it for two 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 geo coordinates.

Damn.

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 L.A.

Why?

I said, because somebody just accessed the email and it's in Washington.

I said, hold on, because it has geo-coordinates attached to it.

So I took the geo coordinates, I put it into Google Earth.

And 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 didn't even know you you were under investigation.

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.

All because you called the president a liar?

I was in a restaurant the other night, in fact, this weekend, and I had a little trouble hearing what people were saying.

And I thought to myself, I'm a little young to go deaf.

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Did, am I missing part of this?

I don't know.

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.

But I mean,

right.

But like airing dirty laundry, calling liars liars.

Yeah.

These are not crimes.

No, they're not crimes.

Exactly.

So

but am I missing something?

I mean, did you kill anybody?

Were you dealing heroin at all?

Nope.

Nothing.

And then you didn't start some kind of fake cryptocurrency company.

I wish I had thought of it.

I'd be rich today.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

I hope at some point we can talk about all the actual criminals who are richer living in my neighborhood.

Right.

Richer than ever.

Okay, so, but you don't know any of this is going on.

When do you get confirmation that you're the target of an investigation?

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.

This is so freaking bonkers.

Yeah.

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?

I said, is this to the FBI building downtown?

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

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

you're going to be charged with a lot of crimes.

What?

That's what he said.

And thank God.

Wait, as you were talking, they were raiding your house?

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

oh

yep and then one of the one of the female

drain the

drain the swamp is drain the swamp not strong enough no burn it down burn it down burn it down yes you know this is neither here nor there because my opinion is not important but when cash patel was named the director of the fbi i wrote an op-ed in a leftist at a 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.

Yeah, let's build a new headquarters, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In Kansas, maybe.

Yeah, Leavenworth.

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 free to go.

Did you have any idea what this was about?

No.

No idea.

No idea.

They charged me with, this is like a bad dream.

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 going to see you.

What was happening?

Did you call home and ask your wife?

What was that?

Yeah.

And she was just wonderful.

She was as calm

as I wished I could be.

And she said, the FBI is 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?

Yeah, why don't you go fuck yourself?

Exactly.

Actually, excuse me.

Exactly.

Talk in that way to your wife with a newborn baby.

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.

Profiles encourage award.

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.

No.

Oh, it was humiliating.

Just utterly humiliating.

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

Okay.

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 because I worked there and the president authorized it and lied about it in public.

That's your sum total of your crimes.

That was it.

I'm going to cut to the chase here.

This is so unbelievable.

So you go to your lawyer's office, you find out you're being charged with espionage.

I called my wife.

She came and picked me up and I told her, I'm going to kill myself.

This is a death penalty case.

I haven't done anything wrong.

And she's like, you're not going to 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, January.

No, four days later.

That was on a, ah, 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 five, 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 arraignment on Monday.

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 bunk, 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 3 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

with a handcuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I said.

And Strzok was there.

Oh, yeah, he was there.

And, you know, but

I didn't know he was Peter Strzok until I got a call in 2019 from a reporter at the Washington Post, 20, no, no, 2017, reporter for the Washington Post.

And he said,

hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on Peter Strzzok 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 head of the counterintelligence 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

the statement is that Karma is a bitch, and now it's his turn.

Yeah.

So all they printed was, now it's his turn.

I think he wound up getting like a million dollar settlement, actually.

He did.

And there was a go fund me.

He got richer.

He got richer.

And there was a go fund me that raised another half a million dollars.

Yeah.

This is so a nightmare.

So, okay, you're charged

just to yeah, three counts of espionage.

Three counts of espionage.

One, but not specifying who you spied for.

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 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.

Did you reveal the identities of anyone?

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.

And they knew that because they were listening to the call.

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.

This is crazy.

What do you mean the journalist wasn't really writing a book?

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, the level of of treachery.

Yeah, welcome to Washington.

It's that bad.

Oh, I'm very aware of that.

Yeah.

I'm so glad I'm not there anymore.

Oh, my God.

I can't wait until the day I can leave.

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,

yes, exactly.

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

I'm going to get that promotion before you do.

It's like if you, if, if I need to make sure you die in prison, that's okay.

That's really.

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.

Okay, so what were you facing initially?

You get charged, you get

45 years.

45 years in prison.

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.

Kiriaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren.

Do you remember her name?

I don't.

I remember she had a Vietnamese name, like Nguyen or Tran or something like that.

But she ended up getting promoted in the Biden Justice Department.

Really?

She became very, very important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope that she becomes famous for that.

I hope so, too.

That level of cruelty to another human being is there's no justification for that.

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.

Did anyone allege that you lied ever?

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.

So you went to prison, you were facing life and actually you're facing the death penalty initially

because

you told the truth about other people's lies.

Correct.

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.

Yes.

So that's a system that can't continue.

That's not a virtuous system.

That's an evil system.

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.

1917 being one of the darkest periods in American history.

When it comes to civil liberties, one of the darkest periods.

The most anti-most un-American moment, really, without any question.

Probably one of the worst presidents we ever had, Woodrow Wilson.

Double without any question.

Destroy Christian Europe for no reason at all.

Right.

Yeah.

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 1910s.

Most Americans didn't have electricity in 1917.

Exactly right.

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.

And none of them was charged with lying.

Not a single one of them.

Because lying is not a crime.

That's right.

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.

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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.

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.

Years.

So I took it.

For telling the truth in an ABC interview.

How long was that ABC interview?

30 minutes, 40 minutes?

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

Yes, actually.

Wow.

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 Bush people and the Obama people who covered up the Bush administration's crimes that

were the criminals.

The amazing thing is that Barack Obama, I mean, I was there.

I knew knew Obama.

He ran against all that stuff.

Yeah, he did.

Right?

Iraq was the bad war.

Afghanistan was the good war.

And he ran a campaign against that.

You know,

but he ended up throwing into prison the guy who told the truth about it.

Mark Halpern and John Heilman 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.

Like, why are the liberals so mad?

That he's a war-mongering, you know, 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.

He's a cold human being.

Like, what is that?

That's sociopathy.

Yeah, well, for sure.

You have to 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.

These are Americans he's doing this to.

Americans.

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.

I would not be surprised by anything anymore.

You know, when President Trump,

I had to laugh, when President Trump stripped him of a 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?

Exactly.

Why don't I have a private citizen?

Do you have one?

I don't.

I don't either.

See?

So why does John Brennan get one?

I agree.

So I said, of course the president should strip John Brennan of a 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.

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

Very much so.

Conduct business without one in D.C.

because everything is classified.

That's right.

Not to protect American national security,

but for the obvious power advantage it gives the holders of those clearances.

That's right.

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.

No.

No, there won't be.

So anyway, you plead, you get

how much time?

I got 30 months.

And

at sentencing, my attorneys asked 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 for the opposite of a jailbreak.

Yeah, it's nuts.

It's nuts.

And of course, I've got, you know, 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.

So you've already said goodbye to your children.

I already said goodbye to my children.

What was that like?

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 going to come and visit me all the time.

And then I'm going to come back home and everything is going to be great.

They were

eight,

six, and one.

Your little kids.

And so.

Eight, six, and one.

In the visiting room, there was a sign on one of the doors that said inmates only.

And my eight-year-old said, Dad, what's an inmate?

And I, 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 is going to be good again.

It took everything I had not to.

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?

No.

The CIA

under John Brennan, who was...

He was director by this point.

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.

Well, they're vindictive, aren't they?

I guess asked Julian Assange how vindictive they are.

And why I got there.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Ask Julian Assange.

They almost killed him.

So.

Mike Pompeo plotted his murder.

Literally.

Who's still free, by the way?

Is Mike Pompeo in jail?

I haven't seen the announcement.

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?

You are not.

Oh, you're not allowed.

Okay.

You are not.

So you can't use federal funds to murder people who embarrass you.

Only if you're Barack Obama.

But anybody else, no, you can't do that.

So if you do that, have you committed a crime?

Yeah, a serious crime.

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

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.

I don't know.

That's a whole different thing.

Pompeo keeps threatening to sue me for saying that.

Well,

the facts are a defense.

I hope he will.

I hope he will.

There you go.

Discovery would be fun.

Anyway, sorry.

So I was in prison.

It was frustrating.

So you say goodbye to your children.

I do.

I say goodbye to my children.

The CIA makes certain you don't go to the work camp, you go to a prison.

Yeah.

It was five days before I got access to a phone at the prison and i called what was that my lawyer the first five days it was you know looking back i think i was in shock

um

did you think about fleeing everybody does

yeah i don't know that i would submit to that i mean you never know until you're there you find yourself constantly looking at the fences constantly calculating how bad you'll get cut up with the concert

before you report to prison did you think like i serve this country, I grew up here, you're from a middle-class family, pro-America?

No.

You never thought about fleeing the country.

Why?

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.

He actually tweeted that at you?

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

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.

Sure, because you're a human being.

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 you've served in prison you don't want to be in prison to 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

he's an ms nbc contributor he took his six million dollar book advance and moved to florida actually

doesn't this i mean why are you not insane i know there's a lightness to you that thank you and 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 a an amazing amount of support

i

i hope that you get a pardon this afternoon i really do this is horrifying his enemies or the people who did this to you yes he ran against this kind of yes he did behavior and he righted it with the j6 people with rod blogoevich i wrote Rod Blagojevich a letter when he went to prison.

This is before I was ever in trouble.

Yeah, I wrote him a letter and I said, You don't know me.

I don't live in Illinois, but this is a travesty.

It was, I remember.

There's no crime that was actually committed.

Oh, I know.

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 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 to pardon Mark Rich because he's sleeping with his wife.

Precisely.

For example, 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.

I agree.

He didn't wait until after a congressional election.

And neither does this president.

Yeah, the British Army disgraced itself by, they murdered a lot of their own men.

Yes, they did.

Who snapped.

Cowardice is contemptible, of course, but you shouldn't.

kill a boy because he runs away.

Exactly.

It's disgusting.

It's disgusting.

It's like, you know, regain your senses for a second.

So anyway, the first five days,

you were in shock.

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, on his eyelids.

It's like kind of a movie.

It was nuts.

And I jumped up and I said, what do you want?

Because I thought, it's two of them.

It's one of me, but I'm going to do my best.

You got to, yeah.

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.

We're not in Georgetown anymore.

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,

great guy.

Not even good guy, a great guy.

I would give him the...

He was a good fellow, really.

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.

I've met Jerek Jeter, nice man.

Sweet guy.

Yeah, absolutely.

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.

And you're still friends with some of them.

We were talking about a dinner last night.

We talk frequently.

Good guys.

Yeah.

That was a misapplication of federal power.

It's like, you know, obviously you don't want

organized crime.

On the other hand, like if that's your number one, well, look at what has happened to America post-mafia.

Has it gotten a lot better?

Oh, no.

I don't think so.

No, it hasn't.

Benson Hurst has not improved.

No, it hasn't.

I know.

I'm aware.

I'm aware.

They did a better job with Staten Island than the current rulers have.

So

at this point, your case is

well known.

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.

Right.

But there are some people who are paying attention and they're making a lot of noise, but it doesn't matter.

No.

It doesn't matter.

You know, it's funny.

My support.

came from

people on the hard left

and people on the libertarian right.

Right.

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.

I agree.

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.

I mean, Ruby Ridge was really just absolutely murdered the guys in cold blood.

Child and his wife shot his dog.

Randy Weaver because his shotgun was two inches too short or something.

That's right.

Lon Harucci, I think was the name of the FBI sniper.

I want to say it again.

Lon Harucci.

Murdered them in cold blood.

Shot a woman?

Really?

Yeah, a woman.

Who's just standing in the baby?

Holding a baby out.

Holding a baby.

Uh-huh.

That's right.

Yeah, and that was, and by the way, that was not only never punished, Lon Harucci was never punished for that.

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 what are you a ruby ridge person like you care right like you're a wacko you're some kind of right-wing extremist 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.

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?

No, no, no.

I mean, he's talking sense here about government overreach.

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.

Oh, it is.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, yeah.

Because you weren't a CIA paramilitary.

You were an actual just like officer.

Case officer, yeah.

Case officer.

Recruiting spies to steal secrets.

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?

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.

Right.

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 is not Christian.

It certainly isn't.

And I said, you know what?

I'll take the job.

Certainly isn't.

And I love those guys.

And I'm still

unarmed, defenseless people is immoral.

It is.

And it's also just dishonorable in the most secular terms.

That's right.

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

That's right.

It does.

It's not how honorable men behave.

PTSD and moral injury are real.

I totally agree.

We damage ourselves.

It's also disgusting.

Like, 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.

That's right.

What is this anyway?

What is this?

And then what happens when you go in and you say, oh, I accidentally killed him?

Oh, well,

we just bury him out back.

That's literally what they did.

Actually, just bury him out back.

Yeah.

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

Agreed.

And

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

It is.

I'm confident things are going to turn around.

I think so, too.

I hope so.

I pray that.

So how long were you in prison 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.

Were any elected officials sympathetic at all?

Yeah,

well,

yes, but none were really willing to go out on a limb.

Gus Billarakis, 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, they're cohesive.

They are.

We stick to that.

I'm aware of it.

Yes.

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,

no, 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, I don't even know if he's still alive.

I knew Moran pretty well.

Yep.

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 was very liberal.

But his foreign policy views were out of the mainstream.

He was not a neocon.

Right.

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

How many times Jeremy Brash

ran against him 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 genocide.

Yeah, right.

Right.

And they were like, it was crazy.

It was crazy.

And they systematically destroyed Jim Moran's life.

They're asking like pretty obvious questions like, why did 9-11 happen?

Right.

They don't want to show you.

How do 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 are they willing to die for that?

Like, what were they mad about?

What were they mad about?

That's what Jim Moran asked.

And I'm like, you can't ask.

Oh, by the way, Jim Moran.

And then they like plastered.

Glenn greenwalled him.

Yes, big time.

They did.

And they kind of drove him out.

And I think he lost his seat in the end.

He retired.

Oh, he did.

Okay.

And he's at a

political consulting firm.

He's in Plain, Virginia.

I ran into him at a conference about a year ago.

No way.

Yeah.

He's a lovely man.

He really is.

I always secretly liked him.

I had him on.

I interviewed him a lot.

And he would get, you know, per his ethnic stereotype, he get like red in the face or like,

spit would come out.

But I kind of like, you know, he was like a, I liked him.

Yes.

Still, sorry, not to.

And Gus Billarakis 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 and he was there to help.

Wow.

Have you ever had any contact with CIA since you got out of prison?

No.

Well,

not other than sending articles and books in for clearance.

Right.

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 the first few times.

Still?

Yeah.

But from whom?

It had to be the FBI.

It could have been the CIA.

What basis could they justify surveilling you?

They sent you to prison for an ABC innovation.

And it's done.

It's all done.

I'm just going to go have a pizza.

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

You're exactly right.

And this is just, this is now on Wikipedia.

But.

Barack Obama was still in the White House.

No, why?

So the policy hadn't changed.

I don't think he knew who I was one way or the other.

I think that Brendan 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, valley condios.

You know, he's a cold man.

Yeah.

He doesn't care.

No, he doesn't care.

So part of the reason that this has to be

precedent, they cannot allow a CIA officer.

This is what it'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.

Oh, I'm aware.

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, Your 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.

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

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.

Swimming pool.

Because the word whistleblower, in and of itself, they deemed to be classified.

And so I couldn't say I'm a whistleblower.

On what grounds?

How is it classified?

They say so.

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.

Whistleblower.

Absurd.

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

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.

Who is this judge?

Her name was Leonie Brinkama.

She was a Clinton appointee.

Was she

not bright or was she just so committed to the status quo, to the Intel?

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 case, she had Zacharias Musawi, the 20th hijacker.

So she reserves these cases for herself, and everybody gets the maximum.

So

she said, in response to my attorney,

she was terrifying.

That the definition of whistleblowing.

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 the definition and actually you were speaking out against harm yeah i was speaking out against harm she says the the definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it period

So that's espionage,

in her view.

I mean, it may be illegal, but it's not.

Espionage is spying for a foreign country.

Correct.

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 Kiriaku plus 12 months.

That's what she said at sentencing.

I'm giving you Kiriaku plus 12 months.

Who is he alleged to have spied for?

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?

The irony is that there's a lot of espionage in Washington.

A lot of people.

Apparently.

Yeah.

Well,

every intelligence service service in the world has its officers in Washington.

There are also people who work for the U.S.

government who, without any kind of authorization,

give

highly relevant classified information to foreign governments.

Yes.

Yeah.

Every day.

I know that for a fact, and I know people who've done it.

And none of them is in jail.

No.

No, none of them.

None of them is in jail.

And it's also fair to say the U.S.

government is penetrated by foreign actors.

Yes.

Yes.

And it has been for a long time.

Yes, I'm aware.

And I don't think anyone goes to jail for that.

No.

Right.

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.

Can I just

note parenthetically, I don't think there are a lot of Greek liberals left.

No, there aren't.

There used to be.

There used to be.

They used to be almost all liberals.

Yeah.

And they've all moved.

I've noticed.

I don't think I've met a Greek liberal in a long time.

No.

They're just not out there anymore.

Yeah.

So he said, look, you know, 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, you know, 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 like...

That's 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.

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.

Oh, no, no, no, no, I agree very strongly.

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

Yes.

I'm sure of it.

Yes.

What about physically?

Well, there are two very well-documented cases where Barack Obama used a drone to murder Anwar Alaki.

Yep.

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.

What about domestically?

Well, you know,

I keep thinking back to 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 question.

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.

It's

anti-constitutional constitutional.

Not just unconstitutional.

It's anti-constitutional.

Do people who work at the CIA have a sense that maybe they're not serving good?

Generally, no.

Generally, these are,

I mean, at the working level, are hardworking, really smart, patriotic people.

Some of them are really smart.

I can confirm that.

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?

Do I remember?

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.

I think that's when they called in Bob Woodward to blow them up, right?

The former Naval Intel officer Bob Woodward.

Oh, I'll tell you.

Not the only time Bob Woodward has been called in by

the National Security State to destroy.

Well, 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, George Tennant.

She said, 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.

He's just a great reporter.

Come on, John.

He's free to work.

He's got shoe leather.

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

He's not an instrument of the government.

He's a counterbalance.

He's a check against their overreach.

He's a journalist.

They're going to run with that.

It's so absurd.

I was shocked.

What did you think of Bill Burns?

I wrote an op-ed when Bill Burns was appointed.

He was a former ambassador to Russia.

Yes.

And then up until January, the CAA director.

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.

Yes.

So you needed an outsider.

Bill Burns was one of the most highly respected ambassadors that we had in the State Department.

That is true.

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.

Yep.

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?

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 Traficante 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.

A name forgotten to history.

That's right.

And a good and decent man.

But there were a lot of people, unfortunately, unfortunately, one was a Greek American, who

very famously, very, 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

came to the conclusion that, yeah, there were CIA officers who were responsible for carrying this.

Did you think that when you worked there?

No, I didn't.

In fact, I thought it was so absurd, I couldn't believe people were even talking about it.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, we're the good guys.

Yeah.

Why would we kill the president?

I thought the same.

Why haven't all the files been released?

I genuinely don't know.

For JFK, I think they have been.

No, they have not.

They have not.

No.

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.

Yes.

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 involved or interested rather in

recruiting him?

What was he doing in Mexico City in October 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?

Yes.

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 Sir Hans or Han's gun held.

And Thomas Naguchi.

And this is confirmed.

Yes.

And Thomas Noguchi.

Well, then that's kind of the case closed.

There it is.

Right.

I mean, we don't know what happened.

We know the official explanation is untrue.

It's untrue.

Because it was a revolver.

It was a.22 caliber revolver.

Correct.

It's like a nine-shot.

That's right.

22s fit a lot in the cylinder.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

And Thomas Noguchi, the coroner, said that

the death shot came from behind.

Yep.

at an angle,

from down on the ground.

But Sirhan was in front of him.

Yes.

There was a security guard there who was not associated with the Kennedy campaign or with the Ambassador Hotel.

Yeah, 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?

Yes.

And it raises the really obvious question, which was, I mean, we know Sir Han had a gun

in the film.

Correct.

Lots of people there, including lots of famous people, Rosie Greer.

Rosie Greer.

Yeah.

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.

Yes.

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.

Oh, yeah, and still in prison.

Yes, he is.

And I mean, that was before I was born, and I'm 56, so it was quite some time ago.

What was that?

Well,

that's the $64,000 question.

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.

Yes.

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.

Which they were.

Which they were.

After being specifically told it's a crime to destroy federal documents.

And they don't belong to you.

Right.

Exactly.

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.

Right.

Do you think it is possible to get people to commit acts that they wouldn't otherwise commit?

I do.

You do.

I do.

You said there are a lot of shrinks at CIA.

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.

I 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 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.

It's Arabic.

Yes.

And I'm asking him, 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, and 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.

Amazing.

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

So mind control is not a sci-fi fantasy.

No.

No.

MK Ultra did far, far more damage, caused just grief and

misery to hundreds of people, maybe more.

And there are sub-sets 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.

Well, the defense secretary did.

Yeah, he did.

James Forrest all.

Yep.

Committed suicide.

Sure, he did.

Yeah, quite, that's quite an amazing story.

I don't think that's on Wikipedia.

No.

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?

Not while I was there.

People talked about it a lot.

They talked about it a lot.

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?

And this is something that the Venezuelan government and the Cuban government have both accused us of doing.

Oh, yes.

When I was was there.

And many governments around the world believe that that is real.

Yeah.

Now, remember, I left 20 years ago.

So who knows?

I don't know.

Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency?

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 policies.

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

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

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.

This is 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?

No, I don't think Al-Qaeda did it.

I think that...

In other words, who else knew it was coming?

I think there were intelligence services out there, foreign intelligence services, that knew it was coming, but it was in their interests for the U.S.

to be at war.

I think that's where this came from.

Did you think that when you worked there?

No.

And I'll tell you why.

On July 6th,

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 fan.

This is At Langley.

Yes, At Langley.

So I had this group group of Arabs that day and I had gone to this very young junior analyst on Al-Qaeda at the

Counterterror 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.

And who was Kofer Black?

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 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 Alex Station.

I mean, I had no idea why somebody as 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, you know, 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.

We'll take you to, I'll take you to dinner.

But I went back to Kofer's office and I said, 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 to 1967 greece turkey cyprus nobody's ever going to read this thing right not not one person no even the cypriots will ignore it not interested right 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 to

national security advisor, thank you, to just remove those three cables.

Nobody's going to miss them because nobody's ever going to read this book.

But just in case.

So I walked over to Kopher's office to tell him that our car was ready.

And his secretary.

Well, so you were at Langley that morning early.

I was.

I was there early.

And his secretary had a small TV on her desk.

You couldn't watch TV on your computer in those days.

And I said, what happened to 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 Kofer's office was.

And you have to imagine this big bullpen where there are maybe 150 or 200 people in

partitioned cubbies.

And then there are private offices all around the perimeter.

And then there are TVs hanging from the ceiling above Kofer's office on

BBC, CNN, Fox,

Canal Palouse, 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 Kofer said, oh, yes, you.

Go to the director's office and tell him this.

You, go to security.

You, go to operations.

And 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.

That parkway passes right by the Pentagon.

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 deputy national security advisor.

He ran out of the White House without shoes to save himself.

I ended up,

my ex-wife and I, we climbed to the roof of my building.

We were engaged at the time, and we watched the Pentagon burn for a little while.

And finally, I said, this is ridiculous.

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 a day.

And your fiancé also worked at CIA.

She did the same thing.

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

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

So you didn't think as one of the only Arabic speakers at the counterterrorism center at CIA and Langley, of course, you knew you would play a significant role in what came next.

next.

I never expected that.

And you did, but you never expected you'd go to prison.

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.

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, but I'm, 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, and I'm still shocked.

Right.

So

the story that you told about the fake Japanese diplomat trying to set you up

is remarkable.

That's a remarkable story.

Sick.

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.

So, but outrage aside, it does sort of reframe your understanding of how things actually work.

That happened to you.

That's a real thing.

Yes.

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.

That's right.

Can you go into a little more depth about what you're thinking now?

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.

Yes.

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.

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.

93.

That must have been the spring of 93.

Is that right?

Yes.

So boy, over 30 years ago.

But you worked for the government then.

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.

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.

So that's what we called them.

That's right.

A guy called David Koresh.

That was his...

cult name anyway.

And they were accused of mistreating children.

Yes.

Which maybe they were.

I have no idea.

Hoarding weapons.

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.

Yes.

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

It was something like 27 of them.

And half of them were children.

Yeah.

Like young children.

Yeah.

I think it was maybe more than 27.

More than 27.

Yeah, it was, it was a lot.

It was awful.

But what was it?

Was that more than what we were told it was, do you think?

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.

I've proven that.

Yep.

I have.

Good.

You're not allowed to buy guns because you're a convicted felon.

I'm a convicted felon.

And you've done nothing wrong.

And I really

hope you receive that presidential pardon soon.

Thank you.

And on top of losing my gun,

I lost my pension.

The Obama Justice Department seized my federal pension.

What?

20 years of proud service,

$770,000.

I'm going to have to work until the day I die.

Only a pardon.

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

Yeah, right.

I have to say that is the story that no one ever tells, and I just know it from my personal, just living in D.C.

my whole life.

They're all rich.

Have you noticed this?

They are all rich.

How, why are there all these former CIA officers who are rich?

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 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.

I've lived in nice neighborhoods for a long time.

And they're always CIA people on my street.

Always.

Always.

Half of McLean, Virginia is CIA.

Yeah, and the District of Columbia and Florida.

And it's just like

legit rich.

Yeah, rich.

Is that

that's not a good sign, is it?

No, it's not a good sign.

Because you're not supposed to capitalize on a position.

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.

That's right.

Like that's one category.

With no questions asked.

May I add one thing?

Yeah.

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 Kiriaku on eBay.

Yeah, so I 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.

Well, God bless that man.

Do you think that's real?

Yeah.

Yep.

Two other FBI agents sent similar emails to my attorneys.

They're sorry they did as they were told.

It's nice.

Did you worry about anything further happening to you?

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 and then it ended up just going away after a while.

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?

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.

Like Nelson Mandela, especially.

the way he was treated and kept in solitary confinement on Robin 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.

And he hadn't done it.

No, he hadn't done anything.

And I thought, you know what, these people went through so much more than I did.

It It was so much worse for them.

And I've become friendly with

one of the former prisoners at Guantanamo, Mohamedou Uld Slahi.

The CIA kidnapped Mohamedou from Mauritania while he was attending his cousin's wedding.

We tortured him mercilessly for 14 years.

14 years?

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 on to Twitter and I tweeted at him and I said Mohamedou 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 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 happened 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.

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 I've also done.

And I, like, what's the purpose of that?

I've forgiven for myself.

I'm sure that John Brennan doesn't give two shits if John Kiriaku forgives him, but I feel better having that monkey off my back.

Yes.

So I did it for myself.

I don't care what John Brennan's feelings are.

And John Brennan, as you described, is a grudge holder.

He's the opposite.

Oh, yes, he is.

And a prisoner of that.

Yes.

John, I really appreciate all the time that you've taken to tell your story.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.

And I hope that you are vindicated in the

to the fullest extent.

Thank you very, very much.

Thank you.

Truth-telling should be rewarded, nothing.

It should be.

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.

You have to reward the truth and punish lies.

And if you invert that, then it's a system you can't live under.

That's right.

Because it's evil.

It is.

It's evil.

John, thank you.

Thank you.

Very much.

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