John Kiriakou: CIA's Secret Torture Programs, Mk-Ultra, 9-11, and Why Obama Threw Him in Jail

0:00 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 were a lot of shrinks at at CIA. I used those those shrinks on operations. We even hypnotized one guy. He was hypnotized with his arm in the air for 2 hours. Would you describe the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency? Not anymore. It used to be until 911 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 got a call from a Japanese diplomat and he said, "Hey, let's have lunch." I said, "Great." He said to me,

0:46 "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? 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 cuz I work there." And the president authorized it and lied about it in public. That's that's that's your sum total of your crimes. Sounds it. [Music] [Applause] [Music]

1:37 [Applause] [Music] It's pretty unbelievable you went to jail. Um, 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. Um, no one outside the CIA has heard of you, but in the CIA, you're very well known. Helped capture an al-Qaeda operative um in Pakistan. risked your life uh as an operations officer and then you leave CIA and you mention in an ABC News interview in 2007 that the CIA is

2:23 torturing people which it was. Yes. Illegally. Yes. And um is a stain on the country. 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 uh other people wind up in jail? Not a single one. the the 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 what's 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 prof you know the baragans or some you know professional peace activist. But you

3:09 were you were like a I was a true believer, but you were a CIA operations officer like doing the war on terror. Specifically a counterterrorism operations officer. Yes. And so you were hardly you were hardly some like No, I was no bleeding now type, right? No. Um and you went to jail. Amazing. So can you just just to come to the point of the story where you're uh you're out of the CIA, you're working at Deote. 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. Um, and what happened then? This was that was 2007 during the Bush, right? It was in December of 2007. Yes. So, I I went

3:55 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 US 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 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. Well, 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,

4:41 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. Um, 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. The whole thing really hurt the country, but um and then lied about it in public, which you're not supposed to do. I mean, let's you're not supposed to do that. And no, you're just not supposed. 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

5:28 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 how are they investigating you? You know, I don't know. They never sought to interview me. I I ran out and I hired an attorney and um and we leaked that to the press that oh I'm represented by this legal giant in Washington DC. It was uh it was Plato Cateras who's no longer no longer living but one of the most famous lawyers in the one of the most famous lawyers the greatest in Washington and um they never contacted him. I 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

6:14 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 is it a federal crime to say the president is lying? No. Oh, it's not. Oh, so you're allowed in the United States, you're allowed if you see a politician lying, you can say that person is lying.

7:01 Call them on it. Okay. Okay. Just just want to because it is America after all, right? Just want to make sure. Okay. So, um, so they invest the FBI spends a year investigating you because you say the president is lying. Yes. Totally normal. Um, 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 and he's very much the peace candidate. He's for transparency. Well, I like to say that it was Saint Obama that came down from the heavens into the into the White House returns. That's right. And um but he's very much a I mean I remember um in fact being on uh on television saying you know he was this wildeyed peacenick lefty guy. Mhm. Oh no he wasn't. Oh he

7:49 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 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 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

8:36 this 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 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 like you're psychologically profiling the president. Oh, I think I think that's exactly what they do. And don't forget, they have an entire staff of psychiatrists and psychologists that do exactly that. And so they use the tools

9:23 um 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 '9s, they didn't even call him the president. They called him the first customer. I swear to swear to God is I know we're getting far a field and we will get back to your story but it it it doesn't sound like so if you look at the org chart the president controls CIA. Yes. But you're describing a 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 these CIA people,

10:10 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 I would say by definition, I

10:57 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 um 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 congress congresswoman from uh Venice California she was the chairwoman of the house intelligence committee during the Iraq war and uh 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

11:42 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. Yeah. 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 aids as a notetaker and he never briefed me." Which is also a lie. Yeah. Well, she was just a pure tool of the intel agency and of foreign government. And that's an ongoing problem on Capitol Hill is rather than being overseers, they're cheerleaders for the intelligence. So, how that is absolutely true and I' I've known them all and um you know that if you criticize any of the intel agencies, particularly CIA,

12:28 which obviously the most powerful um 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. Um 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 Moyahan is dead and Barry Goldwater is dead and all these other senators and congressman

13:16 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 or I I'll give you an example. When I got out of prison, I was invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence. and I went and um there was a senator there, a Democratic senator there uh 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 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."

14:03 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 um you can go through the roster of the you know the hundred members of the Senate and and then compare it to the list of the permanent you know the committee on intelligence um and those are the worst those are the most dishonest people they are they are the 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 the Senate intel committee is like just a sign that

14:48 you you know you you're one of the in crowd. Worse than that, like you're not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. No. How how do they identify the most morally compromised people? No. I I wonder if if this began with 9/11. I think that it didn't. I think it began earlier than that, like during the Clinton administration. Um, where everybody just where the the intelligence community was seen as a as a force for good. Yes. Which was odd to me. Well, I mean, that's I that's how I grew up thinking that for sure. I mean, it was not even questioned. When I first joined the agency, they were still sort of

15:36 getting over the whole um uh 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 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

16:22 of equilibrium. And then just naturally, inevitably, predictably, the tactics that that and other agencies used against foreign governments were used against the US government, the elected government and the 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 US persons. NSA spied on me and leaked the information to the New York Times and leaked the information. I remember it very well to control me, right? Oh, it's illegal. Guess what happened? Nothing. And here again, Congress just says, "Well, what are we going to do?" Yeah, we're afraid

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18:40 your real crime was calling the president a liar. Yeah. George W. Bush. You had to have thought that once he was gone, you know, it was going to be forgotten when 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 3 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 that nomination was withdrawn, you may recall, and he named Brennan instead the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John Brennan and I always hated each

19:26 other. I don't know why he hated me. I hated him for what we're very clear. Already seems like such a marvelous guy. Such a such a sweetheart. I found him to be a very dark figure, very dangerous. uh 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 position. I met him in 1990. January of 1990. Over 35 years ago. Yes. Okay. So, it's fair to say you Oh, I knew him very well. In fact, um, when I was the executive assistant to the

20:12 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. Why didn't you like or respect him? First of all, I thought he was unqualified. Number one, uh 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

20:58 promoted Brennan. But he promoted him into jobs that he simply wasn't qualified for, like the station chief in Riad. This is a guy that had been an analyst for, you know, 20some 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 of operations in Riad in Riad, one of the most important places in the Middle. Complicated place. Very complicated. And then when he went back, he he named him the deputy uh uh 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 I always

21:45 believed he was morally unqualified. John had a reputation as being vindictive. Uh he had once worked for a woman who didn't like or respect him and she let him go. He got a job uh 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 there was a group of guys that that came of age with him and he all promoted all of

22:32 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. Um, 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 soap box 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

23:21 just pretend that the law doesn't exist, right? Oh, we're the good guys. So, let's let's uh 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 PS. We execute. 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 McNamera, ordered an

24:07 investigation. That soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years at Levvenworth. But then in 2002, like magic, it's all legal. So water boarding 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 water boarding for a moment? Sure. So, a prisoner is uh strapped to a board with his feet elevated compared to his his head. There's something put in his mouth like 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

24:52 drowning. In fact, in many cases, you are drowning because a lot of water is getting past that that cloth. In the case of Abu Zuba, and we can talk about him later if you want. Um, we drowned him. His heart stopped beating and he had to be revived so that he could be tortured more. That's what waterboarding is. Why is it done? The idea is this is this is a term that the CIA came up with. The idea is to instill the feeling of learned helplessness in the 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

25:39 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 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 the 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 911 for for

26:25 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 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 con 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.

27:11 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. Um, but 187 times like and KSM ended up confessing to the Daniel Pearl murder, which we we know for a fact he wasn't even in Pakistan when Daniel Pearl was murdered. He confessed to it. He confessed to it. Mhm. 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. Exactly. Yeah. Um, so but 187 times. Mhm. And Abu Zuba 83 times.

27:57 They waterboarded him 83 times. But it was 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 the list of of torture techniques. There there were worse techniques. We we killed people with other techniques. For example, the cold cell. So you're 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° 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. We the Justice Department didn't say we could murder people. They said we could use these, you know, different techniques. They didn't say we could use this cold cell. That was just

28:42 made up. And people died. Mhm. 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 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's never said. They

29:29 um it 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. We're always looking for cool companies that make products that make you feel better. And that's how we ran into Bond Charge. Bond Charge offers a wide range of products that improve your physical condition, help you sleep better, perform better, and center your mind. Recover faster. maintain energy, etc., etc. They make blue light classes, red light therapy. A lot of different products like this, and they help you address the trials of modern life effortlessly and naturally. Now, one of the things they make is a sauna. We could go on and be boring about sauna. Take one every single day.

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31:01 hard to you know, you have an interest in this. Sure. But as objectively as you can, do you think there was a lot of useful information produced by all this torture? No, not by the torture. Listen, it 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 Zuba. They proved that if you treat a prisoner with respect and engage in rapport building and take some time to build this relationship, the prisoner will tell you everything that you want to know. And that's what happened with

31:47 Abu Zuba. 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 um gave that interview at the end of 2007 in which you said really just it was pretty spare interview. You didn't go into any detail. No. Investigation happens. is 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? I think of

32:34 all the problems that were going on in the world, there are other problems in the world, right? I think for two reasons. Number one, he genuinely disliked me. And he has this history of going after people, using lawfare, which now we all know what that means. Using lawfare to take down his enemies. Number one, Lawfair 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 Mhm. 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.

33:19 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 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 and 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

34:05 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." Sh. And then and then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." Try not to use the f word. This is my new This is my new thing. Self-improvement. uh journey I'm taking. But it it's making me mad hearing this because I mean you were in I happened to be in Pakistan around the time you were very dangerous country. I wasn't doing anything dangerous. Oh no. It was super dangerous place. The most dangerous place I've ever been on earth at the time. Yeah. 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

34:53 of aiding those terrorists. the enemy. It gets worse. That's really over the top. Oh, yeah. I I don't think I've ever told you this story, but when I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was the uh 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. And you were working for CIA at the time? No, I was working for John Kerry. Yep. When he was the chairman of the foreign relations committee. When was this? uh 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,

35:39 right? He was an Arabist and I 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. Surprised somebody didn't call the cops. So, um, we talked about the the Israeli election, the Turkish election. We talked about the peace process. I 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

36:27 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 uh 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

37:13 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 love kind of everyone who lives in DC get, you know, has had something like what you described, but I've never heard of anybody going to the authorities over it. So, um, 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

37:59 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? Um it was uh on lower Wisconsin, the famous Italian place. Oh. Um Oh, where they give you after dinner drinks at the end. Um yes. And the ladies in the front window making the pasta. Such a great restaurant. Filamina. Filamina. Thank you. It's been forever. Sorry. I love Filamina. It's wonderful. It really is wonderful. So, so I I I do it. And in that final lunch, he says, "I got promoted. I got my dream job. I'm going to be the number two at the Japanese embassy in Cairo." I

38:44 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 there was a memo to Peter Stro who actually put not really put the cuffs on me in in 20 uh 2012. the Peter Stro. The Peter Stro, he actually I'll get to that in a second, but um one of the one of the FBI agents wrote to Peter Stro and said, "We should end this operation.

39:31 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? Mhm. Mhm. Because I hadn't committed espionage. John government down actually. 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. Who was the guy? The Japanese diplomat. No, he was just an 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. You sure this happened? 100%.

40:18 It's all 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? So, like, I have friends who have a a lot of interesting information on the Oklahoma City bombing. Oo. 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

41:04 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 I'll get the explosives." Well, he's an FBI informant. The FBI gives inert explosives. These idiots go out to the Route 82 bridge and try to blow it up. It doesn't blow up. And then the FBI comes out from behind the bushes. They got 20, 25, and 30 years in in prison. Why would they do that to Why would they Why would they do that? It wasn't their idea to blow up the stupid bridge. But but why why were they targeted? Because this is how FBI agents get promoted. They don't get promoted by not arresting

41:50 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, well, 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 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

42:37 they do. You need to shut down the FBI right away. I would not object to that at all. And in my case, they charged me with three counts of What is the 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 and then they try to destroy you. Yeah. Like and your because your crime is you didn't like John Brennan when you both were junior guys at the CIA because you correctly said the President George W. Bush was lying was lying cuz he is a liar unfortunately. Um, and so like let's spend millions of

43:23 dollars. Million dollars of the taxpayers's money is what they spend 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 did 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 bigname clients.

44:10 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 Pieta tear there." So, instead of staying in a hotel, because things are going really well right now, you should you should talk to a real estate agent. It was so exciting, right? And then 22 FBI agents raided my house. When? Uh January 12th, 2012. 2012. 2012. They investigated me for 3 years. How 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 like 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 was the

44:56 third one? Uh and the the torture was was signed by the president. Yes. Mhm. All true. All true. And so for five, six years they investigate you without telling you. Mhm. Now, what were they doing to investigate you? They were They had my phones tapped. Actually, actually tapped. Yep. They um 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 readify.com. So, if I want to write you an email, I put, you know, tucker carlson.com.readnotify.com. And when you access it, it'll show me Tucker Carlson read your email. He read

45:42 it for 2 minutes and 37 seconds. He forwarded it. He deleted it. He filed it. Whatever. And this is where he was located. And it has a a a town and it'll have sometimes geo coordinates. Damn. So, I I wanted to write a Freedom of Information Act request because I was thinking of writing a book about a a 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. Um, actually, I I I called a 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 I'll correct it for you." So, I sent it to him and I got a read

46:28 notify notification and I looked at it and it said accessed in Washington DC. And I said to him, I called him and I said, "You're not in Washington today, right?" And he said, "No, I'm in LA." Why? I said, "Because somebody just accessed the email and it's in Washington." I said, "Hold on." Because it has 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 were under investigation." No idea. But they were looking at me and they were accessing all of my emails. They even

47:14 followed my family and me into church, into Target to go shopping and and they would write these stupid reports. Uh, 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. Mhm. Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. You may have noticed that the companies whose products you buy tend to kind of hate you. They're controlled by massive multinational corporations and they have all kinds of weird agendas that you're supporting when you buy their products. We didn't realize that nicotine pouches, which we've used for years, were in this category. We just want a nicotine pouch. And then they lecture you and take the money you give them to support things that you hate. So, we decide we're going to make our own. And we did. And it is, we can say,

47:59 not bragging here, just stating fact, the single best nicotine pouch in the world. It's called AL. And it comes in all kinds of excellent flavors. Wintergreen, tropical fruit, chilled mint, refreshing chill, sweet nectar, and a bunch of others that we're rolling out. By the way, there are 20 per tin, not 15 like some of our competitors will not be named Zen. And they're in 3, 6, and 9 millig. It is the single best nicotine pouch ever made. You will not regret it. Did Am I missing part of this? I don't Brennan 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

48:46 liars. Yeah. These are not crimes. No, they're not crimes. Exactly. 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. Um, right. I hope at some point we can talk about all the actual criminals who are richer living in my neighborhood. Richer than ever. Um, okay. So, but you don't know any of this is going on. When do 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,

49:31 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?" Cuz remember, I didn't know that this Japanese guy was an FBI agent yet. I said, "Sure. This is so freaking bonkers." Like, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, we have another case and we need your help." And I said, cuz 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 10:00?" I said, "Absolutely." So, I went at 10:00. And I said, "What do you want me to do?" I said, "I was to the FBI building downtown." Yes. I said, "Is it what? The Russians? Who is it?" Well, you know,

50:16 before we get to that, he says, "Uh, 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 want 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 um when you were in Pakistan and you were describing this uh 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 9 months to write that book and 22 months to get it cleared at the CIA's uh publications review uh 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

51:02 then I said, "What what what are we talking about here?" And then one of them said, "Well, we probably should tell you that as we're speaking right now, we're raiding your house. We're confiscating all of your electronics. And holy you're gonna 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? Mhm. Mhm. Yep. And then one of the one of the female drain the drain the swamp is not

51:48 strong enough. 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. Um in Kansas, maybe. Yeah. At Levvenworth. Um Oh, excuse me.

52:34 One final sentence. I thank God that I had the presence of mind to say I want 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 Stro was standing there and he said, "Did he implicate himself?" And the guy says, "Not really, but I'll tell you about it in a second." And he turned to me and he said, "You're free to go." Did you have any idea what this was about? No. No idea. No idea. There they they charged me with This is like a bad dream. It It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. I I

53:20 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 what happened. Did you call home and ask your wife what was going Yeah. And she was just wonderful. She 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 yourself? Actually, excuse me. Exactly. Yeah. talking that way to your

54:07 wife with a newborn baby. Mhm. 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 I we c we we counted actually we got something like 65 or 67 calls from the media that that night. I just shut my phone off. We unplugged the we had landlines back then. Uh one of the local networks put a truck in front of our house with a spotlight on the house. No. Oh, it was humiliating.

54:55 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 cuz I worked there." And the president authorized it and lied about it in public. That's that's that's your sum total of your crimes. That was it. I'm going to cut to the chase here. This is so unbelievable. Well, so you go to your lawyer's office, you find out you're being charged with espionage. Mhm. 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

55:40 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? uh January uh Janu uh no 4 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 um on Fridays, right? Or Thursdays after 5 because there are no federal arraignments on Fridays. So you get arrested on a Thursday evening and you have to spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night in jail and then you get to go to arraignment by Monday. No, only because

56:27 I asked to see my attorney and so they told me I had to turn myself in at the FBI uh Monday morning at 10:00. 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 car loads of people out there at 3:00 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

57:13 car and walked into the FBI headquarters, they broke off. And then they they chained me to a to a metal bench. So I'm I'm like this actually with a handcuff. I Yeah. Yeah. And I said And Struck was there. Oh yeah, he was there. And you know, but I didn't know I didn't know he was Peter Stro 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, "Uh, hey, I wanted to get your thoughts on Peter Stro being uh fired from the FBI." I said, "I don't know anything about Peter Stro other than what I've read in the Washington Post." He said, "No, Peter Stro arrested you in January of 2012." I

58:00 said, "That was Peter Stro?" He said, "Yeah, it was Peter Stro. He was the head of the counter intelligence division. It was Peter Stro 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's a 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 GoFundMe. He got richer. He got richer. And there was a GoFundMe that raised another half a million dollars. Yeah. This is so a nightmare. So, okay. You're

58:47 charged just to Yeah. Three counts of espionage. Three counts of espionage, 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 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, 6 months after I blew the whistle, I got an email from a a a journalist who was writing a book on the CIA's rendition program. I told him, "I don't

59:34 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 I don't know what ever happened to him. He's probably retired and living in Virginia somewhere. They got me. I confirmed the

1:00:22 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. Mhm. 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

1:01:07 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 treachery. Welcome to Washington. It's 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 I the day I can leave. It's like nothing is as it seems. Everyone's lying. Everyone's pretending

1:01:52 to be something he's not. Mhm. And underneath it all is the willingness to to hurt people, to kill them. I mean, yeah. Yes. Exactly. It's not just like, you know, we're competing and I'm like 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 sad. Speaking of which, I took a plea to make the 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 40 45 years. 45 years in prison. And one of the one of the uh attorneys in in the Obama holder justice

1:02:39 department said to me at the first profer meeting, they offered me 45 years and this woman says, "Take the deal, Mr. Kiryaku, and you may live to meet your grandchildren." Who what do you remember her name? I don't. I remember she had a Vietnamese name like Nuen or Tran or something like that, but she ended up like getting promoted in the Biden Justice Department. really became very very important. Yeah. Yeah. I hope I hope that she becomes famous for that because 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

1:03:25 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 6 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 in actually you're facing the death penalty initially penalty because you told the truth about

1:04:14 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. Mhm. 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 a statistic? The Espionage Act was written in 1917. Yes. To combat German saboturs 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 unamerican moment really without any question. Probably

1:04:59 one of the worst presidents we've ever had. Woodro Wilson. Double without any question. Yeah. Destroy Christian Europe for no reason at all. Right. Yeah. It 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 19. Most Americans didn't have electricity in 19 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

1:05:44 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. Sorry. 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

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