CIA Whistleblower Says He Was Targeted By Brennan, Mueller, Strzok
A former CIA officer who revealed the agency’s waterboarding program to the media claims that he was targeted for retribution by some of the same government officials investigating President Donald Trump.
John Kiriakou tells The Daily Caller News Foundation what roles John Brennan, Robert Mueller, and Peter Strzok played in an investigation that he claims was intended to set him up with an espionage charge.
Kiriakou claims he was targeted in a sting operation directed by Strzok.
When the FBI asked John Kiriakou to meet at the Washington field office in January 2012, the former CIA officer says he gladly agreed to the request. “Anything for the FBI,” Kiriakou told the FBI agent who contacted him. Months earlier,as a senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou had helped the FBI investigate a Japanese diplomat who had approached him offering a bribe.
Or so he thought.
Instead, Kiriakou says the FBI was running a sting operation against him for what he claims is payback for revealing secrets about the CIA’s waterboarding program. The government officials behind that investigation have resurfaced in the probe of the Trump campaign, which officially began as an FBI matter on July 31, 2016 and is now overseen by the special counsel’s office. As the Obama White House’s number 2 official on the National Security Council at the time, John Brennan ordered the Justice Department to charge Kiriakou with espionage, Kiriakou says. As FBI director, Robert Mueller formed a 12-person task force to investigate the 15-year CIA veteran. And as a top counterintelligence official at the FBI’s Washington office, Peter Strzok oversaw the investigation and arrested Kiriakou on Jan. 15, 2012. “It’s no coincidence that the same people who were implicated in my case are implicated in these attacks against the president,” Kiriakou told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Kiriakou, 54, says that some of his supporters have directly raised the pardon issue with Trump. Kiriakou’s nightmare began years before his interview with the FBI, in December 2007, after he revealed in an on-camera interview with ABC News that the CIA had waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi national who the CIA falsely believed was al Qaeda’s No. 3 official. Kiriakou, the chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan, had helped capture Abu Zubaydah in March 2002. He resigned from the CIA in 2004 and joined the private sector.
After the ABC interview, Kiriakou was approached by numerous journalists hoping to speak with the first former CIA official to go on the record to speak about the CIA torture program. In exchanges with three of those journalists, Kiriakou revealed the identities of two CIA officers, one of whom had helped him capture Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou maintains that his disclosure were inadvertent and that he believed he was confirming information that the journalists already had. While Kiriakou has expressed remorse for sharing the names with reporters, he and his supporters have argued that none of the officers were threatened or harmed, and no CIA methods exposed. The CIA submitted a “crimes report” after Kiriakou’s comments, but the George W. Bush Justice Department decided against opening an investigation.
That changed just after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. “What we found in discovery was a memo from John Brennan to the Justice Department saying ‘charge him with espionage,'” says Kiriakou. When the Justice Department responded that Kiriakou had not committed espionage, Brennan responded, “Charge him with espionage anyway and make him defend himself,” says Kiriakou.
Years later, as CIA director for Obama, Brennan played an early role in the investigation of possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian government. According to the book “Russian Roulette,” in August 2016, Brennan attempted to pressure then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to publicize alleged links between the Kremlin and Trump campaign. ''' Brennan’s Kiriakou memos have not been made public. Kiriakou says they were provided to his attorneys solely for his case and returned to the Justice Department.
https://www.dailycaller.com/2018/11/14/kiriakou-cia-mueller-brennan-strzok/