BREAKING: Former CIA Official Says The “Deep-State”…

When John Kiriakou says there is a deep state inside the American intelligence apparatus and that it is dangerous, he is not speaking from a position of theoretical speculation or partisan loyalty to the man currently in the White House.

He is speaking from a position of direct, painful, personal experience with what happens when the permanent bureaucracy of American intelligence decides that an individual needs to be destroyed.

Kiriakou went to federal prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program.

He watched the people who actually authorized and carried out that program walk free.

And now he is on national television confirming the existence of the very institutional structure that destroyed his career, because he believes the American public needs to understand what it is dealing with.

Kiriakou said on the Hang Out with Sean Hannity podcast: “Of course there’s a deep state and it’s dangerous.”

He then described how it operates: “The next thing you know, you’re drowning in millions of dollars of legal debt, your reputation is ruined.”

That description is not a political talking point.

It is a first-person account from a man who lived through exactly the process he is describing, who watched the legal, financial, and reputational destruction machinery of the American intelligence establishment operate at full capacity, and who survived it.

Kiriakou made a claim that goes well beyond his own experience: he argues that his 2012 prosecution under the Espionage Act was deliberately designed as a template for the tactics later deployed against Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and others in the president’s circle.

“Brett Tolman, the former U.S. attorney from Trump One, former U.S. attorney for Utah, said the Kiriakou case was the template,” Kiriakou said, adding: “The template for the Democratic Party’s policy of lawfare.”

The allegation is specific, attributable, and significant.

A former U.S. attorney is saying on the record that a case against a CIA whistleblower was used as a precedent-setting exercise for a broader campaign of legally structured political persecution.

Kiriakou’s biography is essential context for everything he says about the CIA and the deep state.

He joined the CIA in 1990 and spent over a decade as an intelligence analyst and counterterrorism operations officer.

He led the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, one of the most significant al-Qaeda operational figures apprehended after 9/11.

He was present at and had direct knowledge of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.

When he went public in 2007 and confirmed to ABC News that waterboarding had been used and that it was torture, he became the first United States government official to make that confirmation on the record.

The CIA filed a crimes report the same day.

The charges that followed were brought under the Espionage Act and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a combination that was used to construct a case against Kiriakou for disclosing the identity of a covert officer to a journalist.

Kiriakou pleaded guilty in 2012 to a single count of violating the IIPA and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.

He served approximately 23 months.

The architects of the torture program he exposed were never charged with anything.

The CIA officials who authorized and supervised the program were not prosecuted.

The contractors who conducted the waterboardings were not charged.

Kiriakou, who told the truth about what the program was, went to prison.

That disproportion is not ambiguous.

On the Tucker Carlson Show, Kiriakou explained how the CIA effectively operates independently of elected leadership:

“Donald Trump took a lot of guff in his first term when he used on a regular basis the term ‘deep state.'”

He described how career intelligence officials within the CIA can effectively shape or resist presidential directives, outlasting and at times undermining U.S. presidents.

Carlson posed the question directly to Kiriakou: does the president control the CIA?

The answer Kiriakou gave was that the organization chart says yes, but the operational reality is considerably more complicated.

The structural mechanism through which the deep state exercises its independence from elected oversight is not a mystery or a conspiracy.

It is the natural product of institutions built around permanent career professionals who manage classified information, who have relationships with each other that predate and postdate any particular administration, and who have developed a shared institutional culture over decades that defines acceptable behavior in terms that elected officials cannot easily challenge.

A president who comes to office intending to fundamentally reform these institutions immediately discovers that the people he is trying to reform control the information he needs to govern and can withhold, delay, or selectively provide that information in ways that shape his decisions.

Kiriakou’s description of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s efforts to reform the agency since his appointment provides a current-day reference point for what institutional resistance to presidential direction looks like in practice.

The resistance that Ratcliffe has encountered in pursuing declassification of UAP materials, in restructuring the agency’s analytic functions, and in reducing what he has described as the politicization of intelligence products is being encountered precisely because the permanent bureaucracy believes it has both the right and the ability to manage those processes in ways that minimize the president’s ability to direct them.

The deep state, as Kiriakou describes it, is not a formal conspiracy meeting in a room and issuing directives.

It is an informal, culturally cohesive network of career professionals who share assumptions about what American foreign and intelligence policy should look like, who have institutional tools available to advance those assumptions, and who use those tools when elected officials attempt to deviate from the direction the permanent bureaucracy favors.

The tools include withholding or shaping intelligence products, leaking selectively to sympathetic journalists, bringing legal and administrative actions against individuals who challenge the bureaucracy’s preferred direction, and simply waiting out administrations they disagree with.

James Comey confirmed the waiting strategy on NBC’s Meet the Press just weeks ago, telling career DOJ and FBI personnel to hang on for two and a half years until Trump’s term ends and they can rebuild the institutions.

John Brennan confirmed the existence of a resistance legion inside the intelligence community on MSNBC.

Now John Kiriakou, who paid with two years of his life for telling the truth about one of the CIA’s most consequential programs, is confirming on national television that the institution these former officials are rallying their networks to protect operates with a level of independence from elected accountability that the American constitutional system was not designed to accommodate.

Kiriakou’s position in this conversation is unique and significant precisely because he does not fit the partisan framework that usually structures debates about the deep state.

He is a career CIA officer who was prosecuted by a Democratic administration.

He has been critical of intelligence community practices under both parties.

He has confirmed the CIA’s torture program in terms that would have satisfied his most liberal critics, and he is now confirming the existence of the deep state in terms that align with the Trump administration’s institutional critique.

He has earned the right to be heard on both subjects, having paid for his credibility with a federal conviction and 23 months in prison.

The Obama administration’s prosecution of Kiriakou under the Espionage Act was the most aggressive prosecution of an intelligence whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg, and it was carried out by an administration that campaigned on the most transparent government in history.

The prosecution sent a message that was received clearly by everyone in the intelligence community who might have been considering speaking out about other programs: the government will destroy you if you tell the public what it is doing.

That message shaped the behavior of intelligence officials for years, and its effects are still being felt in the reluctance of people with direct knowledge of classified programs to come forward.

The fact that Kiriakou is now appearing on national television to confirm the deep state’s existence and danger is itself a kind of historical completion.

The man who was made an example is now describing the apparatus that made the example of him.