A Response to John Kiriakou
I can't say I was ever explicitly warned to walk away from the Don Reynolds story
A friend pointed me to an article on CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou’s Substack from earlier this month in which he cites my reporting for The American Conservative on the Donald Reynolds case and alleges I was threatened by the DOJ.
I want to clear things up and add a little more detail, because this is probably not over. Kiriakou’s post is behind a paywall, so I’ll quote the two relevant paragraphs:
I’ve also been encouraged to write about this case by Marty Gottesfeld, the whistleblower and hacktivist who was incarcerated with Reynolds at Marion and is now in the Communications Management Unit at the maximum-security penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana.
The advice I’m looking for is severalfold: 1) What questions haven’t been answered by the reporting already done. The American Conservative was off to a great start. But I’ve been told by multiple people that “DOJ” (I don’t know if that means lawyers or FBI agents) warned the journalist to walk away. And 2) in the realm of activism, is it even possible to challenge a sentence that amounts to the death penalty? As you’ll see, Donnie Reynolds was never accused of harming anybody. But life plus 75 years? It’s draconian.
First, I’d like to say I’m glad Reynolds’ case is finally getting some more attention. Nobody covered it at the time, which I find rather strange.
Second, I want to clarify that nobody has explicitly threatened me over this story. I did speak to one of AG Bill Barr’s deputies about the case, though it was in a non-reportorial capacity so I’m not able to divulge who or what was said. A lot of strange things have happened to me over the past few years, but after you’ve worked on five or six stories that have a chance of provoking retaliation—Hunter Biden, Google blacklisting, Don Reynolds, January 6—it’s hard to know who or what is putting pressure on you. Is it possible I was sort of frozen out because of all of this? Yes, I suppose it is, though it’s not something I’ll ever be able to prove. I have a new phone number now and avoid using my old email.
What Kiriakou appears not to know is there was an effort to get Don Reynolds clemency in the Trump administration, and I was involved in it. I realize this transgresses journalistic boundaries, but I did it for two reasons: chiefly, I think he deserves clemency, I’m clear about that in my original article for TAC. My mind has not changed about that. Second, given the pressure brought to bear against Reynolds’ family and others who have worked on the case, I worried that might happen to me, and creating a paper trail at the highest level serves as a kind of protection.
I’m not going to say who I talked to in the Trump White House, but I have reason to believe Reynolds’ case was looked at at the highest level. I spent the last two months of the Trump administration biting my nails and hoping it would go through—watching it fail, while pardons and commutations for various corrupt political operators and white-collar criminals did. It was an embittering experience, that’s for sure.
After Trump left office, I figured Reynolds’ chances for clemency in a Democratic administration were fairly low. I worked briefly on a podcast to bring more attention to the case, but after seeing the story land with a thud, and seeing all the ways you might be wrong about certain aspects of it, I dropped it. I felt too close to the story at that point. I used to speak on a fairly regular basis with Donald Jr’s mother and father, but when I got rid of my phone, I stopped. If they, or Marty Gottesfeld, feel I have abandoned them, I’m sorry. There’s only so much I can do by myself.
I will say, however, that recordings have been made of the Reynolds family and various people who knew Don Jr: the black community in Knoxville has very much not gotten over this case. Nor should they, there is nothing normal about it.
This is speculation on my part, but I think more or less the reason why the government is trying to keep this stuff under wraps is because of the existence of a politically unpalatable alliance between the feds and the Sinaloa Cartel, which involved multiple agencies. The pieces of it are already in the public record: Fast and Furious was the effort to arm them, the DEA non-prosecution deal was a second agency piece. The Sinaloa Cartel is more restrained in their use of violence than other cartels, they’re powerful, keeping them in control allows the flow of drugs to be managed—there’s a certain realpolitik logic to it, but as I said, politically unpalatable.