U.S. President Donald Trump in Evian-les-Bains, France, June 17, 2026. REUTERS_Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump has made news over accusations of selling or exploiting his presidential pardon power for money. But now one former CIA counterterrorism officer wants Trump to pardon him for revealing one of the nation’s “darkest chapters.”
In 2007, the Times reports John Kiriakou “exposed one of America’s darkest secrets to an audience of millions on primetime television,” when he revealed that his colleagues had waterboarded terror suspects to extract information in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
For years prior to Kiriakou‘s revelation, the CIA had hidden the brutality of its “enhanced interrogation” of prisoners shackled naked in stress positions, deprived of sleep for 24-hour periods and confined for days in a coffin-sized box. But Kiriakou’s damning on-the-record information carried political, legal and diplomatic consequences for the United States when he described how suspected al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded for information.
“For many Americans, it created a moral dilemma that fundamentally altered their view on the war on terror,” reports the Times. “… Six years after Kiriakou leaked sensitive information to journalists, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Today, he is pleading for a retrospective pardon from President Trump.
“You shouldn’t send people to prison for telling the truth,” Kiriakou told The Times from his home in Arlington, Virginia.
Barack Obama ended the Bush administration’s rendition program, and five years later, a Senate committee report revealed that while Zubaydah had some knowledge of the 9/11 plot, he was not a member of al-Qaeda nor had he played any role in the attacks. The committee eventually concluded that none of the torture methods used on Zubaydah, or the others, yielded “actionable intelligence” they could not have obtained through standard questioning.
“Kiriakou felt vindicated. But it brought little solace to the 62-year-old, who to this day is burdened by the role he played in one of the darkest chapters in American history,” reports the Times. “Each man is suspended in purgatory: Kiriakou trying to clear his name; Zubaydah, now a ‘forever prisoner’ of Guantanamo Bay, neither charged with a crime nor offered any prospect of release.”
Meanwhile, critics say Trump is doing damage by abusing his presidential pardon powers in his second term, pardoning politically-connected Ponzi scheme criminals and other lawbreakers who scammed individuals of millions — even relieving them of having to reimburse their victims.
“We had justice and now it’s kind of like … ‘we’re going to let these criminals go out and do it again’,” reported 80-year-old Colorado pig farmer and Ponzi victim John Long.
The New York Times estimated that Trump made more than $1.4 billion since he was elected to his second term, in part from felons and wrongdoers seeking his clemency.
The Times reports Kiriakou has submitted a formal pardon application and awaits a decision. He said that a senior administration official told him “it could happen in six hours. Or maybe he doesn’t like your face, or maybe he doesn’t like your suit and then it never happens. You have no way of telling.”