Ex-CIA Analyst: I Was Wrong on Russia. FBI Director Comey’s Testimony is Game Changer

John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA analyst, and whistleblower who exposed the Bush-era torture program and served 23 months in federal prison joins me for the interview on the podcast. The author of The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror tells me: "I'm sure yet, that the American people fully appreciate how important this is and what a big deal this is. A former CIA colleague of mine said yesterday that he had not seen anything like this since Iran-Contra or maybe even since the beginning of the Watergate scandal. I have been wrong on this issue for the past six months or so where I have gone on a myriad of news outlets and said that I'm just not seeing any evidence of Russian hacking, and if there had been Russian hacking, what exactly is it that we're accusing the Russians of doing? Director Comey made that far more clear [Monday] that this was a concerted covert action effort by the Russian government to influence the outcome of the election. Now whether or not it was the Russians that got Donald Trump elected, I still have doubts over it, but it was, indeed, interference in the US election. That's interesting, and it causes me to shake my head.” ABOUT THE GUEST John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He became a political prisoner after he exposed the CIA’s illegal and immoral waterboarding torture program, becoming the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.(www.johnkiriakou.com)