Giuliani's Associate Offered Trump Pardon To Ex-CIA For $2 Million: Report

An associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had offered an ex-CIA officer a presidential pardon in exchange for $2 million.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative, had reportedly been offered the pardon when he met with Giuliani and his associates at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to a report published Sunday by The New York Times.

“It's going to cost $2 million — he's going to want two million bucks," the associate told Kiriakou.

The former CIA officer said he laughed at the proposal and refused to take the associate’s offer, according to the Times.

"I laughed. Two million bucks — are you out of your mind? Even if I had two million bucks, I wouldn't spend it to recover a $700,000 pension,” Kiriakou told the associate.

A person close to Kiriakou reported the conversation to the FBI. Giuliani later disputed the report, saying he did not work on clemency cases because of potential conflicts of interest.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2012 after he disclosed the name of an officer involved in torture in secret prison facilities across the globe. He also disclosed the CIA’s torture program that had personally been approved by then-President George W. Bush. He revealed the existence of the program during a television interview in 2007, three years after he left the intelligence agency.

“I gave a nationally televised interview in December 2007 in which I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president [Bush],” Kiriakou said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“We have laws in this country that specifically ban the kind of torture techniques that the CIA used against al-Qaeda prisoners. We just pretended that they were legal. At the same time, the CIA actually killed prisoners in custody using these techniques,” he added.

Before his arrest, Kiriakou served as an analyst and case officer for the CIA for 14 years. He was involved in a 2002 raid in Pakistan that led to the capture of senior al-Qaida member Abu Zubaydah.