Jason Miyares
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Jason Miyares was the attorney general of Virginia from 2022 until his defeat in November 2025, and one of the very few Republican officeholders John Kiriakou praises without irony.

The expectation

Kiriakou is explicit that he got the man wrong at the outset. "When Jason Miyares, the Republican, he's Cuban-American, born in Cuba, when he first was elected attorney general four years ago, I thought: oh my God, there we go. He's a right-wing extremist. It's going to be terrible."

The correction

The verdict he actually reached is short. "No, he's been a perfectly fine attorney general." The host supplied the metric implied, never in the news, enforcing the laws, and Kiriakou let it stand.

On election night he put it more strongly, and flagged the effort it cost him. "Miyares has been a terrific attorney general. And it's hard for me to say that about a conservative Republican, but he has been an excellent attorney general."

The defeat

Miyares lost to a Democratic challenger whose private text messages about violence against Republicans had leaked less than two weeks before polling day. Kiriakou's description of the outcome contains no satisfaction at all: "and he was just unceremoniously thrown out last night."

He had, two weeks earlier, called the race "a dead heat", and had noted that the received wisdom was of large-scale ticket-splitting in Miyares's favour. Neither the polling nor the wisdom held.

Why he is in the corpus

Miyares is useful evidence against reading Kiriakou's political commentary as reflexively partisan. The pattern he describes here, an anticipated extremist who turned out to do the job soberly, and whose removal Kiriakou regrets, is one he applies in both directions, alongside his placement of the incoming Democratic governor as a 1970s moderate Republican.

The test he applies to both is the same, and it is not ideological: whether the officeholder is "never in the news, enforcing the laws."

See also

- The Jay Jones texts
- Abigail Spanberger
- Winsome Earle-Sears and the machine gun
