Ilhan Omar
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Ilhan Omar is a U.S. Representative whom John Kiriakou credits with sponsoring a rewrite of the Espionage Act in two consecutive Congresses, working with his friend Chip Gibbons, who wrote the bill. Asked what he would do first if granted three wishes, Kiriakou says rewriting the Espionage Act would be his first, adding "shout out to Ilhan Omar because she's working with a good friend of mine to do exactly that."

Kiriakou says the bill has no chance of becoming law under a Republican-controlled House, not on the merits but because of who is sponsoring it: "The Republicans aren't going to pass Ilhan Omar's bill into law. She's Ilhan Omar. They don't even want her to be an American citizen." He calls the result "just politics," and suggests the same bill from a senior Republican might fare differently.

In a separate interview, Kiriakou says the bill, drafted with attorney Chip Gibbons and modeled as an affirmative defense for whistleblowers, has now been sponsored twice by Omar and has never made it out of subcommittee either time, adding that there has been no substantive whistleblower reform in the United States, at either the state or federal level, since his own case. Asked who in Congress could take up the fight on issues like the Epstein files after Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation, Kiriakou named Omar and the progressive "squad" in the House as the most logical, if politically controversial, successors.

The Minneapolis dinner

In January 2026 Kiriakou was invited to a dinner with Omar, one of about twenty guests, the night before what he describes as effectively a general strike in Minneapolis. He relayed her account at length the next morning, and marked out the parts he thought mattered.

The first was that the administration "has underestimated the resolve of Minnesotans repeatedly." Omar's argument, as Kiriakou reports it, was partly meteorological: these are sturdy people, it is routinely twenty below zero, and the ICE personnel brought in from Washington, Texas or California are not used to Minnesota winters, "this is going to get very old for them very quickly." The second was that Minnesotans read the operation as a federal attack on their city and state and would not roll over for it. The federal government, Omar said, had expected people to run screaming from the room and hide in their homes; instead there were thousands of people at least temporarily hiding others in their homes so that they could not be found. Kiriakou's own conclusion was that it would get worse before it got better.

Omar had come to the dinner straight from a series of budget votes, and gave Kiriakou the second story of the night: the Democrats, "utter and complete and total sellouts", in his gloss, had demanded that the Department of Homeland Security budget be stripped out of the omnibus, producing what Omar called a "minibus" that funded the entire government except Homeland Security. Every Democrat voted for it; the Republicans held together on the separate Homeland Security vote.

Days later, discussing a meeting between Trump and Omar, Kiriakou's line, that the Democrats "are salivating to inherit" an executive branch this powerful, was quoted back to him on air. His answer was three words: "They won't change anything."

See also

- Espionage Act
- John Kiriakou
