Kiriakou's case-officer rankings
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In August 2026 Kiriakou introduced a recurring segment ranking politicians "on how good of a case officer I think they would be", using what he calls the S-tier system. He credits his younger producer with explaining the scale: S means "you would be one of the best case officers in the whole CIA", and it runs down to F, meaning "you would probably be horrendous, you would probably sell state secrets to a foreign government for money, or you're sleeping with your source."

The governing criterion is not ideology. Kiriakou grades people he disagrees with at the top and people closer to his own politics at the bottom, and the qualities he rewards are honesty and the ability to make others want to be nearby, the raw material of recruitment.

The top of the scale

Thomas Massie is the first S. Kiriakou knows him, is "very friendly" with him and goes to baseball games with him through a mutual friend, and grades him on the same quality he looks for in an officer: "most definitely the kind of person that people want to be close to. He attracts that kind of attention, positive attention." Jon Ossoff joins him, "as honest as the day is long", with the note that liking his politics is not the point.

Two names are moved out of the category and graded as directors instead. Of Tucker Carlson, whom he considers a friend and disagrees with widely, he says: "A CIA case officer? I don't know. CIA director? Is an S." Mark Warner receives the same treatment, and the grade is given across a disclosed conflict.

The middle

Ro Khanna takes an A as "one of these very few selfless people"; Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman briefly named attorney general before Republican senators withheld support, takes an A on personability; and JD Vance takes an A on character, Kiriakou citing Hillbilly Elegy and Vance's upbringing. Marco Rubio is "probably the toughest one", "really really smart" but, Kiriakou suspects, one of the officers who would have been "jumping up and down to invade Iraq" and who would put policy ahead of intelligence; he lands at C. Rubio's grade prompts the only revision of the exercise: having placed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at C, Kiriakou reconsiders, "I think she's better than Rubio", and moves her up to B.

The bottom

Hakeem Jeffries takes a D as "a know-it-all narcissist who cares only about his organization"; Mike Johnson a D as a decent man and "arguably the weakest Speaker of the House in American history"; Nancy Pelosi a D as "one of the more dangerous figures in modern politics", with Kiriakou declining to elaborate; and Marjorie Taylor Greene a D on the ground that a case officer must follow many issues at once. Jim Jordan and Gavin Newsom take D grades for specific conduct rather than temperament.

Katie Porter is graded D for cruelty to her own staff, a "parade of current and former staff members" describing swearing, berating, thrown objects and humiliation, which Kiriakou says ended her run for governor of California, after an aside on her serial ambition: "Lady, pick a job and stick with it." George Santos, whom he calls not merely a liar but "what psychiatrists call a fabulist" who invents "intimate, intricate details" of events that never happened and answers exposure by doubling down, earns the only stated F, "We don't have the F there, so we got to put him as a D."

The genuine F goes to Max Miller, and on a rule rather than an opinion: the CIA bars an officer credibly accused of spousal or domestic abuse from carrying a weapon, and an officer who cannot carry a weapon overseas "is no good to the CIA."

See also

- Thomas Massie
- Jon Ossoff
- Mark Warner
- Tucker Carlson
- Max Miller
- Jim Jordan
- Ro Khanna
