Max Miller is a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio, married to Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio senator Bernie Moreno.[1] Kiriakou describes the allegations against him, as reported in the New York Times, as “horrifying”: that Miller scalded his wife’s chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her, held a gun to her head, pushed her against a wall and slammed her head, and fractured their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.[2] A restraining order was filed against him, and against Emily Moreno’s attorney, after he grabbed the attorney in court.[3]
Kiriakou’s own reaction is personal rather than analytical: “If my son-in-law laid a finger on my daughter or my granddaughter, I’d wreck his life in more ways than one.”[3]
The political arithmetic
The scandal’s importance to Kiriakou is what it could do to a state Republicans no longer expect to contest. Ohio “used to be a purple state. It’s not purple anymore. It’s red” — and yet he judges the affair capable of costing Republicans a Senate seat, a House seat and the governor’s mansion at once, all of them “seats that Republicans just cannot afford to lose.”[1] Miller’s district is safe on paper and was won by Donald Trump.[4] A poll conducted by a Republican firm nonetheless put him five points behind his Democratic opponent, with 41 per cent of voters viewing him unfavourably against 25 per cent favourably — and, Kiriakou stresses, with the Democrats having spent nothing at all attacking him.[5][6] What circulates instead are recordings of emergency calls and audio of Miller describing injecting testosterone in his office.[6]
He files the case alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, who was expected to walk into the office and was instead “literally booed off the stage” in front of what should have been a friendly crowd.[7][5] Asked what makes a politician keep running in the face of evidence like this, Kiriakou gives a two-word answer: “Narcissism. Sociopathy.”[8][9]
The CIA rule
Two days after covering the Ohio scandal, Kiriakou returned to Miller in his case-officer rankings and produced the only genuine F of the exercise — reached through an institutional rule rather than a personal judgement.[10] Having summarised the allegations again — beating his wife, scalding her with hot water, breaking their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone — he says simply that “that is not the kind of person you want at the CIA.”[10][11]
The disqualification is mechanical: “There’s an internal rule at the CIA that if you have been credibly accused of spousal abuse or domestic abuse, you may not carry a gun. And if you’re overseas and you’re not allowed to carry a gun, you’re no good to the CIA.”[11]