Ro Khanna is a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from California. Kiriakou states a personal liking, “I like Ro Khanna very much”, before grading him A in the case-officer rankings.[1]
The reasoning turns on the two things he looks for in an operations officer. The first is motive: “I think Ro Khanna is one of these very few selfless people. Ro Khanna cares about the greater good.”[1] The second is the quality he treats throughout the exercise as the operational one, “he has the kind of personality where people want to be around him. And I think that that would make him a successful case officer.”[1] He places Khanna alongside Matt Gaetz, a former Republican congressman he assesses on the same personability grounds despite the distance in politics.[2][3]
The settler-M4 detention (July 2026)
On a July 2026 trip to the West Bank, Khanna was detained by Israeli settlers who were “brandishing American-made M4s”, and the IDF, when it arrived, sided with the settlers and continued the detention. When Khanna’s translator told them “these are Americans, they’re on a visit sponsored by the American embassy, it is an official US government visit, and one of the men in the car is a member of Congress,” the settlers and the IDF “laughed at him.”[4][5]
Kiriakou’s line on the tactical error: “They made a huge mistake. First of all, most of these settlers are Americans. They’re American citizens. They’re going to need to be reigned in. Second, official US foreign policy is to oppose the expansion of settlements. But where they really screwed this up is detaining a member of Congress. Khanna has a vote on the budget like every member of Congress does, and he can cast his vote against military or civilian aid to Israel.”[5][6]
Kiriakou reads the political consequence off the prediction markets: “If you look at Kalshi, the predictive app, it has moved Khanna from, you know, number 66 of potential Democratic presidential candidates up into the top 10. It’s given him a platform. It’s given him a name. And the more that people criticise him and say that he set it up, the more his name is out there, the more he’s able to establish this position, his position on Israeli settlements and expansion, and it makes him a serious person.”[7][8]