The killing of Alex Pretty was the shooting of a man by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January 2026, and the subject of John Kiriakou’s most direct prediction of criminal liability for serving federal officers anywhere in the corpus.
The comparison
Told by the host that the crisis felt like a Kent State moment for the administration, Kiriakou said the phrase had been taken out of his mouth. “This is Governor Rhodes and Kent State all over again.”[1]
The comparison is not casual for him. Kiriakou has described the 1970 shooting of unarmed students by the Ohio National Guard as a formative event of his own politics, and as the historical measure against which he judges federal violence against civilians. Invoking the governor rather than the guardsmen places the responsibility at the political level.
The cover-up, and the clock
His reading of the official response was summary. “If it looks like a cover-up and it smells like a cover-up, it’s a cover-up.”[1]
Against that he set a single point of law. “But the thing is, there’s no statute of limitations on murder. And so Donald Trump can pretend all he wants that this guy Pretty was the aggressor. We watched the video. This guy was executed in cold blood in full view of a hundred people. And it’s on tape.”[1]
The prediction that follows is unusually specific about mechanism. “Donald Trump’s not going to be president forever. Eventually the state is going to be able to conduct an investigation — a real investigation. The FBI is going to be ordered to cooperate. ICE is going to be ordered to cooperate. And people are going to go to prison.”[1][2]
The objection raised against it
The host did not accept the prediction unaltered, and put the practical difficulty to him: that by the time any real investigation begins, evidence will have disappeared or been destroyed, and witnesses will have moved, become hard to locate, or died. Kiriakou’s answer to that was a single word of agreement.[2]
He does not resolve the tension. The case, in his account, is both certain to be prosecutable in principle and likely to be gutted in practice — which is, on his telling, exactly what makes the delay valuable to the people responsible for it.