Matt Kibbe (3:23)

Probably just as well. But I have to talk about the process and the procedure just for a second, because I think it's in historical. Anonymous. I can't say that word.

Thomas Massie (3:36)

Anomaly. Thank you, you told me. Now mine's got water in it. I think yours has vodka.

Matt Kibbe (3:42)

Wow. This is, I just got back from Europe, so it's actually happy hour where.

Thomas Massie (3:46)

I'm, you know, you can drink clear liquid on the floor of the House but you can't drink anything that's got any color to it. And I think that's discriminatory against bourbon. You know, bourbon is brown.

Matt Kibbe (4:00)

Yeah. But another attack on the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Thomas Massie (4:04)

Absolutely, yeah. Vile, vicious attack on my state's products.

Matt Kibbe (4:08)

Let's take one more long poll of my anomaly water. It's, it's, it's, it's extremely unusual to have a discharge petition get to 218 votes and come out of the House. And it's probably even more unusual to have it pass so quickly through the Senate.

Thomas Massie (4:32)

The Senate passed it before it got there. I've never seen this. Right. Usually we're stuck here before Christmas and they're like, well, we're going to be here another three days. And we're like why? And it's like, well, it takes three days to pass anything in the Senate. And this bill didn't take three days. It didn't even take one second. Because what the senators decided to do, they saw what an ass whipping the speaker took on this for five months. Just total stupidity to stand in front of this freight train of the American people and get run over for five straight months. Stand in front of the victims and justice and you know, a guy who's supposed to be for family values taken up for pedophiles. And the Senator saw this thing play out for five months and as soon as it passed the House, 427 to 1, Speaker Johnson assured everybody that this would get modified in the Senate, that it was a terrible piece of legislation and that we just needed to get it through and that the Senate would fix it. Well, what did the Senate do? John Thune said, no thank you. We think you've showed us with your 427 to 1 vote. This bill doesn't need any changes. And so they did unanimous consent within hours of it passing in the House. We didn't even send them the bill yet. It didn't get to them until 10am the next day. But the night before they had a vote to say, whenever the bill gets here, it's already passed, we're going to go ahead and deem it passed when it gets here. So they passed it before they had it. I've never seen the Senate move that quickly. And then it went over to the White House. And there was no bill signing. And there was a lot of speculation that, you know, he had, he has a certain number of days to sit on it if he wants. So there was speculation that he was sitting on this because there was no bill signing. The reality is he signed it the second it got there. Like once this thing started moving, it moved like a freight train after being stuck for five months. And when I was on your show back in, you said it was October. You know, the media was asking me several questions. They would say, well, surely, Congressman Massie, they always ask me, is one of your co signers going to take her name off of it? Because there were three women, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, who deserve so much credit. They were under so much pressure, they.

Matt Kibbe (7:00)

Took so much heat, so much.

Thomas Massie (7:02)

They had Lauren Boebert go over to the White House, allegedly in the Situation Room. And. But I had talked to Lauren Boebert earlier that morning and we talked about all the lies they were saying. And I think she went over there and won the debate and came back and didn't take her name off. So my hat's off to her. But the media always thought somebody would take their name off. And then they said, well, okay, you might get to 218, but will it pass in the House? Like, what do you think I'm saying? Well, it's going to pass. Yeah. I've got 20 coast Republican co sponsors on this or 12 Republican co sponsors. I've got more co sponsors than I do signers. And how do you co sponsor something without voting for it? So even if people are absent or don't vote or sit on their hands, it's going to pass. And they said, well, what do you think the majority is? Because you know, the President can veto this. And they said, I think we may get a veto proof majority. And they're like, I don't know about that, Congressman Massie. And I said, not only may we, I said, I think there'll be 100 defectors at least, which would. On the Republican side. I say defectors because this is ironic. The President described it as a hostile act to back my legislation. The White House said, anybody that backs Massie's legislation, it's a hostile act. When he, he eventually signed it, which must have been a hostile act toward himself, he signed the bill, but I said we could get 100. And I even told a few reporters, you know, this thing could snowball and it could be a unanimous vote. Like, do you want to be one of the 30 people who don't vote for this. And so as it turned out, it was 427 to 1. And Clay Higgins took a lot of heat for being the one no vote. And I went up and shook his hand because at least he didn't flip flop on this. You had a bunch of members of Congress who followed Mike Johnson's lead. He's not a good leader. He led them to protect pedophiles, which was an unsustainable position. And he led them in that direction for five months. And some of them took it to heart and went in front of microphones and went on TV shows and said that my legislation was poorly drafted. These things are all false. That it didn't protect the victims, that it would result in the release of child sexual abuse material. They told all the. They repeated all the lies that Mike Johnson said. And then all of a sudden one day they, after calling it dog crap for five months, they were told to eat the dog crap. And Clay Higgins is like, I ain't eating something I call dog crap. So I've got respect for him.

Matt Kibbe (9:52)

I could see you going up to him and saying, how does it feel.

Thomas Massie (9:56)

To be the only no vote one.

Matt Kibbe (9:57)

Guy that votes no.

Thomas Massie (9:58)

Actually, I joked, I said, if this weren't my bill, I'd probably be the own no vote, which is not true. If it's good legislation, I'll vote for it. But it passed the Senate and the President signed it. Let me tell you what the. And they've got 30 days to release the material at the DOJ. And 30 days from signing is December 19th. So they have until midnight on December 19th. Now, a lot of these disclosure bills say that you have to disclose it to Congress. And when they say Congress, they mean the speaker and the chair of the committees, which means it never gets released. So I wrote this legislation to say it has to be released within 30 days to the public. I don't trust my colleagues release it to the public. And not in some encrypted file format that's impossible to search. It has to be in a searchable format and within 30 days. And so 30 days is December 19th. We're almost, we're inside of a week or almost a week away from that. But here's what's happened. I had members of the media and even attorneys. I'm not an attorney, but they're just like legally illiterate. And they would say, but the law doesn't allow the DOJ to release these materials. And grand jury precedent doesn't allow grand jury material. The Judges have already ruled on this. Surely you're not legally illiterate, Congressman Massie. And he said, well, listen, I watched Schoolhouse Rock, and here's the way I understand it. If there's an existing law and then you pass a new law and they contradict the new law, is the new law like it overrules the old law? And, in fact, that is why we took the steepest hill to climb to get the Epstein files released. Like, we could have convinced the chair to do a subpoena. Right. And then the DOJ just thumbs their nose at you because it's a subpoena, and you could try to refer them for contempt of Congress. But is the DOJ going to prosecute the doj? No, we tried that with Eric Holder. Okay. We found him in contempt, and he did. Surprisingly, he didn't refer himself for criminal investigation. This DOJ wasn't going to do the same thing. So a subpoena wouldn't work. Well, the speaker of the House, he offered a placebo. He wanted the members who were going around disparaging my legislation and Ro Khanna's legislation. We worked on this together. The members who were disparaging it, they said, man, we're getting chewed up back home. I can't pump gas without somebody coming up and saying, why are you covering for pedophiles? I need some cover on this. So the speaker offered a resolution of the House to say that everything had to come out, blah, blah, blah. Well, a House resolution is only binding on the House. Like, in order for something to be binding on the executive branch that Congress does, it has to pass the House and the Senate and be presented to the President. Doesn't have to be signed by the President. It has to be presented because he could veto it, and then we could override his veto. So the way this works, just getting back to Schoolhouse Rock, is if you pass a law, that's the law of the land. Now, the other laws that contradict it are in the past, recognizing that principle, that legal principle. There are three cases where there's grand jury material that are interesting to the public and to the victims. Although, let me put a little disclaimer. Most of the interesting material is not in the grand jury transcripts. Most of it is still in the possession of the DOJ and the FBI in the form of interviews with victims and suspects. Okay, there's 302s.

Matt Kibbe (14:15)

What are they? Yeah. What's a 302 again?

Thomas Massie (14:17)

So I don't know why they do this, but the FBI, a lot of times they don't videotape or audiotape the interview. They listen, they do an interview, and then they write down a 302 form, they fill it out and put the material there that they heard in the interview that gives a little rubber band in there that lets them maybe fudge things. I'm not sure why they do it that way, but that's the minimum basic. They could record it and videotape it, but the minimum basic thing they have to DO is a 302. And the victims lawyers told me that they know there are at least 20 men in those 302 forms that have been implicated by victims. And even though Kash Patel has testified to the Senate that Jeffrey Epstein was the only perpetrator of any sex crime associated with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, which it's just too hard to believe if you have a thousand victims and nobody else was involved. And the, and the victims, which we like to call survivors because they're still here and they made it through this. They've, through their lawyers, they've told me there's more names in those 302 files. Now, if the DOJ didn't prosecute and didn't take it to the grand jury, that wouldn't be inside of the grand jury material. So that's why I had to give this little footnote. But it is interesting. There's three cases. There was the old case against Epstein in Florida. There was the new case against Epstein for which he. The first case he got a light sentence, you know, home detention, blah, blah, blah. And then he went on to perpetrate these crimes for many years and I would say work for intelligence agencies. And then his second conviction was in New York. And that's going to have some. That's the one that put him in prison. And then there was the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell. And these are federal prosecutions. So those three judges, when requested by Pam Bondi's DOJ to release their grand jury material, said, we can't release it. The law and precedent, because of you wouldn't want. The operating theory here is if somebody never got convicted, why would you release their name? Because it would be embarrassing and maybe soil their character. Well, my law says specifically that you can't redact names and evidence to avoid embarrassment. Like we put that in there. So the doj, Pam Bondi's doj, if they were sincere, I got to give them a lot of credit. I suspect something else afoot. Maybe they thought the judges were, would rule differently, but the DOJ went back to these three judges after being told we can't release the grand jury material. And they said, in light of the Epstein files Transparency act passed both chambers of Congress and signed by the President. Can you now release the material? And guess what? Two of the judges said, yes, we're going to redact the victims names and we'll give you that material in light of this new law because it overrides the old law. We're still. That was Epstein's old case in Florida, Maxwell's case, for which she's serving in some minimum security facility with, you know, special treatment. We haven't yet, but I think we will soon hear from that third judge on whether he ascribes the same principle. And then any other legal argument that the DOJ was going to make for their own material or the FBI's, you know, they is gone. Except for we make an exception for if it would compromise an ongoing investigation. And this is what makes me a little bit suspicious. Pam Bondi, on the eve of the passage of this bill, announces she's reopening the Epstein case because there's new material. And so they're going to do an investigation. Now they have to specifically cite why the material they're not releasing, the release of, which would compromise their ongoing investigation. Like the law requires them to do that. I don't think they can open. They could open 30 investigations and they still won't be able to keep all this material from coming out because it just covers it basically casts a shadow on a silo of some of this information if they have an ongoing investigation. So what we have done, I've sent with some of my other colleagues in Congress, we sent a letter to Pam Bondi asking for a briefing. Could you come to us and let us know what the new information is that warrants opening this investigation? That you said isn't warranted. By the way, her reason for opening this investigation implicates Kash Patel's testimony to the Senate when he said Epstein was the only criminal here. And I have no evidence of anything otherwise. Well, Pam Bondi's found something that Kash Patel didn't. And the survivors know of things that Kash Patel didn't. So it'll be interesting to see what she. And we requested that meeting to happen. And the date we requested has already come and gone. So I don't know if she intends on complying with that.

Matt Kibbe (20:02)

Does she have to.

Thomas Massie (20:07)

She doesn't have to respond until December 19th. And that's sort of when the rubber meets the road. And if Congress passes a law and members of the administration don't follow that law, there's a generalized statute. We didn't have to write a new. You can be convicted of this for this, for this, and serve this much time. There's a generalized statute. If you don't follow a law, you're criminally complicit. And if they don't release it at the doj, they're criminally complicit. If it had been a subpoena, you could say they were in contempt of Congress. But because we made it a law, we took the steepest hill to climb and we climbed it and we got there, it's a crime not to comply with it.

Matt Kibbe (20:57)

Thank you for joining me today on.

Sam (Free the People host) (20:58)

Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.

Matt Kibbe (21:29)

And to a point you made in the last episode. And I want to emphasize this because it's easy for people that voted for draining the swamp and reining in the deep state and lots of frustration that none of that is happening. It's important to note that ultimately you were able to do this because the American people demanded it and there was enough public awareness and enough public pressure, so many independent journalists who could, who could maintain a narrative other than the official narrative, that it may be the case that if enough people demand it, we can get all sorts of things done.

Thomas Massie (22:13)

Yeah, this quickly devolved when I introduced the discharge petition, which if you missed the first season of this, it's a procedure that, whereby if you can get half of Congress plus one to sign a piece of paper, auto pins are not allowed and you have to physically be present to sign it. You can't phone it in. You got to go to the floor of the House to sign it. Just getting people to go do that, you know, even if they want to do it, is a herculean task. It hit 218 signatures. If you can get 218 signatures and you can keep them on there without taking their names off, then you could force a bill to the floor of the House. And I was able to shave 30 days off this process by using rules they didn't know I knew. Normally a bill has to sit for 30 days before you can start the seven day waiting period and then start collecting signatures. What I did was take an existing shell bill that had been introduced in the first month of Congress and had been sitting there. Just called a good government bill, and it doesn't really do anything. I went and found that parked car and put the payload in it. So my discharge petition didn't require 30 days for a bill to mature. I just changed every word of a bill with a rule. And, you know, I had some help. They're smart people in Congress. I'm not going to say I came up with all this on my own. A lot of them work for me. But it also comes from connections that I made. Being here for several years and knowing people on the Rules Committee and institutional knowledge, I know where it resides and how to go find it. So anyways, was able to accelerate this. But what happened is as soon as I sprung this on them, they first. What is it? First they laugh at you, first they.

Matt Kibbe (24:22)

Ignore you, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you.

Thomas Massie (24:25)

Yeah. And then you win.

Matt Kibbe (24:26)

Yeah.

Thomas Massie (24:27)

Okay. We, we quickly went through past the ignore and laugh stage to within a matter of days. The White House had emissaries on Capitol Hill trying to. Jeff Freeland is one. For instance. He was. I ran into him on the street and I said, I don't begrudge you doing your job. I understand you're doing this, why you're doing this. And he said, you're just moving too fast for me. I said, well, I made a mistake. I got 12 co sponsors before I put this in the hopper and now you know which 12 people to whip. And he kind of laughed and I said, look, we'll be on, we'll be on the same side 90% of the time. This is just one of those 10% of the time where we're not on the same side. And so I don't, I've never. Other than that one exchange, I don't really have any interactions with him. I have no ill will toward him because he was doing his job. But he was sent over there and he was running around trying to keep people from signing it or get people take their name off and the name's locked in. I had three and I needed two more. And it was siege warfare. And when everything, like when the concrete set up and I had 216 names and I wasn't going to get any more more, the media thought, well, that's the end of Massie's run. But what we knew And I didn't say for several days is there were three vacancies of turnover in Congress, and all we needed was for two of those to get filled and I would get to 218. So it killed me not to tell people we had already actually got to 218. But Speaker Johnson drugged this out for it's like, five months. It was siege warfare for five months. No side gained any more. But then I gained one. A few months in, I gained one. A few more months in, I gained the other. The speaker was able to delay that by 50 days, which is unprecedented. He refused to sign in a new. Swear in a new member of Congress. He said, well, we're only. The government's shut down and we're only having pro forma sessions. I've never been in a government shutdown where Congress also quits working. It's kind of ridiculous. But Speaker Johnson decided that was the best strategy, just to keep everybody out of D.C. and not do anything. And so we have these pro forma sessions every four days where they just meet for 30 seconds, say prayer and a pledge, and then gavel back out and announce the next pro forma session. And the Senate does the same thing that, ironically, that's to keep President Trump from making recess appointments. Like, I don't know if he's figured that out yet. Like, I think he just did.

Matt Kibbe (27:17)

He was complaining about it.

Thomas Massie (27:18)

I heard him grousing on a hot mic. Yeah, that's the kind of thing Susie Wiles should be telling him. And she should be over here spanking Mike Johnson and saying, quit having these pro forma sessions. You're holding up my agenda. Why am I the only one telling you this? Like, there are, you know, lots of Republicans.

Matt Kibbe (27:39)

You're not even invited to the Christmas party.

Thomas Massie (27:41)

Right. I want to go to the Christmas party and tell Trump how Mike Johnson is holding up his agenda. That's what I would do.

Matt Kibbe (27:47)

Yeah.

Thomas Massie (27:48)

Okay. So it was siege warfare for five months, and the only way we could keep up siege warfare on the Castle, so to speak. We had the President against us. We had the speaker against us. We had the AG against us. We had the FBI director against us. I would say we had Fox News against us. But Fox News didn't report on anything. It was like, total blackout on this. So if you're a Republican, you don't even. You still don't. If. If all you do is watch Fox News, you still don't know this is happening.

Matt Kibbe (28:21)

Right.

Thomas Massie (28:24)

So we had all these forces against us, but we had two very important things for us. And one, we had the survivors and we did two press conferences and you couldn't. The president was simultaneously calling it a hoax and calling it a hostile act to back this legislation while we were convened on the steps of the Capitol, right in front of the steps of the Capitol. Capitol with these survivors telling their stories. They're not going away. So this wasn't going away. And then we had the people calling up their congressmen and saying, what's your deal? We were told even by the president himself that these files would be released. Why are you opposing this? And they had all their excuses, legislation poorly drafted, blah, blah, blah. And they said, well, what are you doing? Well, the Oversight Committee is working on this. Just, you know, we've got a blue ribbon panel of some experts that will get to the bottom of this. Like, they had a lot of things they could say, but the people weren't buying it. And the people kept the pressure up. And so that's ultimately, when I got to 218, the reason everybody had to vote for it, except for one in the House and the Senate, was they all, nobody's going to get reelected if they don't. Some of them did it because it was the right thing. They should have signed the discharge petition, and they didn't because they were scared. But that was an act of omission. It wasn't commission. Once you and I kept trying to explain this to the reporters is it's, you don't get. You don't get in trouble for not doing something with voters like most of my colleagues don't. They can sit on their hands and not do something, but it's when you have to do something, you either have to vote yes or no. If you do the wrong thing, that's when you get in trouble. And so really what Ro Khanna and I did was to force them into a spot where they had to do something. They could have all voted no. This could have gone down in flames. But when they were forced to do something, they did the right thing. Not all of them because they were convicted in their hearts to do the right thing. Most of them because they knew they couldn't get reelected if they did.

Matt Kibbe (30:36)

Yeah, you got a heart out. Coming up in a couple minutes. But I want to give a shout out to Marjorie Taylor Greene, your friend and colleague, who appears to have paid quite a price for what she did, to be that she and your other Republican colleagues were all the 218th vote. And for reasons I don't fully understand, Trump has really gone after her, gotten Quite nasty.

Thomas Massie (31:04)

And he's still attacking her after she announced she's going to leave. Yeah, it's really low class. He's called her a traitor. You know, I've received death threats from the left and Marjorie's received death threats from the left. And some of these are incredible. I mean, they've resulted in arrests and. But it's a new thing to receive death threats from the right. And that was happening to Marjorie and to her children. And Marjorie is a successful woman. She's a business person. There's this totally fake narrative that through some kind of insider trading, she's gotten rich since she got to Congress. No, she succeeded in business by treating customers right and hiring people and signing the front of the paycheck instead of the back of the paycheck. And you can go look at her financial disclosure forms. That's where she made her money. And then there's also been this recent argument that she should leave right now. She shouldn't wait until the end of this year because that mysteriously aligns with the five year vesting period of her pension. A congressional pension. What she's going to draw isn't that much. And I discovered when I came to Congress, you're forced to pay into it if you're in the House, in the Senate, senators can opt out of that congressional plan. And it's actually the same for all federal employees. But congressmen participate in the same. It's called FERS. So I introduced legislation, actually, Ron DeSantis and I fought over who was going to introduce it. It's called the EPIC act, ending pensions in Congress. And so he carried it. And I was a co sponsor while he was in Congress. And when he left, I finally got to introduce it myself. But I've got two bills. One is to just end defined benefit pensions and let everybody continue to participate in the 401k type program that's up here. And the other is if we're not going to end them, just let us opt out. And if Marjorie had been allowed to opt out, I bet she would have. But since she had to pay into it, I mean, I'm defending her. Why shouldn't she draw it? But she's been maligned. That stuff's in the noise, the pension stuff. And did she trade stocks or whatever? She's not some insider trader. Look, they don't give me and Marjorie the inside information. I guarantee you that if there are any stock tips, they would give us the fake ones and we would lose our ass betting on the things that this leader and the chairman told us to bet on. And I understand why she left. So she's successful. She's getting death threats. Her kids are getting death threats. She took up for the president when nobody else would. She was dragged into a courtroom and testified. I mean, they've tried to criminally convict her. She succeeded every time because they underestimated her. And even the people that elected Trump did not appreciate her enough. She gave me a heads up before, you know, she announced publicly. And for about 15 seconds, I thought about begging her to stay. And then I realized I would never do that to a friend. And I told her, you're too good of a friend. Like, I understand exactly why you're doing it, and I don't blame you. And you'll be a lot. You'll be a lot healthier and maybe, and I hope people learn a lesson from it that, you know, they're losing the strongest MAGA legislator who's ever been elected to Congress and the strongest supporter of the president. And she. She took some votes she didn't want to take a few times for the president. And he has, you know, it's. He has no. He's expressed no thanks to her and in fact, is like, kicking her on the way out totally wrong. So I don't blame her. Now people are worried, am I going to stick around?

Matt Kibbe (35:39)

You were about to scare me because you're like that. For 15 seconds, I thought you were going to say, you know, I might just join you.

Thomas Massie (35:45)

I have joked that if they would quit fighting me, it might get boring and I would just leave. But because they're fighting me right now, especially this election, it's a referendum. It's not. It's not all about me. It's about whether you can be a voice like Marjorie Taylor Greene and still get reelected. By the way, I am confident that if she had run again, there were people saying, oh, she couldn't run again, blah, blah. No, she's a great fundraiser. She has the support of her people back in Georgia. Even the people that love Trump, they love Marjorie. Especially the people that love Trump love Marjorie. And she's safe Red district. She would have got reelected. But my race, it's a referendum on whether you can be like Marjorie, vote independently. And by the way, Marjorie and I didn't vote all the way. Exactly the same, all the time.

Matt Kibbe (36:43)

Time.

Thomas Massie (36:46)

And still get reelected. I say I vote with Republicans 91% of the time, but in the 9% of the time, they're taken up for pedophiles starting new wars or bankrupting Our country. I ain't going along with it. And so the question is, can you diverge from your own party 9% of the time? Will they allow that much dissent and still can you get reelected? And I think I'm going to get reelected. I'll be outspent massively, most likely, but I've earned the trust of my constituents. The thing I hear the most back home is not, oh, I, oh, I agree with you all the time. Like, there's never a vote you've taken that I didn't agree with. That's not what I hear most frequently. What I hear most frequently back home is, you know, I don't agree with you all the time. Maybe 80% of the time or 90%, but in the, in the 10 or 20%, I don't agree with you. I know you believe what you're doing and you're fighting, and I'll take somebody who's doing that over a rubber stamp, somebody who comes up here. You never know their name because they never raised their head. They get reelected. They're, they're. They don't really try to get things done. They don't rock the boat. They play by the rules, even if the rules are broken. And they just, you know, they can get perpetually reelected like that anyways. That's the referendum. I can't not run because then everybody loses hope if I quit or even if I lose. And that's why I don't just have to run. I have to run and win. But I think I can. I think my constituents, you know, according to my own polling, they still support me by wide margins. And the president, people know he's not always right. They, they know that he's. Occasionally he takes bad advice. Occasionally he tweets things that he shouldn't tweet. And, you know, he was wrong on the Epstein files. First he was right, then he was wrong, and then we helped him be right again. So, you know, it'll. It'll all shake out. I think I'll be back here in a year talking to you after having, let's see, it's. This time in a year will be right after November. But my real Showdown is on May 19, whether I can win the primary with tens of millions being spent against me.

Matt Kibbe (39:21)

All right, thank you, sir.

Thomas Massie (39:23)

Thank you.

Sam (Free the People host) (39:25)

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org. Sam.