Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Rep. Thomas Massie on Trump’s Republican Party, AIPAC, and the Epstein Class (Transcript)

Shortly before 9/11, somebody put big bets in shorts against airline and bank stocks. Those are two businesses that were directly affected by the events of 9/11. Now, we know this happened because these are public markets, so there’s a record of it. But we also know because they admitted it. The FBI figured out who did it, but the FBI never got around to telling us their identity. So the largest federal law enforcement agency has known for 25 years who had foreknowledge of 9/11, and that’s demonstrable because they bet against the events of that day before the rest of us experienced them, and has never divulged their identities.

Now, we can guess as to why that is. Why would the FBI be protecting people with foreknowledge of 9/11? We don’t know for certain what the answer is, but we do know that they are doing it. They did it, and they’re still doing it. So if the identities of people who bet against 9/11, who shorted airline stocks before 9/11, are somehow classified on national security grounds and you’re not allowed to know them, then we can bet safely that whoever is profiting from the Iran War in public markets probably isn’t going to get any kind of insider trading violation. Probably not.

Are the Markets Real?

TUCKER CARLSON: But one thing we also have learned is that these markets are much more vulnerable, susceptible, maybe based on manipulation than we ever thought. And if you think about it, that’s kind of a surprise. Even people who complained about how central the stock market is to the American economy — and you can argue whether we have a real economy, if it’s based on anything, that’s an academic argument — but even people who thought, “Wow, we seem a little bit overinvested in public equities markets,” kind of assumed they were real.

A market’s a pretty straightforward proposition. I’ve got something to sell, you want to buy it. I’ll sell it for what you’ll buy it for and vice versa. It’s transparent by its nature. It’s self-correcting. That’s the basis of our economic system. Capitalism, free market capitalism. It always finds the right level, the rational level, because it’s based on the free exchange of money for assets. But that’s not what we’re seeing now. Not at all.

Markets are doing things you would not expect markets to do if they were behaving rationally in a free way, if they weren’t rigged. You would see certain commodities prices, including oil, go up a lot more than they have. Gold go up a lot more than it has. And yet gold and oil and other commodities have stayed far lower than you would rationally expect them to stay after 60 days of terrible news out of the world’s center of global energy production.

So the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for months now, in effect. And yet oil, as of airtime tonight, was under $100 a barrel, much lower than it was in, say, 2008. That is bizarre. But it’s more than bizarre. It’s fake. It is obvious. It’s become too obvious to deny over the past couple of months that public markets are not what they told us they were, which is to say open and free and equal for everyone to participate in.

It’s going to take a long time for that understanding to percolate down to the level of retail investors. But the knowledge is there and you can’t deny it — that some people are getting rich from this and most people aren’t. And it’s not exactly clear the mechanisms by which they are. But it’s very obvious that it’s happening.

We’re not accusing Bill Ackman of participating in this. It’s not like Bill Ackman would talk down share prices in publicly traded companies to make money. Oh wait, he’s done that his whole life. But in this specific case, we have no evidence of a crime, assuming it still is a crime.

Wars Are Profitable — For Some

TUCKER CARLSON: But we can say with great confidence that in this, as in every other war, some people will do just fine. In fact, they will greatly benefit from it, which is one of the reasons we keep having wars. Because they were enormously profitable. It’s hard for normal people to appreciate that that could possibly be true. People die. Innocents die in foreign countries. Your own country becomes poor. Your own service members die so you can get rich. Could anyone be that dark? Yeah. And we’re watching it now.

So there is a part of the population that thinks this has been a very good war and isn’t even aware that it might be unpopular with anybody else, because — in the famous words of Pauline Kael, who didn’t vote for George McGovern, who lost very badly in 1972 — we all live in our own worlds. So Bill Ackman doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t think this is a great thing. It’s a great war.

The State of the American Economy

TUCKER CARLSON: So how’s the rest of the country doing? Well, the chairman of the White House Council on Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, was called to the lawn today to give an account of the American economy. And that’s a tough thing to do. And we say this with great sympathy and no personal animus toward Mr. Hassett at all. But here’s the tape. Here’s what he said.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

KEVIN HASSETT: So the consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders, just like the corporate sector you’re seeing in the earnings reports. And they’re doing that because they have so much more money in their pockets. In fact, I had the head of one of the big 5 banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data. And just as Secretary Bessant said, credit card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else too.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Economic Reality Behind the Credit Card Numbers

TUCKER CARLSON: Credit card spending is through the roof. Now, again, you feel bad for the man who has to present those data to the public as if they’re a win. But think about this for a second. The average interest rate on a credit card, not even a new credit card, but an existing credit card, which is to say a credit card held by someone with a track record of paying money every month to the credit card companies. These are not high-risk credit cards. These are normal credit cards. The average interest rate in the United States right now is 23%. 23%.

And by the way, that goes up to 36%, probably higher, probably higher than 36%. But officially, 36% is the highest rate any mainstream credit card will charge you. You could go get a personal bank loan for 11%. So you could borrow money at less than half the rate than you’re getting from your credit card company. So why would anybody use a credit card and roll over the interest? 40% of American adults cannot repay their credit card balance. That’s 111 million people, and they are paying on average 23% interest. So that’s not a win. That’s a sign of desperation and impending poverty.

AI, Data Centers, and the Coming Economic Cataclysm

And keep in mind, we are living right now in the final moments before whatever AI is going to bring us — those data centers being erected in your town, the ones that you are paying for through higher energy costs, through the legacy environmental cleanup you’re definitely on the hook for. Those data centers are being constructed in order to eliminate half of all American white-collar jobs. So you hate to use the hackneyed cliché, “digging your own grave,” but it’s not entirely an overstatement at this point.

Those data centers going in, destroying the landscape in your town, eating up fertile farmland in some cases, certainly making everything uglier and providing almost no jobs — those are going up in order to facilitate AI. And the one thing, really the only thing we know about AI is it’s going to eliminate half of all productive work in the United States. That hasn’t happened yet. It’s beginning to happen. But all forecasts from the people who are developing it, who have every incentive to downplay the negative effects of the technology they’re creating, all the forecasts suggest in the next 2 or 3 years we’re going to see economic disruption on a scale we’ve never even conceived of.

Keep in mind that economic change always precipitates, always causes forces — economic forces — political change. And if the economic change is profound and abrupt enough, it causes revolution. The First and Second World Wars were a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Of course, Marxism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. But no technological change in all of history matches the abrupt and radical change now being promised by the developers of AI.

So all of this — the conversation we’re having about the American economy and how much money people have and how much they owe — all of that is taking place in the final moments before the economic cataclysm we’ve been promised by artificial intelligence. So it’s not like we can wait 10 years for this whole thing to self-correct, for markets to become honest again, and for people to make a wage sufficient to buy a home and raise children. This is all happening, which is to say people are getting poorer and far more indebted on the eve of what we should all be staying up late worrying about and trying to fix.

But instead, no one is worried about it in any position of authority. People seem to be wholly focused on cashing in on it. Build the 40,000-acre data center as soon as you possibly can. Get taxpayers to pay for it, in effect, by shouldering the costs of running it through higher utilities. And take as much money off the table as you can while you can. That’s what it looks like.

Now, maybe that’s an ungenerous interpretation. Maybe there are a lot of people who are really trying to build a better tomorrow through AI. And doubtless there are some of those. But big picture, that does seem to be what’s going on. And you know that because no one has explained to you how this is going to be good for you. Instead, they’re telling you that borrowing money on your credit card is a sign of economic health. It’s a sign that we’re on the right track. “We have more money to spend. That’s why we’re buying more on our credit cards.” No, people who have money to spend buy things. People who have no money to spend buy essentials on credit. And that’s exactly what is happening now.

The Extractive Economy and Its Discontents

Some of that is a reaction to the economic changes already wrought 2 months in by the war with Iran. Some of it is the downstream effect of years of bad economic planning, years of living in an economy where Bill Ackman makes $8 billion or something with an IQ of 105, with no track record of improving the country or creating anything, basically just leeching off the existing system, plundering it effectively. He hates it when you say that, but he’s never explained how what he does for a living is good for the United States or productive in any sense. It’s merely extractive. Probably worse than lead mining.

But all the gains, the substantial gains over the last 20 years, have not been broadly shared by Americans. They’ve gone upward. Now that’s a moral problem, maybe, probably, but it’s certainly a management problem. It is a problem of governance at a certain point, because it means a huge number of Americans — let’s go with the 111 million, the number that can’t repay their credit card debt — who have no vested interest in the system. They have a negative net worth. They don’t own anything. They are living here, but they don’t see a future for themselves or their families, or they may not have families, and they certainly don’t own anything worth protecting. And so what does that add up to? Social and political volatility.

So you would think the people in charge of the country who are benefiting the most — the people like Bill Ackman who think it’s been a really good war — would be very concerned about this, and they would not want to put any more economic pressure on this beleaguered population, and particularly on young people who seem to bear the brunt of it, probably because they have the least political power, so nobody cares what they think.

A healthy society would be totally focused on what young people think because they are building the society that will outlive the current leadership of that society. But they’re ignored. So if you were thinking longitudinally, if you were thinking about what’s best over time for your country, your civilization, you’d be focused on them and you would not casually add to their burden. But what we’re watching is a kind of frenzy of carelessness, of thoughtlessness, of callousness toward people whose lives have not gotten better over the past 30 years, but gotten measurably worse in every category of measurement.

Trump on the Cost of War with Iran

Now, you hate to pile on, and you hate to take the president literally, because I’ve said many times, Trump is not meant to be taken literally. Sort of like reading poetry. The theme is what matters. The feeling it evokes is what matters. I’ve made that argument, and it’s often true. But at some point, particularly when you’re talking about hard numbers — the prices of commodities, for example — in the middle of a war that is affecting those prices, it is worth paying attention to the president’s own estimates of the costs of this voluntary war that he started at the demand of Israel. So here is the president, I think yesterday, explaining his view on oil prices.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DONALD TRUMP: I also thought oil would go up to $200, $250, maybe $300, and I knew it would be short-term, but I thought it would go — I look today, it’s like at $102, and that’s a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Economic Consequences of $300 Oil

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s $100. It could— I thought it was going to go to $200 or $300. Really? What would $200 a barrel oil mean? Well, we’ve never had it. We’ve never had in the— and this is, these are adjusted numbers. We’ve never had $200 a barrel Brent crude, period, in world history. But what would happen if we did?

Well, I don’t know. $10 a gallon for unleaded at the pump, more for diesel, much more for jet fuel. What would that mean? Well, it would mean inflation, possibly hyperinflation. What would $300 a barrel oil, which the president said he imagined we could have, what would that mean? Well, it’s not even worth guessing because no one’s even modeled it out. No one’s even taken the time to write out the formula or guess as to what effect $300 a barrel oil would have on human civilization.

But you can be absolutely certain it would be the end of a lot of things that we take for granted. Certainly air travel, jobs. It would be a true disaster on the level of I don’t know, a national tsunami or hurricane. It would affect every person in the United States making less than $1 million a year. It would crush people already at $100 in the US. $100 oil. You just heard the president say it’s $97, something like that.

People around the world are worrying about famine because of course oil is not just used to produce gasoline and jet fuel and asphalt and kerosene and all the familiar products, it’s also used to produce fertilizer, all kinds of petrochemicals used in manufacturing, but fertilizer. And without it, crop yields go down and people starve in the most populated continent in the world, which would be sub-Saharan Africa.

So already you are seeing a massive human cost, not well reported in American media, to a relatively small spike in global oil prices. And here you have the president saying, “I thought it could be $300.” That’s like saying, “Well, I thought they might drop a neutron bomb on Chicago, but you know, I just wanted to risk it.” No president should ever be willing to talk that casually about the economic destruction of his nation.

Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and the Justification for War

The justification for it— “it’s worth it,” said the president, because Iran had nuclear weapons and you can’t let crazy people have nuclear weapons. So it’s almost not worth rebutting that with the facts, which are as follows: Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. It did not have ICBMs to deliver that weapon here or anywhere near here. It did not have an active nuclear weapons program, and the American intelligence community, all 18 separate agencies, determined that conclusively after studying it for years. And with the motivation to find said nuclear program, they couldn’t.

So no, Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. It was nowhere near getting a nuclear weapon, despite the lying you have often heard. That was not even an imminent threat. It was not close to an imminent threat, despite the fact the Israelis had told us in the US Congress for over 20 years that it was an imminent threat. That was a lie.

But you have to ask yourself, even if it was true, would that justify destroying the American economy? Would it justify driving 200,000 Britons into poverty in 2 months? And that’s just the opening salvo. Would it justify a famine in Africa?

No one wants to say it. There are a lot of countries with nuclear weapons. You don’t want any of them to have nuclear weapons because any normal person thinks nuclear weapons are bad because they are by definition weapons of mass destruction that kill innocents. So they are bad as a category. But there are a lot of countries that have them, including countries with leaderships that are filled with religious extremists, like Israel and Pakistan and in a way North Korea.

And the world has been able to continue for now almost 30 years with a nuclear-armed Pakistan. It’s not ideal. Maybe we should have done something during the Clinton administration to stop it. But we haven’t had to destroy the American economy in order to do something about it since then.

Of course not. And in fact, the deeper truth is that there is a kind of stability, as bad as nuclear weapons are, when rival nations possess them. India and Pakistan, which are countries with a long, almost 80-year history of hating each other and many wars in the interim, have managed to fight fairly bitter conflicts since 1947 without using nuclear weapons against each other. How is that possible? Well, the mutually assured destruction principle, which, as ugly as it sounds, is real. It’s absolutely real.

What you don’t want is a nation that feels no constraints whatsoever, that feels it can do whatever it wants. It feels it can roll into its neighbor’s sovereign territory and expel the population and kill people. We thought the lesson of World War II was that’s bad. But that’s kind of what you get when you have a country that feels it has unconstrained power. It can do whatever it wants. What does it tend to do? Well, whatever it wants.

And so you could at least make the case academically, even if you disagreed with the whole idea of nuclear weapons and thought they were probably inherently evil, even if you wondered where they came from in the first place, even if you had dark suspicions about the genesis of nuclear weapons, and some of us do. You could still make the case on a pragmatic basis that look at the effects. Look at the effects. They are less bad than this.

Trump’s Falling Support Among Young Voters

So that’s the explanation from the president. You can see why an administration that had higher levels of support from young people a year and a half ago than any Republican in memory— young people came out for Donald Trump to vote for Donald Trump. Why did they do that? Because they are dissatisfied with the system as it is. They understand it is rigged against them, because it is. And they felt that here was one man strong enough to stand up against that system.

They tried to put him in jail. They tried to impeach him twice. Here was a guy who understood he was up against and would take it on and was brave enough to do that. And a year and a half in, what they’ve seen is a guy who got in office and immediately took the side of the people who persecuted him for the preceding 8 years. He took their side and became their most valiant champion and began to persecute their enemies as he himself had once been persecuted. He switched teams.

And they look at this, and they may not understand all of the details, but they look at this in horror and they feel betrayed. And that is obvious from the polling numbers. And these are polling numbers that are so stark that you can’t actually lie about them. You can’t spin them. Donald Trump’s drop in support among voters under 30 is precipitous. It’s off a cliff.

And there are a lot of reasons for this. The Iran war, the refusal to release the Epstein files, the mounting debt. That most of them carry? How’s your average 27-year-old, 5 years out of college, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt from this 4-year college was supposed to make the difference between getting ahead and staying in your hometown and stagnating in some dead-end job? That kid likely has a negative net worth 5 years out of college, and in many cases they’re told point blank, “We can’t hire you. Because of how you look.”

How do you think kids like that feel about Donald Trump? Well, you should talk to some.

So at this point, you have to ask, what’s the solution? What are people like that, voters like that, young people, not exclusively, but heavily young people, what are they looking for? Well, probably what all people are looking for: honesty, fairness, decency, a sense of humor, courage, a willingness to actually stand up and fight entrenched power. That’s what they’re looking for.

Introducing Thomas Massie

And who do they look to? Well, there aren’t many. One of them is a guy called Thomas Massie. He’s a member of Congress from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, not the most important state in the union, not one you hear about too much. He’s a member of Congress, one of 435. You may have heard his name.

Why? Thomas Massie is in his district and probably nationally, but certainly we know for a fact in his district, the most popular person among young voters, 80% approval rating among young voters. Why is that? Well, once again, because Thomas Massie has made good on the promises that Donald Trump made to the nation, to these very same people who supported him in 2024. And he stuck with it.

Thomas Massie is a better standard bearer for Trumpism, for the America First ideology that Donald Trump ran on 3 times, than Donald Trump is a far better spokesman for that because he has not changed. And moreover, he’s a thoroughly decent man. Cheerful, kind, loves his family. His children love him. He’s self-reliant. He is, in short, the American they told us we should aspire to be. A man who doesn’t brag about himself, who says what he means, who stays true to his word, and who in the end, if it all falls apart, could take care of himself and his family. That’s the American ideal. And that is Thomas Massie. That’s not fake. That’s real.

And that’s obvious in the way that he behaves in public as a member of Congress. And it’s obvious in the way that he lives at home in the farm he lives in, in the house that he built with his hands. He is the man you want your son to be.

Massie vs. the Republican Establishment

And so you would think at this point Thomas Massie would have the full support of the Republican establishment in Washington. Oh no, no. Just the opposite. Thomas Massie has like 3 allies in the House of Representatives, a lot of people who like him personally, but only a very few who are willing to support him publicly because he has become the number one enemy of the Trump administration.

Well, how did that happen? How did a guy who ran for office on a clearer, more precise version of Trump’s own platform, who had 75% approval in the last election from his own voters, how did that guy become the number one person the Trump administration wants to destroy? 13 days from today in the Republican primary in Kentucky. How did that happen?

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but it seems pretty obvious this all began in this room on this show almost exactly 2 years ago in a 2-hour-long interview we did with Thomas Massie about a bunch of different topics, including his off-grid homestead that he built with his own hands. He at one point described the experience of serving in Congress and being asked to carry water for a foreign power, Israel.

Now, Thomas Massie has never been hot on the topic of Israel. Thomas Massie probably hasn’t spent 20 minutes in his entire life talking about Israel or thinking about Israel. He doesn’t hate Israel now, its leadership, Israelis. He’s kind of agnostic on the whole question even now. But at the time, 2 years ago, Thomas Massie committed probably the most dangerous thing you can commit in Washington. He explained how the process works.

How is it that members of Congress arrive there with a plan to help their constituents and their nation and wind up spending such a huge percentage of their time doing the bidding of a tiny Middle Eastern country of 9 million people? How does that happen?

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS: Massie on AIPAC

Well, part of the process revolves around a group called AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Here is Thomas Massie’s fateful description of the process in Congress. Watch.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: There’s a foreign interest group called AIPAC that’s got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East. We haven’t had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress. It’s a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They’re for anything Israel, and they’re a very effective lobbying group. They get in there. They try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress. They almost get—

TUCKER CARLSON: On what? On Israel. And I wouldn’t do it. And they said, “Why?” And I’m like, “I don’t do homework for lobbyists, right? I didn’t like writing term papers at college. I’m not writing one for you.”

What did they say? They said, “Oh, well, here, just copy Rand Paul’s term paper and put your name on it. We’ll accept that.” And I’m like, “No, I’m still not cribbing somebody else’s homework to do homework. I’m not turning in my homework for you.”

And what— I hear laughing, but you know what, I bet I may be the only Republican in Congress who hasn’t done homework for AIPAC. And it’s just what it is. It’s conditioning. They want you to do something very simple and benign. And for them, they don’t really grade your term paper. They just want to know that you’ll do something for them. And if you’ll do something for them as a candidate, you’re more likely to do something for them as a congressman when you get in there.

The Israel Lobby, Thomas Massie, and the Fight for Kentucky

TUCKER CARLSON: You will never hear the Israel lobby describe more precisely the humiliation rituals included, which are a key part of the process. Debase yourself and then you serve us always. But you’ll never hear it described more precisely, but also more good-naturedly. Massie isn’t mad. He finds the whole thing hilarious. “I’m a member of Congress. I’m not doing homework for you.” And he laughs and he means it. And his cheerfulness is real. It’s not a pose. He’s not angry at AIPAC. He’s just not playing along. He’s an American. He doesn’t have to play along. Get out of my way. Stop. He smiles, moves on to things he cares about, like keeping the United States from going bankrupt.

That is the way. That is the way right there that reveals a total unwillingness to play along with someone else’s charade, to become someone else’s servant or slave without any hatred at all. Thomas Massie isn’t mad because he knows he can’t be controlled. He’s not a rich man, but you can’t bribe him. He has everything he wants. He’s not mad at you. You’ve got your agenda, but he’s not going to serve it under any circumstances. Go away!

Because Thomas Massie is not a hater, because his position is rooted in principle and good-natured cheerfulness and American self-reliance and decency. And that’s so obvious to everyone who watches him. He became the number one threat. And next thing you know, the president’s favorite political consultant, Chris LaCivita — Chris LaCivita — is tweeting that Thomas Massie is, quote, “garbage.” Garbage. You just call that man garbage. A political consultant has the brass to call that man garbage. A guy who literally sells his allegiance to whoever will pay him is calling that man garbage. Yes.

Miriam Adelson, Chris LaCivita, and the Attack on Massie

TUCKER CARLSON: Now, why would Chris LaCivita say that? Well, because he’s been hired by an Israeli called Miriam Adelson, a woman who was married to the late Sheldon Adelson, who made billions in the gambling industry, now mostly in China, who was one of, if not the single biggest contributor to Donald Trump’s campaign last time. Now, she may be an American citizen, but she was asked point blank by the president on camera, “What country are you more loyal to, the United States or Israel?” And she indicated very clearly Israel, which is her right, of course. But she kind of, in stating that, gives up her right to influence American politics. People with loyalties, self-professed loyalties to other nations should not be involved in our politics. They certainly, certainly shouldn’t be central players in our politics. And yet now she is, as she was in the last election.

Miriam Adelson, who it’s not clear has ever been to Kentucky, is spending through Chris LaCivita, the president’s political consultant, who has decided Thomas Massie is garbage — whatever it takes to take the seat away from him — because he committed the crime of describing how things actually work in the US Congress. And that cannot be allowed. And as a lesson to others, future Thomas Massies, anyone who gets the idea that maybe I’ll get to Congress and tell the truth about how things actually work, maybe I’ll put my own country, my own community, my own people ahead of other concerns that have nothing to do with this country or its people — maybe I’ll let those people know, don’t bother because you’ll be crushed. You won’t win. And if you do, there’ll be Chris LaCivita out there calling you garbage, attacking your wife as they have, spending tens of millions of dollars against you just to make sure that no one else tries to be you ever.

A Referendum on Democracy Itself

TUCKER CARLSON: All of which leads to where we are right now, which is a moment where a Republican Congressional primary in Kentucky is the single most important political race of the year, because if they are successful in doing this — crushing a man, defaming a man, slandering a man, attacking his family purely for the crime of telling the truth about them, about how they operate, about the nature of the Epstein class — then you have to wonder, why are we voting in the first place? What is the point of all of this? Is there a reason to participate in the process if in the end some Israeli casino lady can come in and just determine the outcome with Chris LaCivita?

That’s not democracy. It’s not even a poor facsimile of democracy. It’s just straight up teeth-bared oligarchy. It’s shut up and obey. It’s a foretaste of life under AI. It’s the control grid, actually. And so while we can, it’s probably worth doing whatever it takes within the bounds of the law to prevent that from happening. Not because Thomas Massie is going to change the system single-handedly — he’s not, and he’s happy to admit that — but because crushing Thomas Massie for the crime of telling the truth is itself a moral crime. You can never punish people for telling the truth, and yet in Washington the only people who are punished are those who told the truth, and at some point that has to stop or the system itself lacks all legitimacy.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so for the second time in 2 years, here is Thomas Massie in his own words. Thomas Massie, thank you for doing this. You’ve got a primary in less than 2 weeks, 13 days. And so to take the time to come here, we’re grateful for it. It seems like this is — this primary is more than a primary. It’s a window into what MAGA has become, and it’s a referendum, I would argue, on democracy itself. And so just to frame the conversation around that idea, what was your margin of victory in the last race in Kentucky?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: In the last race, primary, I got 75% of the vote. There was somebody that got 13% and somebody got 12.

TUCKER CARLSON: 75% of the vote.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And in the race before that, I got 76%. And then the race before that, I got 81%.

TUCKER CARLSON: 81%. Now, the race you get 81%, you were already having conflict with Trump at the time, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. At the time, he was saying to throw me out of the party. Called me a third-rate grandstander, to which I claim I’m at least second-rate.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fair. So I’m going through this because I think it leads to today and it makes a really interesting point. So what is the current polling in your race?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s a single-point lead for me. It’s not very fluid. They’ve spent $10 million against me. And when I say they, I hope we get into they.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And it’s going to be close. It’s just going to be — the result is going to be based on who turns out.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it was 81% margin, 76, 75, like full-on blowouts in the Republican primary in your district in Kentucky. And now it’s within a couple of points and you could lose.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

$10 Million from the Israeli Lobby

TUCKER CARLSON: And the difference is they have spent $10 million against you. So I don’t think anyone would dispute that. That’s the difference, the money. Poured into this race from outside of Kentucky is basically pushing you to the point of almost losing, and you may lose. Where’d that money come from?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, it didn’t come from regular people. It’s come from billionaires, and 95% of it, at least 95%, has come from the Israeli lobby. I’ll give you their proxies: the RJC, which is the Republican Jewish Coalition, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson went together. They funded a PAC called MAGA Kentucky, which is neither MAGA nor Kentucky.

TUCKER CARLSON: But do any of them live — do any of them know who those three people are?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Miriam Adelson is the gambling magnate who ironically makes money from the Chinese now gambling and not in Las Vegas.

TUCKER CARLSON: And she’s literally an Israeli.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, she was born there. Yeah. She’s given over $200 million to the president. He puts her on the stage. He says that she’s influenced his own policy and attitudes toward Israel. And so she’s trying to buy a congressional seat in Kentucky along with the rest of these groups that are probably, by the way, getting her money as well.

There’s also another interesting faction called Christians United for Israel. They’re really just another wing of AIPAC and RJC that’s been used to co-opt Christians into supporting their position. And their position is more war. It’s more strife. It’s more bombs. It’s send more foreign aid. And those are the things that I’ve been voting against. So the real reason that this race is a serious race and I may lose is because a foreign lobby has fully funded — to the extent that they’ve never done in any Republican race ever before — my opponent.

Massie’s Record on Foreign Aid

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting because you’re not — I don’t think of you as an opponent of Israel or a hater of Jews, an anti-Semite, a man with hate in his heart or anything. I don’t think those topics have defined your terms in Congress so far, have they?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No. You can’t go find even a xenophobic tweet or Facebook post from me in my entire life. I’m the least xenophobic. I went to MIT, which is a real melting pot of different nationalities and races and ethnicities. And it was a meritocracy. And that’s what I’m used to — just come to me with your ideas. I don’t care what color your skin is or who your parents were. And let’s talk about things. But it turns out that I’ve never voted for foreign aid.

TUCKER CARLSON: For Israel?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: For Israel, for Egypt, for Ukraine.

TUCKER CARLSON: For anybody?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: For anybody. In fact, I’ve offered amendments as soon as I got to Congress in 2013. I had an amendment to defund the foreign aid to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time because they were in the middle of a coup. This is how ridiculous our foreign aid is. We didn’t even know who was going to control the capital. There were tanks in the streets and we didn’t know who the leader was. And my colleagues insisted on sending the billions of dollars to Egypt anyway. The question is, who’s going to cash the check when it gets there?

So I’ve got a complete track record of voting against all foreign aid. But it turns out there’s one lobby that’s very upset about that, and that’s the Israeli lobby. And so you’re right, this is a referendum. The question we’re putting to the people is, are you going to let a foreign country or lobbyists for that foreign country buy a seat in Kentucky and displace the one congressman who will tell you what’s in the bills, who will explain his votes? I explain all of my votes, especially on controversial bills, on social media to where anybody can see.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your position is that it’s not your position as much as it’s the fact you’re willing to disclose what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

The Conversation That Changed Everything

TUCKER CARLSON: So to add evidence to that claim, the last time you were on this show was almost exactly 2 years ago. It was a little later in May. I think you had just won your primary, 75%.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so you decide to come up here and we have this amazing conversation mostly about you and your life and the self-sufficiency with which you live and how you built your house. And it’s an amazing story. We’re going to repost that video soon because I want people to see it before the primary. But in the middle of that conversation, you said, yeah, there’s this group called AIPAC, and here’s how they go about corralling support in the Congress. And they have minders that follow you around. And I just don’t hate Israel. I don’t support foreign aid to anybody. And I don’t have an AIPAC minder. And I remember thinking, boy, I’ve never heard anybody explain how this works in the way that you did. I felt like that conversation was a pivot point in your political life.

AIPAC’s Influence and Campaign Funding

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It was. And you know what’s interesting? In the 2 years that have transpired since then, not one of my colleagues has said I’m wrong, right? Did anybody come out and say, oh, he’s full of it, I don’t have an AIPAC person that I go to dinner with every time they come to DC and back in the district? Nobody said that. They— I mean, they all have an AIPAC person. Now, some of them may not know it’s their AIPAC person, but they’ve all got an AIPAC person. And by the way, I have a lot of Jewish friends, and since that interview, they joke that they’re secretly my AIPAC person, right? When in fact they’re not.

TUCKER CARLSON: But that— it wasn’t just that you voted against AIPAC’s priorities, or some of them anyway, which you did, because there are people who have done that before. But you described and you opened to public view the process. You pulled the curtain back.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that was the crime, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The crime is transparency. It’s not obstructionism, because the votes they’re most upset about me for were 420 to 1 or 421 to 1 or 410 to 5. Right. Like, show me in any of those cases where my single vote out of 435, if everybody had been present, was obstructionist. It wasn’t. What happened, though, is people said, who’s the one person that voted against that? And then they go to my social media and then they read the bill and they’re like, what the hell? Why did my congressman vote for that?

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: What are the other 420 smoking? Right? And so— or what are they getting for that vote? Why did they take that vote? Why were they intimidated into taking that vote? And that’s the problem that I’m causing this foreign lobby is I’m causing people to ask questions for the first time. Who is my congressman’s AIPAC person? For instance, how much money do they get from AIPAC? Why did they vote for that bill that bans passages in the New Testament, that infringement on the First Amendment?

The Money Behind the Primary Challenge

TUCKER CARLSON: So because you revealed that, you got this swarm of big donors laying down big money to get you out of your seat. And you said basically it revolves around three — Paulson, Singer, and Adelson. Have they described why they’re doing this? Why would a casino magnate or a hedge fund manager, private equity guy, distressed debt buyer like Paul Singer, why would they care what happens in a Republican primary in Kentucky, of all places?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s to silence me. It’s so that I shut up. Look, if I lose on May 19th, I’ll be out of Congress on January 3rd of next year, and nobody’s going to follow my Twitter. Nobody’s going to go to my Facebook page to see what’s going on. I won’t be invited down into the secret SCIFs to read the secret interpretations of the laws that the executive branch is using to spy on you. I’ll be gone. The one whistleblower, if you will, in Congress will be gone.

And let me tell you who’s on the other side of this, who’s funding me. I’ve got— and this is miraculous, I think, you called it a referendum. I think it may be a movement within the MAGA movement is what we’re seeing, because I’ve got over 33,000 donors and the average donation is less than $94. These people, they don’t have a lot of money to give, but they can’t be intimidated, right, by the White House. They can’t have their environmental permits pulled on a big data center. The government of Washington, DC doesn’t have that kind of leverage on individual normal people. So those are the people who are funding me in this race. And if you want to be one of them, you can go to massiemoneybomb.com.

TUCKER CARLSON: MassieMoneyBomb.com.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, because we’ve raised almost $200,000 in the last 2 days just by going out there and saying, help me fight back. We’ve got to have some ads to run against these billionaires.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what do you think the full money breakdown is? And without getting boring about it, I don’t think people understand exactly how these campaigns are funded. So there’s— you can send money to someone running for office, but there are limits to how much you can send. You can send to something called a super PAC, and there are no limits at all. So it’s hard to kind of figure out, isn’t it, exactly how much is being spent?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, I think it’ll be after the race when people finally are able to compile the spreadsheets and look at the money. A lot of the donors won’t be disclosed until July, the super PAC donors, because they’re on a 6-month reporting cycle, whereas I have to disclose big donors every 2 days now once we get inside of a window with the campaign. But you got super PACs on each side and there’s a super PAC helping me, not as large as the Israeli super PACs, of which there are 3. But there’s a super PAC helping me.

Now, as far as hard dollar campaign money from real people, I’ve raised over $5 million this election cycle, which is probably more than I’ve raised in the entire time that I’ve been in Congress.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, yeah. I usually raise a couple hundred thousand, maybe $400,000 an election cycle. This time I’ve raised over $5 million. It’s because this situation is dire. Now, the other side, you might say, okay, well, how much money has he raised for his campaign? He’s raised about $1 or $1.2 million per quarter for 2 quarters. So he’s maybe raised $2.5 million at most.

But if you go look at where did that money come from, I think because of the show I did with you 2 years ago, AIPAC sort of gone in hiding and they’re trying to secretly funnel money to campaigns. And what we’ve realized and deduced is that they’re funneling money, hard dollars, not the super PAC dollars, but they’re funneling money from their donors to his campaign through a vendor, a payment vendor called Democracy Engine. It was started by one of the people who started ActBlue. It’s not a conservative, if you will.

TUCKER CARLSON: ActBlue, the Democratic— Yep. Bundler.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. So this is primarily a left-leaning payment vendor. I use a payment vendor called Anadot and some people use WinRed. Probably you’re familiar with that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I am.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So when you see something come through a payment vendor called Democracy Engine, particularly $50,000 per quarter — so if somebody’s reported $50,000 of expenses to Democracy Engine, and if the payment vendor Democracy Engine has been charging 5%, that means $1 million of money came through that payment vendor. And we’ve seen that in both of his quarters. So basically, as far as we can tell, about $1 million of his $1.2 million every quarter that you would think may have come from grandmas who are digging deep in their pockets when they get an email from Trump that says give to this guy — that’s not where his money’s coming from. It’s coming from AIPAC donors.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then AIPAC donors were using a Democratic fundraising operation to get the money to your opponent.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct. And by the way, one of these super PACs that’s aligned against me, United Democracy Project, UDP, they are a pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, left— like, not just left-leaning, like majorly leftist super PAC. And they are full on in my race funding my opponent against me.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is insane.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It is insane. I do think it might be a couple of years from now when AI gets smart enough and honest enough in the competition of AIs that it will tell you exactly what happened in this race, whether I win or lose. It can go back, look at the data and tell you, well, here’s what happened. A congressman from Kentucky was challenged and 95 or 99% of the money came from an Israeli lobby to take him out for merely telling the truth.

TUCKER CARLSON: And not even attacking Israel. No, that’s the thing. You didn’t even attack Israel. You’re not even hostile toward Israel. You’re not muttering about the Jews. It has nothing to do with that at all. It’s just you just don’t think the US government should be sending money to foreign countries, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, right. And by the way, that’s the position of my constituents. So what kind of TV ads are they running against me back in Kentucky? Are they saying Congressman Massie doesn’t vote to give money to foreign countries? Let’s fire him. No, they don’t run that ad. They run ads that distort my record. They’ll take a bill that had 3,000 pages in it, pull a page out of that bill and say he voted against this. It could be a pay raise for the soldiers or something like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: To try and turn you into a liberal.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct. That’s what they want to make it look like, which is hilarious.

The Case for Single-Issue Bills

TUCKER CARLSON: If I—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: By the way, if I could make one reform to Congress— so I voted for the Balanced Budget Amendment, I voted for term limits— but the biggest constraint, the most helpful thing for our republic would be if every bill had to address only a single issue.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amen.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Amen. Because right now we take thousands of votes, but they’re post offices and non-binding resolutions and things like that to make it look like we’re busy all year round, but it usually boils down to 2 or 3 votes every year that are consequential, must-pass pieces of legislation that have everything in them. And that’s the problem.

Voting Against the Big Beautiful Bill

Let me give you an example on the big beautiful bill. There are maybe 3 or 4 sins — and I’ll put that in air quotes — that I committed against the swamp that got me into this situation. And one of those is I was the only Republican who didn’t vote for Mike Johnson to be the speaker.

TUCKER CARLSON: The second was you were the only Republican— Mike Johnson turned out to be the worst speaker of the House in the history of this country ever.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And we’ve had some bad ones.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. John Boehner. No one cares.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. So I didn’t vote for the speaker there twice. At least twice they brought up a continuing resolution of Joe Biden’s budget. And I’m like, wait, I thought we control the House, the Senate, and the White House. Why are we just going to keep going on autopilot with all the things Joe Biden did? Yet they did. And I voted against those things.

And in fact, in one of those bills, they attached an amendment that had nothing to do with the budget to kill the hemp industry in Kentucky. Like, the hemp industry is almost dead. It’s like hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of jobs wiped out in one continuing resolution. Because everybody was afraid not to vote for it. And I voted against it because, number one, it was Joe Biden’s budget. Number two, it killed the entire hemp industry in Kentucky. That was another of my crimes against the swamp.

And when I voted against the big bill, they’re picking things out of it to run ads against me right now. Let me give you an example. So the draft version, the first version that passed the House of Representatives, defunded transgender surgery — sex changes basically — for minors. There was lots of good stuff and lots of bad stuff in that bill, but I voted against it because I said it’ll bankrupt the country. Okay, but it had that good provision in it.

The Senate took the good provision out that defunded sex changes for minors, and then everybody voted for the big beautiful bill again except for me. But it had the money for sex changes for minors. So because I voted no against both versions, they prefer to use the first version and run ads and say that I voted not to defund sex changes for minors, when in fact everybody who voted for that damn bill in the end put the money back in for sex changes for minors.

TUCKER CARLSON: What liars.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s a total lie. They put out that ad saying that these super PACs, again, they’re not talking. They’re taking — they’re distorting my record instead of telling you why they’re trying to flush me out of Congress. They want to flush me out of Congress because I don’t vote for foreign aid.

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TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s just — I guess what I find head-spinning, bewildering, and honestly infuriating is that a bunch of serious committed liberals are trying to kick you out of Congress on the basis of the lie that you are a liberal. Liberals are calling you a liberal.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, if you look at Chris LaCivita, who’s a liberal, who’s the president’s consultant, is calling you a liberal, and he’s too liberal for the district, says the guy whose values have no connection at all to your district?

AIPAC Donors and the Fight for Kentucky’s Congressional Seat

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, look at Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, the three people that fund MAGA Kentucky. They funded transgender activism, partnered with George Soros. They funded abortion candidates. They’ve done fundraisers for Chuck Schumer. Like, it’s true, they are Republican super mega donors, right? But they’ve given money to Liz Cheney after she voted to impeach Trump. And now they’ve cozied up to Trump and they’re influencing foreign policy of the United States and trying to take me out.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re controlling foreign policy of the United States. And I never got resolution to the big question. I’m sorry. What do you think the total — your opponent has received both directly and on his behalf to the super PAC?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think all in, they’ve spent about $10 million, their super PACs and their campaign. All in, we’ve probably spent about $8 million so far. And I would guess all in, by the time this is over, there’s going to be $30 million spent in a Republican primary.

It’s right now the most expensive Republican primary for Congress in the history of Kentucky. By the time it’s done, right now I hear it’s the second most expensive primary in the United States for Congress, but I believe by the time it’s done, it’ll be the most expensive primary in the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s just absolutely incredible to me.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The commercials have commercial breaks in Kentucky now. There’s so many damn commercials.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I just saw a spot they put up. And you tell me who did this, but it was AI-generated video of you with Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggesting that you were having sex with both of them. And basically saying you’ve got the same politics they do.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, it’s a 30-second spot created with AI. There’s a disclaimer at the beginning in font that nobody over the age of 65 could possibly see on the TV that says it’s AI. And it’s not cartoony at all. It looks like a real camera, you know, recordings that shows me walking hand in hand with the two of them, dining with the two of them, and checking into a hotel with the two of them, and uses the word “thruple.”

I’m hoping it will backfire on the just horrible individuals who’ve come up with this idea and think that it will get their rubber stamp, their puppet for Israel, into Congress.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s disgusting. Who is — so we haven’t even named the man running against you. Not that I guess it matters, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It doesn’t really matter.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is this? Who is running against you?

The Opponent: A Warm Body With No Ideology

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: What we’ve found out, he looks good on paper. He served in the Navy SEALs. He’s a boomer originally from Kentucky. And he looks great on paper, but the president says he’s from central casting and that he’s a warm body. And I don’t think the president understands those are not like terms of endearment. And the most interesting —

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s true, though.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Here’s the most interesting thing. Yeah, he is a warm body and he may be able to fog a mirror, but he can’t put 3 sentences together. His own commercials don’t even have him talking to camera. He’s turned down 8 debates with me. And in 2 of these debates, or televised debates, they went ahead and had the debate and I went and debated the moderator. Because I’m comfortable with what —

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s accepted no debates with you at all?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Zero debates. And conventional wisdom is, if you’re me, if you’re the incumbent and you’re ahead even by a small amount, that you should never debate the challenger because you’re just giving him a platform and giving him some notoriety and status to speak and a chance to take you out.

I’m willing to debate this guy anywhere. I’ve said I’ll let President Trump moderate the debate and I’ll still win it. Because this guy doesn’t know what he believes in. He won’t fill out any of the questionnaires from the pro-life groups, from the pro-Second Amendment groups. Those are sitting in his basement. He won’t tell anybody where he stands. Is he for exceptions on abortion? Is he for red flag laws? Because those are the president’s positions. So he’s caught in a tough position right now.

And he doesn’t really — he doesn’t have an ideology, I don’t think. In fact, he was in the Republican Party until 2016 when Donald Trump got the nomination for president.

TUCKER CARLSON: He —

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: My opponent left the party for 5 years while Donald Trump was president. He wouldn’t even call himself a Republican while Donald Trump was president. When Joe Biden won the election, that’s when my opponent came back after Donald Trump lost and called himself a Republican again. So he’s got a lot of questions to answer.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they found a liberal guy who’s taking money from liberal guys to beat — I know you call yourself libertarian or whatever, but I mean, conventionally, you’re one of the most conservative America First candidates that Congress has had in my lifetime. So basically, you’re running against a liberal.

AIPAC’s Donor Overlap With Democrats

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. And let me talk about the association of my donors and his donors with Democrats. So they started saying, “Oh, Massie’s taking money from people that also give to Democrats.” So we went and we did a core sample. We looked at the people who give me money and we looked at all the max donors. Turns out 37% of the people who’ve donated to me have also given to Democrats.

I went and we looked at his numbers. It’s 85% of his donors have given to Democrats. And it’s because it’s a core sample of AIPAC donors. That’s why you’ve got 85% overlap in his donors with Democrat donors — because it’s just a core sample of AIPAC.

In fact, he’s given to Lindsey Graham — actually, yes, like $500 or $1,000. Like, he was so inspired by Lindsey Graham that he gave him his own personal money, not from his campaign, before he was campaigning.

And think about this — he’s promising to be a rubber stamp for the Republican Party. This is the main charge that’s been leveled against me, that I don’t vote with the party enough. I vote with the party 90% of the time. But listen, there’s 10% of the time where I don’t care who the president is. I’m not going to change the position that I promised to take to my constituents.

So, for instance, when the party votes for warrantless spying on Americans, I don’t vote for that. And by the way, in all of these circumstances that I’m going to describe to you, where I don’t vote with the party, I’m actually taking a position that Donald Trump had less than 2 years ago. He was against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act being used to spy on Americans without a warrant because it was used against him, he found out. So I’m sticking with that position that you need a warrant, that the Fourth Amendment hasn’t expired from the Constitution.

And when they’re covering up for pedophiles — look, the president’s own children, the vice president, the FBI director, and the president himself said that they would release the Epstein files. And now I worked harder than anybody else to get it done and got it done. And that’s part of the 10% where they say I have betrayed the Republican Party because I voted to disclose Epstein’s crimes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct. So it’s now a core tenet of the Republican Party that you have to hide the crimes of a left-wing Democrat who was touching kids?

The Epstein Files: Massie’s Push for Disclosure

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It seems to be. And the president himself has said it’s a hostile act. This was before he signed my bill. He ultimately did agree with me. And now it seems like the First Lady agrees with me that Jeffrey Epstein did not act alone. And the files show that he did not act alone.

And you’ve got a prince who’s lost his title and been indicted. You’ve got the British Prime Minister to the United States. You’ve got the former Prime Minister of Norway, the Minister of Culture in France. There’s accountability. All these people have been arrested or indicted or being investigated. But nobody in the United States where Jeffrey Epstein lived and worked — where he spent 99% of his time. Even the US Virgin Islands is part of the United States where Epstein Island is.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just want to linger on this for — I mean, there’s so much to talk about. I just want to linger on the Epstein question. So, why was that important to you to push for disclosure?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: There’s a claim that I didn’t care about it before President Trump was president. I want to clear that up. You can go find on my social media at least 3 times where I posted about it. And I always assumed that Pam Bondi would release the files, right? People are like, “Well, why weren’t you interested sooner? Why didn’t you try harder sooner?” Because I’ve heard the FBI director say he was going to do it. I heard the attorney general say she was going to do it. And then I found out the binders were a farce.

I serve on the Judiciary Committee — this is the committee that Jim Jordan chairs, which, by the way, has authority over DOJ, the Attorney General, and FBI. And so we went on a dinner to the DOJ, to Pam Bondi’s office, every Republican member of the Judiciary Committee. This was in April of last year, about a year ago.

And I told Jim Jordan on the way over — he said, “Everybody gets one question. You can ask the attorney general a question.” I said, “I want to ask her about phase 2 of the Epstein files. Would that be too confrontational?” And Jim said, “I’m not going to tell you what you can and can’t ask. Go ahead.”

So I was one of the first people, as we finished dinner, to ask a question. And I asked Pam Bondi where the rest of the files were and when would they be released. And she said there was nothing left but child pornography and nobody wants to see that. It made it sound sort of like I was a voyeur or pedophile myself.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you were creepy for asking.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, that I was creepy for asking. And so I didn’t ask any more about it. And then I saw in the news as things played out, the story kept shifting. And I said, “Well, there’s some there there.” And I introduced my resolution, which is a discharge petition. I would need to get 218 votes on it to force a vote on whether to release the files or not. I did that in July, and we did a press conference. The reason I’m telling you all this is my motivation changed part of the way through this.

The Epstein Files: Justice, Survivors, and the Discharge Petition

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask you something? If it was child pornography, did you get a sense that there was any effort to find out who these children were, who shot the videos, like, who’s responsible for this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They said most of it was stuff he had downloaded from the internet, not original crimes of his. But even so, right, wouldn’t that stuff be things that you would investigate even if he hadn’t created it, if he had got it from a friend or some black site on the internet? Wouldn’t you want to go find out where this stuff comes from? The dark web?

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you get a sense that they were doing anything about it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No. In fact, this was the final straw for me. A day or two before I introduced the discharge petition, it was either the Attorney General or the FBI director said they were closing all the cases, they were done with Epstein, and there would be no more.

So what happened is after August recess, we came back and Ro Khanna and I held a press conference with the survivors. And it was to motivate this issue in Washington, D.C. and to give these women a platform to tell their stories. In fact, women who had never spoken up before came to this and spoke up, and women who had fought all their lives to be heard and believed and to say their story, and they gave witness to the FBI and it all got suppressed.

They came and told their stories, and a strange thing happened. I had intended to motivate my colleagues, and I was brought to tears by their stories and became doubly motivated to get this done because at that point it became more about justice for them than even before. And somebody may say, well, that sounds pretty cold. You mean you weren’t doing it for them to start with? Well, I was doing it to uncover the creeps, the pedophiles and the rapists and the sex traffickers. But once I met the survivors, it became even more personal to get justice for them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course, it’s less academic and more real. So then you initiated the discharge petition to force a vote on this. And what was the response you got from the White House?

The Discharge Petition and White House Pushback

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I actually had at least a dozen co-sponsors on my Epstein Files Transparency Act. I thought, well, I’ve got a dozen — by the way, a dozen Republican co-sponsors. I thought, well, this will be easy, I’ve already got a dozen who will sign the discharge petition. Well, it turns out most of those people chickened out, would not sign the discharge petition under pressure from the president.

In fact, I ran into the legislative affairs director for the White House on the street on Independence Avenue, Jeff Freeland, just randomly while I was trying to get more signatures and while he was trying to keep people from signing it. We just randomly met at a crosswalk. And I said, listen, I know you’re just doing your job and I’ll be with you 90% of the time. But in this instance, I’m compelled to do this. And I said, by the way, I made a mistake. I got co-sponsors on this bill. So now you got your whip list. I know you’re going to the 12 people who originally co-sponsored it. If I ever do this again, I’m not getting co-sponsors and showing you my roadmap.

There was mutual respect there as two people working on two different things. He said to me, “You’re moving too fast for me.” Like he couldn’t keep up. There was only one of him and I was moving around and getting people to put their names on it and getting people not to take their names off.

By the way, I have to give credit to the three bravest. There’s nobody — if I go back to Congress next week and somebody comes up to me and says, “I saw you on Tucker Carlson and you didn’t say I was brave,” I’ll say, too bad, because you weren’t. There are three women — Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert — who signed their names on that discharge petition and all suffered. Marjorie practically gave up her political career over this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, she did.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: She and her children got death threats over this, not from the left, from the right. And then —

TUCKER CARLSON: And she went to President Trump and said one of my children is getting death threats, and he said, “That’s your fault.”

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, despicable. He also told her that if she insisted on following through with this, she was going to hurt his friends. She told me the day he told her that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hurt whose friends?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: President Trump’s friends. His friends. And I suppose some of them have been hurt. Howard Lutnick was shown to be a bald-faced liar. And it turns out that John Paulson — one of the three billionaires who’ve put money into MAGA — was in Epstein’s phone book, but also was implicated in these files as doing a fundraiser and reaching out to Jeffrey Epstein to get money from him to honor Howard Lutnick.

It’s just a really small world when you get into the billionaires, and they’re not partisans. They’re above party. The Epstein class — they don’t associate themselves as Republicans or Democrats so much as they do among a class of billionaires who are above all of that, above the judges. They’ve got visa waivers, they fly private planes, they don’t mingle with the public whether it’s on a plane or in a courtroom.

Anyways, that’s my hats off to Marjorie for taking on those threats. Lauren Boebert — they took her over to the Situation Room. Like, this is where if they’re trying to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, this is where they are at the White House. They took her into the Situation Room and tried to whip her into taking her name off of the discharge petition.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over Epstein.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Over Epstein. Yep. And then the president vetoed a bill that would have brought water to a large portion of Colorado — over Epstein. And this isn’t even at this point just about Lauren Boebert. Why are people in Colorado deprived of water? Because their representative wants to expose a sex trafficking ring.

Trump’s Betrayal and the Billionaire Class

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, none of this makes any sense at all because it’s a losing issue for Trump and has been. That was the beginning of the end, really — I mean, I think we’re at the end — of the 2024 campaign. It’s just total betrayal of everything. But that began with Epstein last summer and Trump’s now famous attack on his own voters: “If you think this is important to know more about Epstein, I don’t want your support.” Why do you think Epstein, of all issues, is the one that Donald Trump was willing to destroy his presidency over?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. I mean, I did it because it was the right thing to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, I understand your motive, but the president pushed back. Now he’s endorsed this campaign against you and your family, and has really just sort of hurt himself on behalf of the memory of Jeffrey Epstein. Like, there’s something here. What is this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think he’s changed some, and the promise of Donald Trump to negotiate on anything, including immigration —

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s like, no problem, we’ll give them citizenship. But when it comes to Epstein, it’s like, no. And it does raise questions about how did Epstein die and who signed off on that? Why was Epstein rearrested actually for crimes he’d already been convicted of and brought back from France to the United States and then gets murdered in prison less than two months later? Like, what is that? And maybe there’s a connection — I don’t know, I’m just guessing. What is this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s the people who are funding the ballroom, the people who are funding the Arch, the people who are funding the rebranding of the Kennedy Center. These are the people who are also funding my opponent. These are the people who have the ear of the president. These are the people who are changing, dominating our foreign policy decisions. They’re the billionaires. And these are also the same people who are in the Epstein Files by large part, or their friends are.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just want to say stop — I want everyone to just stop and rewind the tape when you said that. Okay, maybe you just answered the question.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think I did. I tried to answer the question.

TUCKER CARLSON: The hair on my arms just went up. Okay.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act: A Law That Never Expires

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: By the way, you touched on something that I want to comment on. There are still a lot of files that haven’t been released. I don’t care whether it’s 3 million files or whether it’s 300 files that they still need to get out there. But the kind of files they haven’t released — they are breaking the law by not releasing them.

TUCKER CARLSON: You mean the Department of Justice?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Department of Justice. Todd Blanch now. And he, by the way, could be criminally prosecuted by the next attorney general. This is the great thing about passing a law instead of issuing a subpoena. They didn’t do this in Watergate. They didn’t do this in Iran-Contra. They had commissions, they had committees, they had subpoenas — whether it was Bill Clinton’s issue. This is the first time — the Epstein Files Transparency Act — where members of Congress got a law passed, passed in the House and the Senate, signed by the president, to compel the release of documents.

What does that mean? Why is it different? Because every subpoena from Congress expires at the end of Congress. This law never expires. This law, unless they can get a House and a Senate and a president to repeal it, is in effect for infinity. 50 years from now, if there’s an attorney general who’s cleaning out a drawer and finds some Epstein files, they have 30 days to release them. We didn’t name Pam Bondi — we said the Attorney General of the United States. As long as there is an Attorney General of the United States, that cabinet position may go away before the Epstein Files Transparency Act goes away, because it’s forever.

But let me tell you the category of documents that will eventually be released that haven’t been released yet. We said in the Epstein Files Transparency Act that the DOJ, FBI, and U.S. attorneys have to release internal memos and emails about decisions on whether to prosecute or not prosecute, about decisions on whether to investigate or not investigate.

And right now, the Attorney General is claiming something called deliberative process privilege that they use when they want to keep Freedom of Information Act files from getting out or to redact them. They say that — and it’s a longstanding rule for Freedom of Information Act — that the government only has to give you the final work product. They don’t have to show you their math, the internal deliberations of a policy. They just have to give you the endpoint.

But anticipating this, and having served on the Judiciary Committee for a long time and having had Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray tell me, “Well, that’s the subject of an ongoing investigation and we don’t have to give you that,” or “That’s deliberative process and we don’t have to give you that” — anticipating that, I put into law that they have to give me that, and the president signed that law. And yet they are asserting that my law doesn’t apply to their deliberative process privilege, and they’re wrong. It won’t withstand 30 minutes in a courtroom, their legal thesis. Every first-year law student knows that new laws overwrite the ones that existed before. And so I think eventually there will be a forum. Some survivor will sue the attorney general or the government for not releasing those particular files, and it’ll get adjudicated and we’ll get more files.

Why Are Republicans Protecting the Epstein Files?

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you ever ask anyone in the administration or the Congress, like, why is this a hard thing for a Republican administration that was elected to “drain the swamp” to do? Why would it be hard? You would think since most people identified in the Epstein files were partisan Democrats and donors to the Democratic Party, it’d be pretty easy for Republicans to be like, yeah, the other guys did this. And there were some Republicans, but not really — it’s mostly Democrats in those files. So why is it so hard? Like, what the hell is this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, Pam Bondi, when I cross-examined her in a hearing while she was still Attorney General about the Epstein files, she protested to me that this also went on under the Biden administration. And I said, of course it did.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, right.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And it went on under the Obama administration and the Bush administration. It spanned 4 administrations. Yes, 5 administrations, counting Trump twice. And I told her, you’re just responsible for this portion of the cover-up, right? So the reason they— I think they don’t want to admit that they have covered this up is then they admit that there are two tiers of justice in this country and that every administration, at least every attorney general, has been in on it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is exactly right. There are two tiers of justice, and some people seem to be immune from law, and some people are just henpecked to death by the law.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And that’s why I want to know their decision process, because then we’ll find out in 2008 why did they give Jeffrey Epstein a light sentence when they had him dead to rights, lock him up, throw away.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’ll find out.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think eventually, because the law goes forever, and I think just by random selection, we’ll eventually end up with an attorney general if they don’t delete the files before that attorney general sits in the seat, whoever that may be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have any sense of how much hasn’t been released from that case?

The Missing Files and Redacted Documents

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, I know that set of particular files haven’t been released. I know that they put some files up and took them back down. And they’ve not put them back up again. And you may say, well, don’t you— didn’t people get archives of those files while they were up? Why do you care that the files haven’t been put up again?

Yes, it’s because I have the ability to go look at unredacted files over at the DOJ, and some of the files that I wanted to look at unredacted because I believe they implicate co-conspirators with Jeffrey Epstein haven’t been put back up onto the public site nor the private site. So I can’t go look at documents unredacted that may contain the names of co-conspirators until they put those files back in the database.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was the justification for protecting co-conspirators?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, they said they’re protecting victims. Okay, but if you’re protecting victims and so you had to take the document down, then what you do is you redact all the information that would hurt the victim and then you put it back up. But they haven’t put it back up, so I haven’t been able to look at that.

Then there are files over there the DOJ claims were redacted before they came into their possession, and so when I try to unredact them, I can’t see beyond the redactions, and the DOJ says, “Sorry, that’s just the way we received them.” Well, the fact of the matter is they need to go back to the U.S. attorneys and the FBI that gave them those redacted documents and say, give us the unredacted documents, but they haven’t done that yet.

And then there’s another category of files that are missing. In talking to the survivors’ lawyers, the survivors have indicated that there’s no evidence of their testimony in these files. Like, they know it exists. They sat down with the FBI, they did an interview, and the FBI agents are obligated to summarize that interview, at least provide a summary in a 302 form. Well, they can’t even find their own 302 forms in the release of information. So we know not everything has been released.

And I also know they’re releasing more stuff, just quietly doing it, because when I go over there and look for things and find that they’ve redacted a man’s name who may be a co-conspirator and threaten on the internet that they’ve done this, then they have released files.

For instance, with Leslie Wexner, he’s the billionaire who resides in Ohio. Pam Bondi, when I pointed out to her that she had redacted his name from the files, she said, “Well, his name appears thousands of times in the files.” I said, “Yes, but in the one instance where it appears on an FBI document listing him as a co-conspirator in a child sex trafficking ring, his name has been redacted. In the only one place where it implicates him, you redacted it.”

And so I know what your question is. It was my question to her: who redacted it? They’re not giving interns a bucket of Sharpies and a bunch of documents spread out and saying, go draw a line through anything you don’t think should be released. It’s all on a computer and you have to log in, and every redaction belongs to somebody. So what I want to know, and I asked Pam Bondi and she refused to tell me, is who particularly redacted that one instance of Leslie Wexner. If you were going to— if you were the least bit curious, you’d want to know.

Leslie Wexner and the DOJ’s Lack of Investigation

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know if the Department of Justice in this administration has spoken to Leslie Wexner?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The Oversight Committee called him over there and asked him some questions. The Department of Justice did not. They mysteriously lost interest in Leslie Wexner after listing him as a co-conspirator.

TUCKER CARLSON: So they never even talked to him?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Never. They had some correspondence with an attorney and decided they didn’t need to talk to him, even though he paid for the whole thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so, you know, they should be wondering— this is why I want to know about that decision of not— why did they not talk to Leslie Wexner? That’s in an email or a memo somewhere. And the clear language of the law that I wrote requires them to release it, and they won’t, and they haven’t. And that’s what we need to know, is why did they, and why do they continue to cover this stuff up?

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you ever have conversations with your colleagues in the Congress about this? Are others bothered by it?

The Bill Passes Despite Opposition

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They’re not bothered enough by it. Ultimately they voted 427 to 1 to pass the bill after fighting it for so many months. And then the Senate realized it had been political malpractice on the part of Mike Johnson to lead the whole GOP conference against the Epstein files release merely because the president wanted him to.

And so when it got to the Senate, they passed it by unanimous consent before it even got there. Like, the bill was still in the House, and the Senate heard it was coming over, and they made a motion to pass the bill before it got there. So they just said, when it gets here, we’re going to deem it passed so we don’t even have to repeat the name of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Mike Johnson really was leading the charge to hide the facts of the Epstein case.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He was lying about my bill. He told everybody it was dog crap, it was poorly drafted, it would hurt the victims. And then it would hurt the victims, when in fact the victims love my bill. But he would stand up, he would say these lies to a whole gaggle of cameras. And then one day Mike Johnson told the entire conference, vote for Massie’s bill.

TUCKER CARLSON: What changed?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We won the argument in the public. If there is hope— and I know I’m giving people hope, and this is one of the reasons I’m fighting so hard to win— there will be not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not several million people who lose hope if I lose.

But what gives me hope, and frankly what gives me even more religious conviction, is that we, in spite of all the odds, we got this bill passed and it became law, and 3 million documents came out. After we had been lied to and told that everything but kiddie porn had been released, right? That gives me hope.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was after Pam Bondi told you everything had been released, correct? Did she ever explain?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think she was largely in the dark most of the time. I always have a question: is it ignorance or is it malfeasance, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: When something’s doing the wrong thing— on her part, I think it was ignorance and blind allegiance. I think when she released those binders, she really thought she was releasing the Epstein files. I believe she thought that. And then she found out very quickly, somebody came and told her, “Oh no, no, we’re not releasing those. You’re not going to do that.” And then she had to adopt blind allegiance without even, in fact, really— she at one point she said, “They’re on my desk for review.” Do you remember that?

TUCKER CARLSON: Very well.

Kash Patel’s Testimony and the Cover-Up

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: How do 3 million files sit on your desk? I think they were not on her desk for review at any point. Also, I don’t think Kash Patel can be the FBI director and anything ever happened with these Epstein files because he testified in the Senate to Senator Kennedy that Jeffrey Epstein acted alone. Even Melania Trump does not believe that, right?

But he testified that Epstein acted alone, and then the next day he came to the House Judiciary Committee where I asked him to double down, and he said there’s no evidence in these files that anybody was a co-conspirator with Jeffrey Epstein other than Ghislaine Maxwell.

So again, here we go. Ignorance or malfeasance? He’s perjured himself in the Senate and the House, and so his only defense could either be ignorance— that’s his only defense— is to say, “Well, when I told you that, I didn’t really know what was in the files,” or “The people working for me misled me.” Those are his only defenses.

And then that’s why I think you will never get to the bottom of this as long as he’s FBI director. And by the way, the Trump administration could redeem themselves on this, but not by releasing 3 million more files. They’ve got to indict somebody. They’ve got to go in there and investigate Leon Black or Jess Staley. There’s enough information even in the redacted files that anybody with common sense knows that there needs to be an investigation of those two men.

TUCKER CARLSON: On what grounds?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: On the witnesses said they were sexually abused by those men, and they’ve never been investigated so far as I know. And by the way, on what grounds? That’s a good question. On what grounds did Prince Andrew lose his title? Did the British ambassador have to resign? Did the former prime minister of Norway get indicted? On what grounds? Not for pedophilia or sex trafficking, but for misuse of state power and state secrets and state authority.

Epstein as an Intelligence Operation

And this gets to what I believe Epstein was. My background is technology. I’m not a hacker, but I went to school with a lot of people who are hackers, and I still know people who are hackers. It’s actually very difficult through wires to break into most of these systems. The guys who get the biggest breaches of data are able to get a human on the phone and convince them to give up their password, or get a human on an email, right? Like phishing.

But if you can get physical proximity to somebody’s phone or their computer, that’s the holy grail of hacking. If once you get physical proximity, or if you can get somebody so comfortable, maybe they’re in another room having sex or doing a line of cocaine and they leave their laptop in that room without logging out, then that’s the holy grail of hacking. You don’t have to be good, you got to be lucky or have really good human intelligence.

And I believe that’s what Jeffrey Epstein was purveyor of, was direct access to individuals. He was interested in meeting with market makers, people who were going to move markets, hedge fund managers, that sort of thing. And foreign officials and dignitaries who were going to make laws and make decisions that would move markets.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it seems pretty obvious that this wasn’t— Jeffrey Epstein was not acting on his own. I mean, first of all, there’s no evidence he ever made any money, right? It’s not clear even now, 7 years after his murder, what he did for a living. Like, where’d the income come from?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know when the probability in my mind that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself went from 5% to 0% is when I heard the recording that he serendipitously recorded of Ehud Barak when he was about to leave as defense minister of Israel. Jeffrey Epstein was advising him on his next career steps, and in this recording, just cool as a cucumber, he says, “Make a list of everybody that owes you something for all the things you did for them while you were in government, and then go get on these boards and draw a check.” Like, he was explaining how Ehud Barak could make money once he left the employ of the government of Israel.

And this is a recording. It’s an insight into Jeffrey Epstein’s mind that you don’t really get otherwise, even through emails. And it was revealing to me. Jeffrey Epstein strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn’t be that worried that he was in prison. I think in his mind it was a temporary condition.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

The Epstein Question and Federal Power

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That he either needed to blackmail somebody, or maybe he had enough blackmail, or more likely than blackmail, he just had enough connections that somebody would spring him pretty soon. And I don’t think he would have lost.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if he was murdered, and I think it’s— I mean, I’m totally convinced he was murdered. It seems very obvious that he was murdered. But if he was murdered in federal detention in Manhattan, like, how could that have happened without the knowledge of highest-level federal officials? There was never an investigation into it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Who are the highest-level federal officials, by the way? They’re not always the elected people. Like, when we talk about the deep state, these are the Victoria Nulands of the world, right? Those are the people who are causing coups. And is that the highest level? Are we talking about the highest level of the permanent government? Are we talking about ostensibly the highest level, the people who get elected and pretend to wield power like Pam Bondi?

Yes, because she’s never been the highest level at the Department of Justice. Who do you think is? I don’t know, but Todd Blanch in a way is working for them. I think it’s the people directly below Todd Blanch, the people that we were told Trump would fire and get new people, the people that did all the bad stuff on January 6th, the people at the DOJ who prosecuted those folks. Why are any of those people still around?

TUCKER CARLSON: And they are.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And they are. And they shouldn’t be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that true in other key federal agencies?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think all federal agencies.

Trump’s Shift on the Deep State

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think happened? How do you go from campaigning against all of this to becoming its greatest champion, as the president has?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. I do think— and he, by the way, he doesn’t need to run again, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Well, exactly.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: People argue that term limits will work because once somebody knows they don’t have to run for election again, they’ll do the right thing. It’ll be in their nature. And they won’t be subject to taking money to get there, to win their next election or doing favors. They could just act in their good conscience.

I think what’s happened is they’ve convinced him that he needs a ballroom, that he needs an arch, that he needs a Kennedy Center renamed after him. And multiple other things, that these take private money, and the order of magnitude of private money that you need for these things obligates you to those individuals. I think that’s part of what has happened.

I also think he’s aligned himself with Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio. These are the neocons. He got close to this with John Bolton and eventually— he tired of John Bolton, I think.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. Most people do.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Some of us never liked him.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m with you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But I think he’s basically gone from pushing those people away, the Dick Cheneys of the Republican Party, to inviting them in the tent. And it’s given him more power, interestingly, to align with these folks on certain issues, whether it’s spying on Americans without a warrant, whether it’s spending more than we can afford, whether it’s starting another war in the Middle East that’s going to be hard to end. He’s listening to too many of those people right now.

Warrantless Spying and the FISA Debate

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would the president, who was spied on illegally by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of this country back in 2015, 2016, 2017, why would he put so much of his authority behind more warrantless spying on Americans?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That’s hard for me to understand. Some people think it’s because he wants that ability to, well, as long as he’s president, to use his own FBI and DOJ to have these same tools. But then that begs the question, why would the Democrats, the uniparty, if you will, why would they want to give President Trump this authority? You would think they might agree to a 3-year hiatus on spying without warrants, right? But no, they don’t want any lapse in the program, and the president doesn’t want any lapse in the program.

TUCKER CARLSON: But if Democrats are so afraid of Trump, if he’s really Hitler, he’s this authoritarian crazy person who’s going to eliminate civil liberties, why would Democrats be giving that guy the power to spy without a warrant on American citizens?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Exactly. You’ve rephrased it better than I said it. In fact, I found myself in a really weird position last week on the floor of the House on flyout day. Most people had already booked their planes to leave before this debate was going to happen.

The House of Representatives sent the Senate a deal to reauthorize FISA if the Senate would ban central bank digital currency. Now, I would ban central bank digital currency and not reauthorize FISA, right? But some of the Freedom Caucus decided that was an okay trade, to trade part of the Fourth Amendment for another part of the Fourth Amendment. And I am terrified of central bank digital currency. It’s an on-off switch for your participation in society, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. They starve you to death if you disobey.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, just— they won’t let you put gas in the tank. You won’t be able to travel. They can control everything if they can control the currency. It’s bad enough.

But we sent that deal to the Senate. I didn’t vote for that deal, but some people did. It went to the Senate, and the Senate laughed at that deal, threw it in the trash, and sent a clean reauthorization of FISA back to the House with the 45-day expiration. And everybody— everybody but me suggested we should just let that pass by unanimous consent and folks could get on their airplanes and go home.

And I said, I don’t think so. Like, an infringement of the Constitution for 45 days is still an infringement of the Constitution. And by the way, we’ve known about this problem for as long as I’ve been in Congress. I’ve been offering and passing amendments to defund this part of the FISA program. It’s not something new. It’s like a florist being surprised by Valentine’s Day. We knew this date was coming.

And so I stood up and I objected and they said, okay, well, now we got to have a debate over this bill. And Jim Jordan got 20 minutes and Jamie Raskin got 20 minutes as the chair and the ranking member of the Committee of Jurisdiction, the Judiciary Committee. And at that point, I stood up and told the speaker that I want 20 minutes in actual opposition to the bill.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, I’m confused. You have one of the most liberal Democrats in the House, Jamie Raskin of Maryland. You have one of the most conservative Republicans in the House, Jim Jordan of Ohio.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But they’re on the same side on spying on Americans for at least 45 days. They’re on the same side.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how could Jim Jordan, this ferociously conservative freedom guy, be in favor of spying on Americans without a warrant?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, the president told him to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but that’s like a core— that’s a core—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s always been a core issue of his. And in the debate of his specifically, correct? It was a condition of being on the Judiciary Committee when I joined. Like, you had to believe that we needed warrants on FISA or you couldn’t be on the Judiciary Committee that he chaired. That was like the first interview question when you applied for judiciary.

TUCKER CARLSON: That the Constitution is still real, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And particularly with FISA 702, this particular program. And he battled last Congress ferociously to get warrants, and it came down to a tie vote where Mike Johnson was the deciding vote. And I don’t know why, again, because Biden was president, but enough Republicans voted to let Biden have the power to spy on Americans without a warrant.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because a lot of the information, that intelligence, that spying on Americans goes directly to Israel. Like, fact. Absolutely right. So that’s what this is really about, is do we allow a foreign country to spy? Does our government make it easier for a foreign country to spy on Americans? It’s like the ultimate betrayal.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Another fact: when X decided to show you where accounts were based, where they were set up, and where they were operated from, the DHS account showed Israel. The US Department of Homeland Security’s X account was set up using an IP address from Israel, using an Android app purchased in Israel. And that doesn’t trouble people. Like, there should be an investigation over why when the DHS set up its Twitter account, it was set up in Israel. Now they claim— if you ask Grok about this, he’ll walk around the bush with you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, of course.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And say that, well, there were some glitches back in the old day and there were some contractors involved and you can never get to the bottom of it. But back to last week— I was able to claim—

TUCKER CARLSON: So, just to be clear, Jordan was on the same side as Jamie Raskin.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct. For the clean 45-day extension.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you feel like your head was spinning as you watched this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes, but I’ve been here before, where it’s me versus the uniparty. And by the way, when they call me an obstructionist, you can put this in the column of things that I try to obstruct, like violations of your Fourth Amendment. So the speaker said, okay, each side gets 20 minutes. And I rose up and I said, well, in fact, each side is for this, so this is no kind of debate. Like, I want my 20 minutes.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like the perfect metaphor. It’s like a fake debate where both sides agree, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. And it is in the House rules, they had to give me 20 minutes. And so then it was going to be me with 20 minutes and Jim Jordan with 20 minutes. Ironically, a guy that I like who has been leading the charge to get warrants in FISA, but in this situation was for reauthorizing a program for 45 days without warrants.

And at that moment, one of the staffers came over to me— this is where it’s getting surreal— and says, “Jim Jordan would like to give half of his time to Jamie Raskin.”

TUCKER CARLSON: This is the last scene in Animal Farm where the farmers and the pigs are like, get it together.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And they said, “Would you object?” And I said, no, what the hell, let them both have time. So I had 20 minutes and Jim had 10 and Jamie Raskin had 10. And then, to their credit, Keith Self from Texas, Chip Roy from Texas, and Warren Davidson from Ohio joined me in this debate. Some other people in spirit came and sat down to offer their moral support. They didn’t need time to debate. And we had a good debate on this issue.

Look, the FBI has used this program to basically run their dating app prospects through the database to see what they can find about them before they swipe right or swipe left.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, that’s the kind of abuse that’s gone on. They’ve used it on Congress. They’ve used it on the president. They’ve used it on political parties. And people say, “Well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why do you care if the government spies on you?” Well, it’s the government’s opinion of whether they like what you’re doing or not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they used it on me and they got caught and no one was punished.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, they’ve used it on Sharyl Attkisson, spying on her, spyware on her computer. They use it on the press. Like, this should concern everybody. And right now we’re in a 45-day extension because I did call for the vote and we had too many Republicans and too many Democrats that voted for a clean extension.

Massie vs. Trump: Where They Disagree

TUCKER CARLSON: So let— can we just go through the issues on which you’ve disagreed with the president? So my read as a non-Kentucky citizen, is that this race comes down to the question of who is more on board with Trump, who’s more the MAGA guy, you or the liberal you’re running against, funded by the casino owners, funded by Israel. What are the issues that have separated you and Trump? Can you just go through the list of the big issues where you’ve disagreed?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Let me start with the ones I agree with just real quick. I voted to fund the wall. I voted to keep men out of girls’ sports in the Olympics. I have voted—

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve read that you were totally for mass migration, illegal migration, that you love transgenderism. You were encouraging people to castrate their sons. That’s not true.

Pesticides, Liability, and the Farm Bill

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Absolutely false. I signed an amici brief to the Supreme Court to support the repeal of birthright citizenship for children of illegals. I’ve done all of these. I voted for the SAVE Act, which is to require photo ID in federal elections. If you want to run for school board and/or HOA, do whatever you want, but if you’re going to vote in a federal election, you got to have an ID and prove you’re an American citizen. I’ve voted for these things. I voted for DOGE. I’ve voted for all of that stuff. But let’s talk about the things where I have been an obstructionist. Most recently they tried to put immunity for pesticides and herbicides in the farm bill.

TUCKER CARLSON: Immunity.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Immunity from liability and a ban on any state. Let’s say a state finds out that one of these chemicals causes cancer. And if it’s applied in a certain way, right now they’re trying to ban any state’s ability to warn its citizens that that product causes cancer.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. So it would be a violation of the First Amendment, a violation of the Tenth Amendment. They had this in the base.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait a second. So if you say something crazy on this show, you can be sued. But if you make some poison that gives people cancer and kills their kids, you can’t be sued because you have, quote, “immunity” along with the vaccine makers given by Congress.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct. And well, they were— by the way, that’s in front of the Supreme Court right now. I went and listened to the oral arguments in the Supreme Court on this issue, and they said in the oral arguments that Congress could decide this issue. And so it was stuck in the Farm Bill. I did work with Democrats to offer an amendment to strip this out. Ana Paulina Luna offered an identical amendment. Her amendment was allowed a vote, and we got enough Republicans and Democrats to vote to take this out of the bill. So if you’re saying that I’m an obstructionist and I work with Democrats, it is true.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you’re trying to poison Americans, that I will cross and then get immunity, right, from tort law. Like, why don’t I get immunity?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Which is state law, by the way. The vaccine immunity is wrong. It’s bad enough, but at least they pretend there’s some federal court where they’ll take care of the problem. Here they were proposing that nobody— you could get a venue nowhere. By the way, that’s a violation of the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution. It’s in the Bill of Rights. It says you have a right to a jury trial, and they’re taking away First Amendment, Seventh Amendment, and Tenth Amendment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would Trump want that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think he’s a busy guy, and I think he’s not paying attention to this. Although I will caution listeners that when I went to the Supreme Court, it was very much like the debate that I had in Congress on FISA. There were actually 3 attorneys, not 2. Usually in the Supreme Court, there are attorneys arguing the plaintiff’s side and the defendant’s side. In this case, the US DOJ joined the German company Bayer— Bayer Monsanto, who makes glyphosate— in arguments. So the DOJ helped a German company make the point that they should be immune from any state liability.

TUCKER CARLSON: A German company should be immune from lawsuits by Americans if it turns out their product kills them.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is so bonkers. There’s an argument about is it worth it to put dangerous chemicals on farmland because maybe the benefits outweigh the risks— I don’t know, there’s an argument. What could possibly be the argument for stripping people’s rights to redress if the product is faulty? Dangerous.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We’ve got corporate capture. Think of the EPA. The EPA was set up ostensibly to protect people and the environment, but now they’ve morphed into an organization that would give immunity. They would give get-out-of-court-free cards to any company that could convince them to put a label on it that says a warning label instead of a danger label.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so the EPA was in favor of giving full liability protection to Bayer Monsanto out of Germany.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s running the EPA?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Lee Zeldin right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he was for that.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: This case predates him, but it’s going on right now under him. And you might think the EPA, the federal EPA, is going to argue for as much authority as they can get. The corporations would love to have one-stop shopping. They don’t want to be subject to courtrooms in 50 different states. They want to be able to say, well, we got a get-out-of-court-free card because the EPA said we don’t need to put a skull and crossbones on this product. All we need is a little warning label on it.

I know we’ve gone deep into that issue, but let me tell you why it’s important. The president is the president and we’re in the majority because there was a coalition formed. I do believe that he and his advisors were genius in setting up this coalition, and I was part of it when I endorsed the president to try to bring on libertarians and independents. But we also brought on MAHA, which is—

TUCKER CARLSON: I was one of the people who helped put that together. Yeah, because I believed—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, then you’re the genius.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not a genius. It just seemed like an obvious issue. They told us banning smoking was going to make us healthy, and life expectancy went down. I just noticed that, and I’m like, this country’s super unhealthy, and why wouldn’t you make it easier for people to be healthier if they want to?

MAHA, the PRIME Act, and Breaking Up the Meat Monopoly

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: By the way, I have a standalone bill too— it’s the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act— and I have Republican and Democrat co-sponsors on that. But that’s what MAHA is. And here’s the problem: if your DOJ and your USDA and your EPA are all going to be captured by a German company and argue that Americans don’t deserve their day in court if they’re harmed by a chemical that’s being sold and mislabeled according to their state, then you’re going to alienate that MAHA part of the coalition.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And that’s another thing that could lead to a bloodbath in the November election.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s going to— yeah, there are a lot of sort of liberal moms, or moms who thought they were liberal but they just watched too much media. But they basically had good values. They’re for their kids, they’re for nature. Those are good values. Those people are very disappointed and betrayed, I think.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t you?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think so.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, by the way, you’re a farmer.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I should say this, by the way. There is one good thing in the Farm Bill. I’ve worked for 11 years on it. I’ve worked 4 years on this part of it. I got my PRIME Act— a pilot program for it— in the farm bill, which means that here in Maine or in Kentucky or any state in the union, you could have a small farmer use a small processor and sell their beef, pork, and lamb locally to consumers without the USDA hovering over that transaction, as long as you comply with the local health inspections.

There are steakhouses in Washington, D.C. that cut up more beef than most small processors in Kentucky in a day, yet they don’t have to have a USDA inspector. And the reason the big corporations— I call it the industrial meat complex— want all these regulations on the little guys is to keep them out of the business. And so my PRIME Act just says you can sell a steak or a hamburger to your neighbor using a local processor as long as you comply with the local health requirements, and you don’t need the USDA involved. And we got a pilot program for that in the farm bill. That’s MAHA.

TUCKER CARLSON: Completely.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And the confluence of MAHA with conservatism— I have a bipartisan bill. It’s one area where Democrats realize that the little guys are being regulated out of the business.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And if they want healthy food, more sustainably raised food, you’ve got to break up the meat monopoly, I’ll call it. Now, the White House has recently announced they’re going to use the DOJ and the full force of the federal government to break up these big meatpackers. The problem with that is if you don’t let the little meatpackers exist, you’re just going to raise the price.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. Right. There’ll be more of it. It’ll be from Brazil.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. Argentina.

Glyphosate on the Farm

TUCKER CARLSON: So really quick, since you do run a farm, a working farm— the chemical in question made by Bayer Monsanto, would you use it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t want to ban it. What we’re talking about is the misapplication of it or the mislabeling of it. Let me tell you a use I would never use. I don’t do it, but I would spray fence lines with it— if you had a respirator and something like that— to kill weeds in the fence line.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I would not spray my fields with it because I’m afraid that the residue from that might be taken up in the meat. I would not tell my neighbor you can’t kill the weeds so that you can do no-till farming of your corn.

But here’s one place where I would never ever use it, and I don’t think it should be legal. They spray it on ripe wheat to dry it out before they harvest it. This is the food you’re going to eat. The next step is to grind it and bake it into bread. And they are just one step away from you eating it, and they’re spraying it with glyphosate— the whole plant— so that it will die quickly and dry out quickly and save them some money. Maybe they can get the next crop in there 4 days earlier into that land.

By the way, that’s been banned in Europe. But not here in the United States. And they say, “Oh, Congressman Massie, this is only used on 3% of the wheat crops in the United States.” First of all, I don’t believe that. But if it is true, then why don’t we just grow something else there in that 3% where it’s too wet to grow wheat? Why don’t we grow soybeans or something instead of wheat at that place? You don’t need glyphosate to dry it out. Or maybe you’ll get 80 or 90% of the yield you would have gotten if you hadn’t sprayed poison on it to dry it out quickly.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s disgusting.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I do think there are areas where I wouldn’t ban it, and I wouldn’t tell my neighbors you can’t use it. But the company needs to have the right label on it. And if we know scientifically that it can cause harm, that needs to be disclosed so that the farmers who are using it— I think it’s a threat to the farmers more so than the consumers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re the ones I know are afraid of it, but it’s also effective. And so they do use it on fence lines, for example. So, okay— glyphosate, warrantless spying, Epstein. What are the other issues on which you’ve disagreed with the president?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Spending.

TUCKER CARLSON: Spending.

The Congressional Slush Fund and Personal Attacks

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So this is probably my biggest issue. And people want to know why food’s so expensive, why is housing so expensive, why is fuel so expensive, why did things get so expensive so quickly? And it started back during COVID. We just put spending into overdrive. We used to say that we’re a free market economy and we’re not socialist because we spend 20% or 24% of GDP, the federal government things, and that Europe is socialist because they spend 30% or more. Well, during COVID we jumped up to like 35%. We were clearly, if there’s a spectrum and you draw a line on it and say above this much federal spending is socialism and below this is not, we crossed that line for several years after COVID, and it has gone down some without the big stimulus spending. But the stuff that’s baked in has stayed high. So we’re like probably at 29%. We’ve gone bonkers on federal spending.

And I will tell you this, this is a fact. The debt has gone up $2.7 trillion since— in the 16 months that we’ve controlled the White House, the House and the Senate. It’s gone up. So by the way, in some years they go— I find it interesting, they try to blame the president for spending, even when, let’s say, there’s a different party in Congress and a different party in the White House. They always blame the president for the spending. I think they should blame the Congress. But in this case, there’s no ambiguity. We control the Senate, the House, and the White House.

And when you say, oh, it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass anything, yeah, it takes 60 votes to spend money. The money would stop if you can’t get 60 votes in the Senate. It’s like the other way around because the money expires every year unless you do a CR or an omnibus. So this is a place where I have diverged with Republicans because they took Joe Biden’s budget and used the big beautiful bill, added hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to it. And this is where I get the ads run against me. Even though I voted for a wall and I voted most recently to fund DHS, there was extra money for DHS and DOJ, which includes FBI, in the big beautiful bill. And I said, we can’t afford this. And that’s why they can run the ads that say I voted against.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not just on the ads, they’ve attacked— and I almost don’t want to even go here, but I was so shocked by it. The president attacked your family, repeatedly, and attacked your personal life. It’s a little odd, you know, who decides to attack other people’s personal lives. What did you think of that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, it’s ironic because I defended him when he gave Stormy Daniels money. This came up in front of us when I was on the Oversight Committee. And they were trying to turn it into a crime. They said he should have run it through a campaign account instead of paying her personally. But I can tell you this, if I told my treasurer I wanted to pay some woman to be quiet with my campaign money, he would say, no, you’ll go to jail for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So they were actually trying to prosecute the president because he didn’t do it a certain way, which certainly would have gotten him in jail. And I pointed that out. And also at the time, I pointed out in that hearing— this was 3 years ago, I think— there was a congressional slush fund that did the same thing, but with taxpayer dollars to pay off people who had been harassed or sexually abused by congressmen and their staff. And nobody wanted to hear that in that hearing. But I blew the whistle on that, too.

TUCKER CARLSON: What happened to the slush fund?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We were able to recently force a vote on disclosing, not getting rid of the slush fund, just saying who, which offices have paid out of this slush fund. And it failed because Republicans and Democrats voted against the measure to disclose the names on the slush fund.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it still exists.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It still exists.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if I’m a member of Congress and I get sued for sexual harassment or blackmailed, I can use tax dollars to pay off the accuser.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They pay off the accuser to avoid the lawsuit because if it becomes a lawsuit, then it’s public. And by the way, I’m calling it a slush fund, and it’s appropriate to do that because every congressional office gets a budget every year. We have to divide it among office expense and salaries and travel and postage and toner cartridges. We don’t even have to take it out of that money— if you’re trying to pay off a claim before it goes to court, it comes out of an extra fund that’s just got money somewhere.

Anyways, we failed on that, but I’m the one that exposed that in the context of defending Donald Trump from the Stormy Daniels allegations, that they had tried— it was a tortured legal logic they were trying to come up with to convict him of something. And yet he has turned around and, in one social media post, dishonored my late wife, dishonored me, and dishonored my current wife by alleging that I shouldn’t have gotten remarried. I got remarried 16 months after my wife passed away. I think this is common among men who are widowers, who have wonderful marriages. You seek that out, you find out that, you know what, God had a good idea here when he created man and woman, and that you’re better off in a monogamous relationship where two people care about each other, and when one gets sick, the other takes care of that person. And so I sought that out again.

But the president, who himself has had affairs— I’ve never had an affair. I’m faithful to my wife. We were together 35 years, married 31 years, high school sweethearts. Here’s somebody who I defended when he was trying to cover up his affair, criticizing the fact that I got remarried in a church, in the eyes of God, according to Christian religion. But I didn’t retaliate. I didn’t tweet back. My wife tells me it’s my fault anyway. I should have invited him to the wedding. And that’s why he’s mad that he didn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you’re a good man to laugh about it. But that’s a pretty heavy thing to say about somebody.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He called me a moron at the prayer breakfast.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s funny because you’re obviously not a moron.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so I said, I’m glad I’m in his prayers because it obviously wasn’t a prayer he was saying at the prayer breakfast.

Alignment on Issues and the AIPAC Question

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just— I think what’s so revealing about all of this is you’ve never attacked him personally. You don’t seem mad at him personally.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re aligned on the issues that I think most people who voted for Trump in 2024 really believed in. You’re way more America First than anything this current administration is doing. And he’s mad at you because of Epstein and spending, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Those are my main infractions, and those are things that he and I both campaigned on and promised to eliminate— to disclose the Epstein files and to eliminate the wasteful spending. And I’m just trying to keep my promises to the people that I represent, and he’s keeping his promises to AIPAC.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I want— what do you think’s going to happen?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: In my race?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Primary Race and the Media Blackout

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s going to be really close. It’s going to depend on turnout. And I think the most stark difference that we can discern in the crosstabs— when you do polling, if you’ve ever been polled, maybe people haven’t got to look at the results of a full poll, but there’s 200 pages of crosstabs that come from a poll when you poll 500 people, because at the end of the poll you ask, what’s your race, what’s your religion, how old are you. Sometimes in the poll you ask the income, your household income, and you look at the crosstabs and try to find out, is there a group of people we’re doing better with or worse with, what do we have to work on? And the most stark contrast in my crosstabs is age. If under 40, I win like 80/20.

TUCKER CARLSON: 80/20.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It doesn’t even look real. And those folks are getting their news from social media, from podcasts, from you, I think. Between 40 and 65, I do really well. That’s the age group you and I are in.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Those people, I think, watch the news, but they’re suspicious of what they see. And then the folks— not all of them, but I’m not doing that well with 65 and up. And I think that’s because they’re watching Fox News 24/7 and Fox News has blocked me out. I used to be on there every week. I went on your show when you were on Fox.

TUCKER CARLSON: I always—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, gone on Laura Ingraham’s show, Shannon Bream’s show, Hannity’s show. I’ve been on all those shows, but not in the last 18 months.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because Fox wants access to the White House. They want the scoop. They want to make sure they’re in the press gaggle. They want to be there when Marine One lands to ask a question. They want to get called on. And they know that if they in any way let me have a platform, that they will be deprived of those things that they want from the White House. And that’s just how it works. So to get on Fox, I have to buy ads to be on Fox. I can’t be on the TV shows. It’s a wonder they’ll still let me buy ads, but I think that’s just because it’s federal law.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you’d asked most Fox News viewers who are Trump voters— if you’d asked them 2 years ago, like, state what you believe on the issues, I think there’d be pretty close to 100% overlap between you and those people.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Absolutely, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I don’t feel like your views have changed.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Mine have never changed, regardless of who the president is or who the speaker is.

TUCKER CARLSON: But Trump’s have changed dramatically. At least the disconnect between what he said he was going to do and what he’s doing is shocking.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: When I endorsed him, I thought we wouldn’t have a new war. I thought we would get warrants for FISA that they had used to spy on him. I thought that MAHA would be front and center at the HHS with Bobby Kennedy there. I thought that we would have sane foreign policy. I thought that where we put America First, that’s my definition of sane. I thought we would end our involvement in the war in Ukraine. I thought we would release all the Epstein files and indict some of those SOBs. And those are all the things I’m still fighting for.

Corruption, Conflicts of Interest, and the Blurring of Business and Government

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel like there’s more corruption now than there was?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, what is corruption?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know. It’s using the power of the government, in this case the federal government, to advantage your business over others, or using, say, foreign policy. Like the idea that our foreign policy might be used by donors to make money for themselves is a shocking idea.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think the conflicts of interest are increasing and not adequately disclosed, and that the line between business and government is becoming blurred. Let me give you an example. The government’s taken a 10% stake in Intel, and they’re bragging that they’re making money on this. I remember when they took a stake in General Motors and then bragged the same thing. The problem once you commingle government ownership and private ownership is that the government is now predisposed to see that company succeed over the companies that haven’t given them ownership. In fact, the reputation of the person whose name is on the ballot is at stake if the company does well or doesn’t do well. And so if there’s any preferences that can be given in contracts with the government, in permits to make buildings, in trade deals, then they go to that company that the government has a stake in.

TUCKER CARLSON: I—

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s fundamentally un-American, and I think we’re seeing— I know we’re seeing more of that, and I don’t think we should embrace it. I think we should reject it.

Paul Singer, Venezuela, and the CITGO Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: I had concerns at the beginning of January when the US government overthrew Maduro and arrested him and his wife and brought them to New York. I predict he will not testify in open court because that would not be good for the US government if he did that. But whatever, that happened. And then there was this scramble to get rich off the oil assets of Venezuela. And I noticed that one of the people who’s funding the campaign against you now, Paul Singer, one of the richest people in the world already, always eager to get richer for some reason, was involved in a Venezuela-related business deal shortly before that exercise. Am I misremembering this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, this is the one exception. This is why I have to say 95% of the money motivated against me is because of Israel. I’ve got to reserve 5% for Paul Singer in Venezuela. He’s known for buying troubled assets, distressed assets, and then a lot of times destroying the company or leveraging the company to get things, or the country. Yes, Argentina, big player in this.

And it should not be lost on the voters in Kentucky that this billionaire bought Citgo, which was the formerly nationalized oil company of Venezuela for pennies on the dollar and completed that transaction just a few weeks before we invaded Venezuela. And it was such a good deal to get this company because it looks like, well, under the current regime and the current rules and the current deals that Citgo has, that this stock is appropriately pennies on the dollar, but it goes from pennies on the dollar to dimes on the dollar, and somebody can triple, quadruple, or get 10 times their money for that distressed asset that they bought at a bargain basement price. If the political forces change and then the US government — in fact, the US military gets involved in making sure that CITGO’s assets are safe and can be producing oil and refining it into gasoline.

So if you — you can ask an AI. This is one of the cool things about AI, right? If you’re sitting at home watching this, ask how much money did Paul Singer stand to make by the US invasion of Venezuela? And it will tell you he stands to make — at least when I queried it, he stands to make more than anybody else on the overthrow of Maduro, and that it could be in the billions of dollars. And this is the guy who’s paying for the ad that says I’m having a thruple with AOC and Ilhan Omar and running the AI of it in Kentucky so that the older people who still think that AI is artificial insemination for their cattle are going to wonder how that was created with artificial insemination.

And from start to finish, that’s the corruption. There it is. And they’re going to try to buy this seat. And if they get away with it, this is a referendum. I don’t think you’re going to vote your way out of this. If I lose, I think it’s bleak.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah, because it means that people with business before the government can use part of their proceeds to crush anyone who questions the deals that they’re benefiting from. Correct.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And it’s happening.

The Corruption of Data Centers and Corporate Cronyism

TUCKER CARLSON: My concern is that this is an even bigger concern with what’s happened in the current administration. If the lesson is that no matter who you vote for, things stay the same or get worse, then there’s no pressure relief valve for the society and people get radical.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Let me give you another example of where this is happening with these data centers. So twice I have seen and stopped special provisions from being inserted into US law to help data centers over all other types of businesses. In the big beautiful bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene and I noticed that there were a couple of pages that would give immunity for these data centers from state law. Like all state law, but also went down to the local level, including planning and zoning. So in other words, they were trying to get in the big beautiful bill a federal law that wouldn’t just trample states’ rights, abilities to regulate AI, but it would trample your local city commission or planning commission or county commission from being able to decide where the smokestacks and the cul-de-sacs go and keeping them separate.

And so we fought and got that taken out of the bill. The margin of passing the big beautiful bill was so slim that we were able to insist that they take that out. Marjorie withheld her vote until they took it out.

And then most recently in the Judiciary Committee, which has no jurisdiction over the EPA, I was sitting there in a markup. That’s where you bring like 8 bills in front of the committee and you’re going to sit there for several hours and you’re going to debate and amend the bills in the committee of jurisdiction. And like the 6th bill out of 8 was to give immunity from lawsuits, from environmental lawsuits, to data centers. And then it —

TUCKER CARLSON: Immunity for data centers?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: For data centers. So I leaned over to a few of the Republicans on that committee and said, did you see this bill? What is this bill about? And then I asked Grok, I’m like, which 5 companies would benefit the most from this bill? And that’s the great thing about AI. It said Oracle, Amazon, AWS — it gave you 5 companies. Now Grok didn’t incriminate itself. I didn’t expect it would, but Grok probably benefits from data centers. You think? So I’m surprised it was as honest as it was to me.

And so what I did is in real time in this hearing, I tweeted that these are the 5 companies that are going to benefit from this special provision of law if it happens. I also said that, look, there are 8 environmental laws here that it cites, and I may not even agree with these environmental laws, but if we’re going to give a reprieve, if we’re going to give anybody relief from it, we need to give farmers and factories and house builders the same kind of relief that you’re proposing to give the data centers. This is un-American. This gets to — is it corruption or not? I think it’s corruption by definition for corporations to be able to insert this. It’s an environmental provision having to do with data centers, but they figured out a way to get it through the Judiciary Committee. And then I drafted a provision.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where was Jim Jordan?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He was chairing the hearing. But in his defense, he may not have been looking very closely at this.

TUCKER CARLSON: The chairman of the committee might not have read the legislation.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Okay, well he does have to farm out some of this stuff. I drafted an amendment in real time. You try to think of creative ways that would brain damage the cronyism that they’re trying to achieve. And I thought, they probably want to build these data centers in farms and farmland. And so I drafted an amendment that said, okay, if this bill passes, excluded is any data center built in farmland. Which if I had gotten that successfully passed — which I think would have been a popular amendment and it probably could have got enough votes for it — and then once it’s in there, the data center guys are like, screw it, we don’t even want this now. We were going to build these into all the farms. That’s what was the whole purpose of the bill, to screw up the environment on the farmland, right? You just screwed the whole bill.

This is so dark. So here’s where I’ll defend Jim Jordan. He had the good sense to pull the bill before we got to it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So it got pulled from the hearing, but I don’t know that it would have happened if I hadn’t got in there and started blowing the whistle. So what’s going to happen if I lose? I don’t think anybody would have been there that day to stop that provision, to kill it in the crib before it made it to the floor of the House.

On the glyphosate thing, I don’t know that we could have rallied MAHA and let enough people know about it to get that done. Certainly the PRIME Act wouldn’t be in the farm bill. There are lots of things — good things that won’t happen if I’m not there and bad things that will happen if I’m not there. And that’s why I’m running.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think, looking back 10 years from now, we’re going to think of this data center transformation of the country?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think these are going to be buildings at some point with vines growing on them. With wild animals crawling through the roofs and the rotted outdoors. Because unlike farming, which is something we’ve been doing for thousands of years, these data centers are going to be obsolete in 10 or 20 years. It’ll be in outer space. Elon’s already got a plan to put them up there where they can get 100% solar all the time. They get the energy and they beam the answer back to Earth. I think it’s a desecration of the planet — we’re going to have a hangover while you and I are still alive looking at these things and wondering, well, what can we do with this empty shell that was purposeful?

Government Surveillance in Your Car

TUCKER CARLSON: They won’t last as long as the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, right? It’s all folly. It’s disgusting. So I just want to end with a story that’s maybe not a world historic story, but it’s just such a metaphor for everything. And that’s legislation that recently passed that allows big companies and the government to spy on you in your car. Your car. It’s now their car, apparently, while you’re in it. Will you describe what this is — the technology, the legislation, and your position on it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed under Biden — like tons of money thrown at things that aren’t really infrastructure — they also included some new mandates. And one of the mandates that’s impractical or Orwellian and needs to go away is this mandate for every automobile made in 2027. We’re just a few months away from this. Every car has to be able to judge your driving and shut down if it thinks you’re impaired.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not —

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And this isn’t like the thing that, if you’ve been convicted of a DUI, you have to blow into to prove that you’re not inebriated. This will judge your driving.

TUCKER CARLSON: I —

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And I’ve been fighting this ever since. I’ve been fighting this for years. I’ve fought it in the Transportation Committee, which I serve on. I’ve cross-examined the NHTSA people who are responsible for this.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’ll —

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They will admit to me it can’t work. It won’t work right. I had a woman who testified that there are about 1 billion car trips a day. If the success rate of this technology is 99.9%, that means there are going to be a million cars that won’t start on any given day. And I pointed out to her, well, it’s not the car not starting because the technology actually stops you mid-trip. So the car’s going to — I guess it’s going to pull you over. And on the highway, you could be a mom with kids because you swerved for a deer and then you got in the breakdown lane because an ambulance went by.

How does the car know — by the way, it’s going to have to know what road you’re on. The technology they’re proposing will watch your face. It’ll look for your gaze. It’ll look at your pupils. It’ll look at your posture, look where your hands are and judge whether you are competent to drive or not. My question that I’ve asked over and over, and I can’t get an answer to, is if the AI in the dashboard and the cameras in your dashboard is the judge, the jury, and the executioner, and you get pulled over on the side of the road and you’re a mom with a minivan full of kids, how do you appeal your sentence? Who’s going to start the car back up? Do you press a button and plead with another AI?

TUCKER CARLSON: But a machine is watching you on behalf of your overlords in your own car. If the North Koreans did this, we would say this is like classic Stalinist hellscape, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. I don’t even think the Chinese have proposed this yet. It’s ridiculous. And I wouldn’t trust the government with this power.

TUCKER CARLSON: But who could possibly be for that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s a coalition. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and parents. If you oppose this Orwellian scenario, they will bring to your office a very sad situation. They’ll bring constituents who’ve had kids that died at the hands of drunk drivers, right? And it’s tough to tell them that this technology isn’t going to work. So congressmen won’t tell them that. It’s tough to tell them there are better ways to stop drunk driving or to prevent this.

TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t even prosecute drunk driving when illegal aliens do it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there is no actual rule against drunk driving anymore in the United States if you are from a preferred ethnic group. So like, this whole thing is crazy.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Gets— that gets to the extra layer of justice, or the bifurcation of justice. We’ve got a system of justice for billionaires, we’ve got a system of justice for illegals.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But, and then we got a system of justice the rest of us are expected to operate on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Joe Biden said out loud, like, it’s not a big deal. Illegals get busted for DUI, so what?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: When I was a county executive, I saw them come to our jail and say, “You got to let this guy go, he’s an illegal.” Like, there’s no way to prosecute him in a regular court system. And that is crazy.

The Orwellian Kill Switch: Forcing the Vote

But this Orwellian kill switch system — twice I have forced a vote on this. On the floor of the House. I forced a debate and a vote, and this is why we lose — the uniparty. I can’t get 218 people to take this provision of law out of law.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there were Republicans who voted for this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, 50 in the last cycle. The victory, by the way, and this is for me, and the reason they want me gone, is I can’t force those 50 Republicans to do the right thing. I can’t even compel them. I compelled 170 of them to do the right thing, and there’s 50 holdouts.

Why do they hate me in the swamp? Why do they want me gone? Part of the coalition is the people who don’t want transparency, of course, because twice I’ve forced that vote. Twice they’ve stood there and taken the wrong vote against their constituents, against the Constitution, for a dystopian future. And now they’re outed.

You can go look at that list of 50 Republicans and mourn that your Republican is among them, but then go to the ballot box and vote against them. But you can’t do that if I’m not there, because who’s going to force that vote to happen?

13 Days Left: The Final Push

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: 13 days from today.

TUCKER CARLSON: 13 days from today, I need to raise money to go up against these billionaires, hedge fund managers, gambling magnates that are making money from Chinese gambling and controlling our government. massiemoneybomb.com is where we’re raising the money. The average donation is $94, and we’ve had tens of thousands of donors.

If this is the biggest battle, the biggest electoral battle this year, it’s all the marbles. Everybody’s pushed all their chips in. AIPAC has pushed in all their chips. All of the cronies have pushed in their chips, and we’re pushing in our chips. I’m doing everything I can for the next 13 days.

TUCKER CARLSON: Godspeed. I’m certainly rooting for you so fervently.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Thanks, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thomas Massie, thank you. Thank you, sir.

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