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Thomas Massie IN STUDIO on Breaking Points: Iran War, Venezuela, Epstein Coverup

Jan 14, 2026 · 26:24 breaking-pointsiranvenezuelaepsteinwar-powers

Massie in the Breaking Points studio with Krystal and Saagar. Half an hour spanning the Iran war powers fight, Venezuela escalation, and the bipartisan failure to release the Epstein files.

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  1. We're really excited to be joined now by someone we've wanted to have on the show for a very long time. That is representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. We cover you all the time,
  2. sir. So, thank you so much for being here in person. Thank you. And as a reminder to everybody, make sure to give us a subscribe so these videos show up. You help our independent news show up in
  3. your news feed. That is very, very helpful. Now, we want to start with news out of Iran. Why is it that these quote America First Republicans, quote America First
  4. Republicans seem to be lining up for a kinetic attack in Iran over these deaths of protesters, obviously tragic, but
  5. also clearly being used as a pretext for another Middle East regime change operation. What is it that has so many Republicans, once again, we're back in the Middle East. We're getting
  6. deja vu right now. What's going on with the Republican Party? Well, I mean, we didn't vote for regime change. We were promised we'd be be done with all the meddling. Um Oh, you have to vote for
  7. war. That's how it works. Right. Well, I and what I mean is re- large of the population, you know, MAGA, we were promised there wouldn't be regime
  8. change. Um and if you go back in the president's own Twitter feed, you can find him criticizing the presidents before him
  9. um and after him for engaging in regime change. So, it's just like the neocons have hijacked his foreign policy here
  10. in the first year. It's not even taken a few years to get there. Now, to your other point, we are supposed to vote on this in Congress, right? Like, we had
  11. this tortured legal scaffolding for Venezuela where they said, "Oh, the DOJ is just arresting Maduro on some machine
  12. gun charges, you know, for US gun laws." Well, he wasn't here in the US with those guns. So, He also runs a military. Yeah, he does run it. I'm assuming like
  13. if Donald Trump had a machine gun, that would be fine. He's the commander in chief and shouldn't that be the same way with another head of state? In any case,
  14. it wasn't even a real arrest. It was a military action. They were trying to say we had the military there to support the police who of the DOJ who were arresting
  15. Maduro. And we're get we're going to get some some kind of tortured constitutional argument for why the president could do a strike on Iran. But
  16. even the War Powers Act says you can only engage in strikes if you're protecting our country from
  17. immediate threat. And then even then, you have to come to Congress and get authorization pretty soon thereafter. So, I've introduced a Iran War Powers
  18. Resolution. I put it in the hopper this summer when things were heating up. Who could have foreseen? Who could have foreseen we would do this in
  19. anticipation of something like this. So, it may be time to call that to the floor and force a vote on it. Now, what happens inevitably is you have people
  20. who don't want to vote for it looking for any excuse to vote against it and they'll say, "Well, we're not actually there right now. So, this is premature,
  21. Congressman Massie." That's what I heard on the Venezuelan War Powers Resolution that we did in December. "It's just the boats. We don't have boots on the ground." And so, we're bringing that one
  22. back up for a vote here very soon, the the Venezuela War Powers Resolution because they can't say it's premature now. Now, they may say, "Oh, we're
  23. already done. We're not going to do any more there." >> AUMF, once again, AUMF they'll use, right? >> Well, another another good point though, the Iraq both Iraq wars and the
  24. engagement in Afghanistan, those were all voted on by Congress. Those were all authorized by Congress. So, even though those were AUMFs and not declarations of
  25. war, they should have been declarations of war, limited in scope and geography, they were not. But at least Congress voted to do that stuff. And here's
  26. what's ironic. I think right now the president could get Congress, a majority in Congress in the House and the Senate to vote for this.
  27. Um I wouldn't vote for it, but I think he could get the vote. The it's just the executive branch doesn't even want to concede anymore that the Constitution
  28. says it's Congress's role to decide when to initiate things like this. If you ask the public why Trump is doing a lot of this stuff, what we hear a lot from
  29. people is, "Oh, he's he's just just trying to distract from Epstein." Um so, let's put up the first element up on the screen. Um you and Representative Ro
  30. Khanna, um you know, really pushed through the legislation that requires the DOJ to release the Epstein files. You've now sought a a special master to
  31. oversee the release of the Epstein files. A federal judge ordered a briefing on quote whether the court has the authority to rule upon or take action to bring about DOJ's compliance
  32. with the act. The court fight is coming to the southern southern district of New York. So, thousands of records were released as a result of the legislation
  33. that you guys put forward, I think in eight different tranches so far. Many hundreds >> continues to be strong. National Yes, here we are. The regime has not fallen
  34. here in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of files are yet to be released. So, what like they that that's clear
  35. violation of the statute and the law. How are we going to get them? And how many more wars are we going to have before [laughter] I call these weapons of mass distraction
  36. from the Epstein files and and they're going off every week, all these weapons of mass distraction. Um whether they that's the intent of
  37. this activity abroad or not, it is the effect of it, which is to take the eye off of this ball and it's to take the eye off the fact that Pam Bondi is
  38. violating the law. She missed the December 19th deadline. [clears throat] She missed the deadline 15 days after that where they had to justify redactions and give Congress a list of
  39. politicians who were involved in the Epstein files. So, they missed two deadlines, but I'm concerned more about what they're redacting and what they're withholding than I am about these
  40. deadlines. And that's why we've asked this judge to appoint a special master. This is the judge that was over the Ghislaine Maxwell case. And what we
  41. noticed is that he still engaged in a dialogue with Pam Bondi regarding the release of these files. And so, what we did is we submitted an
  42. amicus to the court, like a friend of the court. Hey, here's a suggestion if you want to take it or not. Um the judge is asking us to within a week and also
  43. asking the DOJ within a week to say really does Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have any standing here? And so, that's
  44. that's an interesting question whether we do or not, but I do think that the judge is empowered to opine and even to appoint a special master on his own on
  45. whether the DOJ is actually following the law. >> [clears throat] >> Our problem is they've sent a letter to Congress saying, "We're going to
  46. ignore parts of your law because we think prior law supersedes it." But that's not the way this works. When Congress passes a new law, it supersedes
  47. the old law. So, some of the things that they're citing in order to justify their redactions, they're saying, "Well, the Privacy Act um says that, you know, we have to
  48. protect the privacy of individuals, but our bill specifically says you can't redact material to prevent embarrassment and other things." And then the other
  49. thing that they're redacting for is they're saying, "Well, the FOIA standards, which is Freedom of Information Act standards, allow us to redact to protect our internal
  50. deliberations." Here Here's the problem. Our bill is not a FOIA request. Our bill is a law that the president himself signed. And the other thing is
  51. we say specifically in our bill, you have to release internal communications involving decisions about whether to indict or not. And
  52. so, they're they're way off on their legal reasoning. The thing is it's might makes right. They're doing this. They're disobeying the law because
  53. I think they're they're trying to test and see if there's any way it can be enforced. And so, we're doing the most polite thing possible. We're just asking a
  54. judge to oversee this. And then we could ratchet that up as we go along. We can find them in contempt. We could if we can get a majority of Congress to
  55. rule, we could say they're in inherent contempt, which allows us to collect a fine or even to arrest people at the DOJ. Um we could do an impeachment of
  56. Pam Bondi. That is a longer process because it would have to pass the Senate. Right. So, there and then we could there could be civil litigation in courts that could
  57. also get to this. What's clear though is somebody's got to make the AG follow the law. And I would like to remind them,
  58. anybody at the DOJ who's watching this show right now, this this isn't a subpoena. It's a law. And so, it doesn't expire at the end of this Congress. So, a future attorney general can prosecute
  59. anybody who's involved in disobeying this law. >> Well, yeah, I was actually just going to ask about that. What mechanism might exist to hold them accountable if, for example, they are just making mass
  60. redactions or holding things for national security purposes, anything that falls into the that umbrella, potentially it would just be the political system that a
  61. opposition party would come into power and prosecute Pam Bondi or others at the DOJ. It could it could do that. Yeah, I mean, the next administration could come
  62. in and prosecute them. The reason that typically hasn't happened in the past is because Congress, whether like it's an oversight committee or the Judiciary
  63. Committee, issues a subpoena, somebody doesn't show up, and then from the DOJ >> for example. >> Clintons, for example. But the the
  64. harder case is when you have somebody at the DOJ who's thumbing their nose at Congress. So, you refer contempt to the DOJ and the DOJ says, "You know, we
  65. don't think we're going to find ourselves in contempt." So, they never act upon it. And it's a time bomb with a fuse that defuses itself at the end of a
  66. Congress because subpoenas expire. If they were issued by one Congress, they don't carry into the next Congress. This is a law that doesn't go to the end of
  67. Congress, it goes forever. Like literally Right. if somebody doesn't comply I even hate to say this, it's just a thought exercise. 10 years from now, the
  68. Attorney General who finds an Epstein file is compelled to release it. >> Right. Uh over at Drop Site News, you've done
  69. some [clears throat] reporting based on the documents that you guys have forced into the public as well as some from the inbox of Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister and intel
  70. official of Israel, which shows very clearly that whatever else Epstein was doing, definitely at times he was working with Israeli government officials
  71. in the interest of the Israeli government. Um so people can make of that whatever they want. What have you encountered about that relationship as
  72. you've kind of pushed for the release of these documents? >> And as AIPAC and billionaire money pours into your race, which you've handily won
  73. re-election, and you're popular in the your district time after time, seems like there's a target on your back for a reason. Yeah, it's either a really small world or [laughter]
  74. uh these I'm a I'm a coincidence theorist now, not a conspiracy theorist. I'm observing coincidences like for for instance, one of the three billionaires
  75. funding the race against me is in Epstein's black book. Now, that came out many years ago. Which one was that? >> It's not an indictment.
  76. John Paulson. Okay. Um and these are the three billionaires, you know, one's Miriam Adelson, one's Paul Singer. They're all connected very deeply to
  77. Israel um as was Epstein. And in the case of John Paulson, he shows up in the black book of Epstein. And again, I
  78. wouldn't say that's not an indictment. >> Right. There probably lots of people who Epstein had their personal cell numbers and may have had legitimate
  79. conversations about a scholarship or something. Um but that's the kind of uh connections that we're seeing here. And you know,
  80. Ehud Barak for instance, we know he met with Epstein at least three dozen times and it may have overlapped with when he was actually an official Oh, it did.
  81. working for Israel as >> I can confirm that. >> Okay, good. Yeah. Defense Minister. He was formerly Prime Minister and then Defense Minister. I submitted to the
  82. record in a congressional hearing um with Kash Patel right there in front of us, five documents that establish a
  83. connection between Epstein and intelligence agencies. Um quotes from his security guard for instance, the meetings with Ehud Barak,
  84. the fact that Epstein met with our own acting director of of CIA, I believe. Yeah. Then became later became the
  85. director. Mhm. Um there's strong connections there. Yeah. And you know, the bill that Ro Khanna and I released has been criticized for
  86. saying that you can redact to protect national security. And so they might for instance try to redact his connection to the CIA. The problem is they need to say
  87. when they're redacting for national security. They still need to release those documents and have the redactions. That's the other thing about these redactions, they're just putting
  88. black on everything. >> [clears throat] >> They're not putting why they've redacted it. You know, okay, we're trying to protect a victim here or maybe we're trying to protect a billionaire from
  89. embarrassment in this case. But was it true by the way that the reason they screwed up the redactions on the last tranche was that DOJ made them
  90. get rid of their Adobe Pro account? Did you hear that, Jerry? That cuz if you don't have Adobe Pro, you're going to have to do the sloppy method, which you can just copy paste and and break
  91. through it. People were able to jailbreak all these files. You know, I don't think we defunded their >> So that would be kind of a double win for you because you were very supportive
  92. of that. >> mad it was disclosed that you could unredact these things fairly soon. I was hoping they would release more of these things that all you had to do was Right. I know, we should have kept that.
  93. >> Keep it quiet. God, it's on a notepad. Yeah, let them do it. You know, maybe they their Adobe Photoshop Pro license lapsed. I don't know, but I'm pretty
  94. sure they got plenty of Sharpie markers over there. They could have printed this stuff out and did a Sharpie and then scanned it back in. I'm I'm glad they
  95. did it the way they did. I just wish there was more stuff we could unredact and eventually I think we will. Now, your weapons of mass distraction
  96. point would be turned around by you. In fact, the entire predicate for your primary opponent's campaign is that you yourself are a distraction from the MAGA
  97. agenda. And as a libertarian, something you've had to think about your entire career is that threats to personal freedom and liberty and constitutional order come from both the left and the
  98. right. Yes. So when we faced such an authoritarian, Ronald will disagree with me on this, but an authoritarian threat to speech and personal liberty from the
  99. Biden era left, a lot of people on the right said it's just important to go pedal to the metal for Donald Trump, let Mike Johnson cook. How are you thinking
  100. about these things now? Do you feel like you've done more Obviously, you feel like you've done more good than harm, but what do you think about the people who say Thomas Massie has done more harm
  101. than good to the cause of personal liberty? Uh well, first of all, I vote with my party 91% of the time. And in the 9% I
  102. don't, they're taking up for pedophiles, starting a new war, or bankrupting the country. Um now, so there's this None of those things are MAGA? None of those things
  103. are MAGA. As not the MAGA that I signed up for. Not the president that I endorsed, not his mission. I did endorse Donald Trump um before, you know, the
  104. November election, which was a big step. He and I talked on the phone about that endorsement. He was very thankful for it. Uh I told him I was doing it because
  105. I thought there were still a lot of libertarians and independents on the fence, and he agreed. He was so excited about my endorsement. I said, "Well, how
  106. do I get this endorsement out there?" And he said "Oh, just tweet it. I'll retweet you. We'll put it on Truth Social. I'll get it out there for you."
  107. And then he's like, "The libertarians love me. They all applauded for me at the convention." And anyways, he it wasn't I do believe it
  108. was consequential, at least he thought it was consequential enough to to put it on his own social media. Um so it's, you know, I
  109. >> Did you speak at rallies? I did not. Okay. Um that I just called him up on the phone and he took my call. He says, "Hello, this is
  110. Donald." >> [laughter] >> And you know, and I said, you it was very interesting phone call, but um
  111. eventually we got to the point of >> have your number at the time or did he just answer It's or cuz it's not a toll He was on a plane to go tape Joe Rogan
  112. and I'm pretty sure he doesn't answer random calls. I think I'm in there under sharp cookie, tough cookie. Yeah. Cuz every time he answers, he goes,
  113. "You're a sharp cookie. You went to MIT." I was just going to say a buddy of you. >> my uncle Professor John G. Trump taught at MIT 41 years. It's a record.
  114. I've got the best genetics. >> [laughter] >> So and I've heard that like every time. So I think in his phone it says sharp cookie or something. And also tough
  115. cookie. Yeah. Um But now it says, what does he call you now? Oh gosh, the litany of adjectives. It I went from a third-rate
  116. grandstander to a He endorsed me after that, after 2020, he endorsed me in 2022 and called me a first-rate defender of the
  117. Constitution. Now I'm back to third-rate grandstander. Lowlife. What was the latest thing? Was it Epstein? Like what was the break for him? Yeah.
  118. I wonder if he's got it if like there's some secret project that's a time machine over at the White House and they let him turn the knobs and look into the future
  119. and he sees that I do something uh great to his detriment. And so now every morning he wakes up trying to figure out how to derail me from my path
  120. into Obviously, I'm being facetious here. Um I don't know what it is. It's I don't you know, he came to our GOP conference
  121. at the beginning of this session of Congress in January and mentioned me three or four times. >> Kennedy Center speech? >> Yeah. I said you were there. >> Trump Kennedy Center. Right, the Trump
  122. Kennedy Center. Um I was not there, but my friends all came up to me who were there and said he mentioned you like four or five times, not by name each
  123. time, but was clearly he was speaking about. Here's but to to the main point, there's this narrative people are trying to say I've stopped an agenda. Right. I didn't
  124. stop the big beautiful bill. I didn't stop all these CRs, which are basically the Biden budgets. >> Which Mike Johnson said we wouldn't be governing by CR.
  125. I haven't stopped anything yet, and the only thing where I've really changed the course of Congress, this Congress, is to get the Epstein files Transparency Act
  126. passed. I have forced some transparency on them, and I think that's what they dislike when they have to vote on whether to go to war or not. Um and then
  127. on some of the amendments, like I'm going to offer amendments to defund things that you know, allegedly Here's a part of the cognitive dissonance I think
  128. over at the White House. There's all this fraud in these programs like ref- refugee resettlement programs,
  129. the daycare programs. The White House has tried to withhold funding from five different states at least, and a judge said you can't do that. And they're
  130. complaining that the judge said we you know, this judge, he's got too much power. The reason the judge can do that can say that is President Trump signed
  131. the bill that said he would give the money and Republicans wrote the checks to give the money. Once you pass a spending bill, it has it's a law.
  132. And so you have to follow the law. They have an opportunity, the Republicans do and this president does by January 30th to put those guardrails in. If they want
  133. to withhold money or say that or put guardrails around things to keep fraud from happening. There's a bill coming up in this week and next week to
  134. do that. And so somebody needs to not sign the bill. If that would be the president if [clears throat] it perpetuates the
  135. fraud. I'll be interested to see how that goes. Can't wait for the National Endowment for Democracy to get another 300 million as you've been pointing out. That's in the minibus. I'm going to predict it does. I'm going to predict
  136. they don't stop that even though they complain about it and it's a tool for intervention overseas. It's a tool for the CIA. It's a It's and it's a lot of
  137. money going overseas. I don't think that's going to make America great again. Well, my final question for you is actually back when you did an interview with my colleagues and me at
  138. the Washington Examiner in like 2017 and I wrote a story afterwards about something so interesting you said, which is that back in 2012 when you'd been campaigning with Ron Paul and Rand Paul,
  139. you thought everyone was super excited. You know where I'm going with this. Super excited about like libertarian ideas and you found out ultimately that they were just looking for the craziest son of a in the race.
  140. >> Yeah. Are you now the craziest son of a son of a in the race? Are you going to win by being more maggot >> [laughter] >> Well, I mean I did apply that
  141. that name to myself back then even. I said that when they elected Ron Paul and Rand Paul and myself, I thought they were the
  142. Republican Party was going more libertarian, more constitutional and then I saw Donald Trump get in a race and take the same base that we had. And
  143. then I realized at that point they had not been voting for the libertarian or the constitutionalist. They were voting for the craziest son of a in the race. >> Disruptor. The disruptor and you know,
  144. it's a I use that as a term of endearment by the way. >> Yeah. Of course. Um >> Same. I think I'm the only sane Republican in
  145. the race right now or the only one that's forming an opinion that sometimes deviates from the groupthink. The sanest son of a
  146. Probably. It looks crazy up here, but back home I don't think it looks crazy when you say I don't think we should increase spending. I don't think we
  147. should topple governments overseas. I don't think we should be covering up for this pedophile ring. Is that crazy? If that's all crazy, then
  148. I'm crazy. How's the polling look? Like are have you done any or is there public polling? You You didn't see Donald Trump's tweets? >> No, I missed that.
  149. He says he's reported three times on the polling. At one point I was at 6%, but I'm back up to 9%. I've hovered around 8% in 50% jump.
  150. >> Yeah, in the president's tweets. The reality is I am winning back in the district. And even when you inform and the race hasn't heated up. I've got a primary on May 19th. Okay. Uh even
  151. though they spent $2 million disparaging my name, they haven't really spent any money promoting my opponent. He has zero name ID. So when we poll it and we pulled it in September and December uh
  152. we and we put him on the ballot both times, I beat him by a large margin. If you go in and tell the people, "Oh, but Trump has endorsed him." And look at how
  153. it changes, I'm still winning the race even with the Trump endorsement. So we'll see. There's going to be a lot of money spent. I think >> There already has been a stunning amount
  154. against >> Yeah, there's been $2 million spent almost 10 months before the race against me. There's been a million
  155. dollars spent for me. I've spent half a million dollars on TV and ads from my own campaign funds. But I've got $2 million in the bank. Every
  156. time Donald Trump tweets against me, I raise another $80,000 on average and those are people mostly who support Trump.
  157. Well, the one of the billionaires against you, Singer, stands to make billions from the Venezuela invasion. So he can you know, carve off a little little piece for that. It's just return on
  158. investment for him. I mean he bought Citgo, which was the nationalized Venezuelan oil company that sells gasoline in the United States. He bought
  159. them for pennies on the dollar in a forced auction sale of them even though there was a higher bidder. >> Right. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah. And he does he goes and buys bad
  160. debt and bad, you know, hard luck cases and then uses the government >> uses the government to force to compel other governments to pay the loans or to
  161. make him whole and that's what's happened here. And they're not even hiding it. >> this with Argentina. He did it with Puerto Rico. He's trying to do it with Fannie and Freddie or was trying to do
  162. it with Fannie. Yeah, the White House is not even hiding it. They're you know We've we've been gaslit this whole time. It started out, "Oh, it's about fentanyl and fentanyl's a weapon of mass
  163. destruction and we're just blowing up the boats." And then, "Oh, well, actually they don't send us fentanyl. They send us cocaine." All right. Well, but at least we're just blowing up
  164. boats. We're not going on the mainland. Oh, actually it's about the oil because these are narcoterrorists and this is the most preposterous thing
  165. that they get away with saying that the oil funds the drug trade. I'm pretty sure if there's one industry that doesn't need or receive subsidies, it's
  166. cocaine. >> Yes, I think they're doing okay. >> I think they're doing just fine. Maybe a little help from the DEA >> [laughter] >> in there. Yeah, the CIA might help finance some of it every now and then,
  167. but they don't need oil money to sell cocaine, but that's how they tried to get to the oil. But now, I mean give them credit for committing candor, which
  168. is it's usually a crime up here to commit candor. >> [laughter] >> The president is committing it. He's admitting this was an attack, not an
  169. arrest and he's saying we're taking their oil and I'll take as much of it as I want and I'll sell it for any price I want. And he will eventually he's going
  170. to make his big donors whole like Paul Singer who bought the troubled asset known as Citgo. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a
  171. comment below. It really helps get the show to more people. And if you'd like to get the full show ad-free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com.
  172. >> That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.