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Rep. Thomas Massie: "We Didn't Vote for Regime Change" (January 2026)
Anti-war voices across the spectrum against a ground war in Iran: Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Ana Kasparian.
Thomas Massie IN STUDIO: Iran War, Venezuela, Epstein Coverup · Breaking Points · uploaded 2026-01-14 · 26:24
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=ZejH2NRG-eY · IPFS QmUayJwM12yqsj8onCNYrxTyhhEU3g93uweWRk8426TLba
What this video is evidence for
Opposition to a war with Iran does not belong to one party. Breaking Points is co-hosted by a progressive (Krystal Ball) and a conservative (Saagar Enjeti). In January 2026, six weeks before the war began, they brought in Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), the Republican who has done the most to force Congress to vote on the war.
The hosts open with the question many Americans were asking: why are "America First" Republicans "lining up for a kinetic attack in Iran," using the protests there as "a pretext for another Middle East regime change operation"? Massie:
"We didn't vote for regime change. We were promised we'd be done with all the meddling."
He explains the Constitution plainly. Even the War Powers Act allows strikes only to protect the country "from immediate threat," and "you have to come to Congress and get authorization." He had already filed an Iran war powers resolution to force a vote. "The executive branch doesn't even want to concede anymore that the Constitution says it's Congress's role to decide." He also discusses the AIPAC and billionaire money pouring into his primary race to unseat him, and the Epstein files, which the hosts note show Epstein at times "working with Israeli government officials."
Left and right, the argument is the same: Americans never voted for this war, and Congress was never asked.
Where this fits: see Who Pushed Iran War for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:26:24. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
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 Massey of Kentucky. We cover you all the time, 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 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 1st Republicans, quote, America 1st Republicans, seem to be lining up for a kinetic attack in Iran, over these does of protesters, obviously tragic, but 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 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 done with all the meddling. Oh, you have to vote for war. That's how it works.
Right. Well, and what I mean is writ large to the population. You know, MAGA, we were promised there wouldn't be regime change. Um, and if you go back in the president's own Twitter feed, you can find him criticizing the president's before him, um, and after him for engaging in regime change. So it's just like the neocons have hijacked his foreign policy here in the 1st 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 this tortured legal scaffolding for Venezuela where they said, oh, the DOJ is just arresting Maduro on some machine gun charges, you know, for U.S. gun laws.
Well, he wasn't here in the U.S. with those guns. So that was... It also runs a military.
Yeah, he does run it. I'm assuming 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, it wasn't even a real arrest. It was a military action, and they were trying to say we had the military there to support the police who of the DOJ who were arresting Maduro.
And we're going to get some kind of tortured constitutional argument for why the president could do a strike on Iran. But even the War Powers Act says, you can only engage in strikes if you're protecting our country from immediate threat. And then even then you have to come to Congress and get authorization pretty soon thereafter. So I've introduced Iran warpowers resolution. I put it in a hopper this summer when things were heating up.
It just kind of, who could have foreseen we would do this in 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 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, Congressman Nasi.
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 back up for a vote here very soon. The Venezuela war powers resolution because they can't say it's premature now.
Now, they may say, oh, we're already done. We're not going to do any more than... AUMF. Once again, AUMF, they'll use, right? Well, another good point, though, the Iraq, both Iraq wars, and the engagement in Afghanistan.
Those were all voted on by Congress. Those were all authorized by Congress. So even though those were AOMFs and not declarations of war. There 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 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. I wouldn't vote for it, but I think he could get the vote. It's just the executive branch doesn't even want to concede anymore that the Constitution 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 people is always, she's just trying to distract from Epstein. So let's put the 1st element up on the screen. You and representative Rokana, you know, really push through the legislation that requires the DOJ to release the Epstein files. You've now sought a special master to oversee the release of the Epstein files.
A federal judge ordered a briefing, unquote, whether the court has the authority to rule upon or take action to bring about DOJ's compliance with the act, the court fight is coming to the Southern District of New York. So, thousands of records were released, as a result of the legislation that you guys put forward, I think, in eight different tranchas so far. Many hundreds. Security continues to be strong. Yeah, so here we are.
The regime has not fallen here in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of files are yet to be released. So what, like, they, that, that's clear violation of the statute and the law. how are we gonna get them? And how many more wars are we going to have?
before? I call these weapons of mass distraction from the Epstein files and they're going off every week, all these weapons of mass distraction. whether they, that's the intent of 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 violating the law. She missed the December 19th deadline.
She missed the deadline 15 days after that, where they had to justify redactions and give Congress a list of politicians who were involved in the Epstein files. So they missed 2 deadlines, but I'm concerned more about what they're redacting and what they're withholding than I am about these deadlines, and that's why we've asked this judge to appoint a special master. This is the judge that was over the Jalaine Maxwell case. And what we 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 Amiki to the court, like a friend of the court, Hey, here's a suggestion, if you want to take it or not.
The judge is asking us to, within a week, and also asking the DOJ within a week, to say, really, does Rokana and Thomas Massey have any standing here? And so 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 whether the DOJ is actually following the law. Our problem is, they've sent a letter to Congress saying, We're gonna 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 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, says that, you know, we have to 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 thing that are 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 deliberations. 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, we say specifically in our bill. You have to release internal communications involving decisions about whether to indict or not. And, um, 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 I think 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 judge to oversee this, and then we could ratchet that up as we go along. We can find them in contempt.
We could, uh, if we can get a majority of Congress to rule, we could say they're an inherent contempt, which allows us to collect a fine or even to arrest people at the DOJ. Um, we could do an impeachment of Pam Bonding. That is a longer process because it would have to pass the Senate. Right. So there, and then we can, there could be civil litigation in courts that could 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, anyway at the DOJ who's watching this show right now, 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 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 redactions or holding things for national security purposes. Anything that falls into that umbrella, potentially it would just be the political system, uh, that a 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 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 committee issues a subpoena, somebody doesn't show up, and then from the DOJ.
Clintons, for example. Yeah, the Clintons, for example. But the 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 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 diffuses itself at the end of a Congress because subpoenas expire.
If they were issued by one Congress, they don't care into the next Congress. This is a law that doesn't go to the end of Congress. It goes forever. Like, literally, if somebody doesn't comply, and even hate to say this, it's just a thought exercise. 10 years from now, the attorney general who finds an Epstein file is compelled to release it.
Right. Over at drop site news. You've done some reporting based on the documents that you've guys have forced into the public as well as some from the inbox of A Hood Barack, former prime minister and tele official in Israel, which shows very clearly that whatever else Epstein was doing, definitely at times he was working with Israeli government officials, in the interests of the Israeli government. So people can make that whatever they want, what have you encountered about that relationship as you've kind of pushed for the release of these documents? And as APAC and billionaire money pours into your race, which you've handled in one reelection, you're popular in 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 these, I'm a coincident theorist now, not a conspiracy theorist. I'm observing coincidences, like, for instance, one of the three billionaires funding the race against me is in Epstein's black book. Now, that came out many years ago. It's not. Which one was that?
It's not an indictment. John Paulson. Okay. Um, and these are the 3 billionaires, you know, one's Miriam Adelson, one's Paul Singer. They're all connected very deeply to Israel, as was Epstein, and in the case of John Paulson, he shows up in the Black Book of Epstein.
And again, I would say that's not an indictment. There are probably lots of people who Epstein had their personal cell numbers and may have had legitimate conversations about a scholarship or something. Um, but that's the kind of uh, connections that we're seeing here. And, you know, Ehud Barack, for instance, we know he met with Epstein, at least 3 dozen times, and it may have overlapped with when he was actually an official, working for Israel. I can confirm that.
Okay, good. Defense minister. He was formerly prime minister and then defense minister. I submitted to the record in a congressional hearing, uh, with Kash Patel right there in front of us, 5 documents that establish a connection between Epstein and intelligence agencies, uh, quotes from his security guard, for instance, the meetings with Ahud Barack, the fact that Epstein met with our own acting director of, of, um, CIA, I believe, then became later became the director. There's strong connections there.
And my, you know, the bill that Rokana and I released has been criticized for saying that you can read act 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 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 black on everything. 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 embarrassment in this case. Was it true, by the way, that the reason they screwed up the redactions on the last trunch was that Doge made them get rid of their Adobe Pro account. Did you hear that, Theory?
Because if you don't have Adobe Pro, you're going to have to do the sloppy method, which you can just copy paste and break through it. People were able to jailbreak all these files. You know, I don't think we defunded their, that would be kind of a double win for you because you were very supportive of that. I'm just 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 should have kept that. Keep it quiet, guys. Let them do it. You know, maybe they their Adobe Photoshop Pro license lapsed. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure they've 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 glad they did it the way they did. I just wish there was more stuff we could unredact. And eventually, I think we will. No, your weapons of mass distraction 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 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 right. So when we faced such an authoritarian, Ryan will disagree with me on this, but an authoritarian threat to speech and personal liberty from the 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 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 Massey has done more harm than good to the cause of personal liberty? Well, first of all, I vote with my party 91% of the time, and in the 9%, I don't. They're taking up for predophiles, starting a new war or bankrupting the country. Now, there's this.
None of those things are MAGA? None of those things are MAGA. Not the MAGA that I signed up for, not the president that I endorse, not his mission. I did endorse Donald Trump. before, you know, the November election, which was a big step.
He and I talked on the phone about that endorsement. He was very thankful for it. I told him I was doing it because 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 do I get this endorsement out there? And he said, oh, just tweet it. I'll retweet you. We put on true social... I get it out there for you.
And then he's like, the libertarians love me. They all applauded for me at the convention. And, um, anyways, he, it was, I do believe it was consequential. At least he thought it was consequential enough to put it on his own social media. Um, so it's, you know, I...
You speak at rallies? I did not. Oh, okay. Uh, that I just called him up on the phone and he took my call. He says, hello, this is Donald.
And, you know, and I said, yeah, it was a very interesting phone call, but eventually we got to the point. Did he have her number at the time or did he just answer to, or I guess it's not a tool. He was on a plane to go tape Joe Rogan, and, uh, I'm pretty sure he doesn't answer random calls. I think I'm in there under sharp cookie tough cookie. Because every time he answers, he goes, oh, you're a sharp cookie.
You went to MIT. I was just going to say, buddy. You know, my uncle, Professor John G. Trump taught it MIT, 41 years. It's a record.
I've got the best genetics. So, and I've heard that like every time. So I think in his phone it says sharp cookie or something. And also tough cookie. Yeah.
But now it says, what does he call you now? Oh, gosh, the litany of adjectives. I went from a 3rd rate grandstander to of, he endorsed me after that after 2020. He endorsed me in 2022 and called me a 1st rate defender of the Constitution. Now I'm back to 3rd rate grand standard.
Low life. What was the latest thing? Was it Epstein? Like, what was the break for him? Yeah.
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, 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 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 at the beginning of this session of Congress in January, and mentioned me 3 or 4 times. At the Kennedy Center speech?
Yeah. Trump Kennedy Center. Right, the Trump Kennedy Center. I was not there, but my friends all came up to me who were there and said he mentioned you like 4 or 5 times, not by name each time, but was Cleary 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 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. 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 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 on some of the amendments, like I'm gonna offer amendments to defund things that, you know, allegedly, here's a part of the cognitive dissonance, I think, over at the White House. There's all this fraud in these programs, like refugee resettlement programs, the daycare programs, the White House has tried to withhold funding from 5 different states, at least, and a judge said you can't do that. And they're complaining that the judge said, you know, this judge, he's got too much power. The reason the judge can do that can say that is President Trump signed 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.
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 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 do that. And so somebody needs to not sign the bill, if that would be the president, if it perpetuates the 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 mini bus. I'm gonna predict it does. I'm gonna predict 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, and it's a lot of 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. I mean, at the Washington Examiner in, like, 2017, and I wrote a story afterwards about something so interesting, you said, which is that back in 2012, and you'd been campaigning with Ron, Paul, and Rand Paul, you thought everyone was super excited. You know where I'm going with it. I was super excited about, like, libertarian ideas and you found out, ultimately, that they were just looking for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.
Yeah. Are you now the craziest son of the bitch, son of a bitch in the race? Are you gonna win by being more MAGA? MAGA? Well, I mean, I did apply that, uh, 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 Republican Party was going more libertarian, more constitutional. And then I saw Donald Trump getting a race and take the same base that we had. And then I realized at that point, they had not been voting for the libertarian or the constitutionalists. They were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. Disruptor.
The disruptor. And, uh, you know, it's a I use that as a term of endearment, by the way. Yeah, of course. I think I'm the only sane Republican in the race right now or the only one that's forming an opinion that sometimes deviates from the group think... The sanest son of a bitch.
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 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 I'm crazy. How's the polling look? Like, are have you done any, or is there public polling? You didn't see Donald Trump's tweets? No, I missed that.
He says, he's reported three times on the polling. At one point, I was at 6%, but I'm back up to 9%. Okay. I've hovered around 8% and 50% jump. Yeah, and 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. Even though they spent $2 million disparaging my name, they haven't really spent any money promoting my opponents.
He has 0 name ID. So when we poll it, and we pulled it in September and December, Uh, 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 it changes, I'm still winning the race, even with the Trump endorsement. So, we'll see.
There is going to be a lot of money spent, I think... There already has been a stunning amount against it. Yeah, there's been $2000000 spent almost 10 months before the race against me. There's been a $1000000 spent for me. I've spent half a $1000000 on TV and ads from my own campaign funds.
But I've got $2000000 in the bank. Every time Donald Trump tweets against me, I raise another $80,000 on average. And those are people mostly who support Trump. Well, the one of the billionaires against you, singer stands to make 1000000000s from the Venezuela invasion. So he can, you know, carve off a little fees for that.
It's just return on investment for him. I mean, he bought sick go, which was the nationalized Venezuelan oil company that sells gasoline in the United States. He bought them for pennies on the dollar in a forced auction sale of them, even though there was a higher bidder. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah.
And he does. He goes and buys bad 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 make him whole, and that's what's happened here. And they're not even hiding it. He did this with Argentina.
He did it with Puerto Rico. He's trying to do it with Fannie and Freddy, or was trying to do it with Fannie. Yeah, the White House is not even hiding it. There's, you know, we've been gaslit this whole time. It started out, oh, it's about fentanyl and fentanyls, a weapon of mass destruction, and we're just blowing up the boats, and then, oh, actually, they don't send us fentanyl.
They send us cocaine. All right, well, but at least we're just blowing up boats. We're not going on the mainland. Oh, actually, it's about the oil because these are narco terrorists. And this is the most preposterous thing that they get away with, is 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 cocaine. Yes, I think you're doing okay. I think they're doing just fine. Maybe a little help from the DEA. Yeah, the CIA might help finance some of it every now and then, 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 is, it's usually a crime up here to commit candor.
But, uh, the president is committing it. He's admitting this was an attack, not an 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, um, he will eventually, he's gonna make his big donor's hole like Paul Singer, who bought the troubled asset known as sicko. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.
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Last Updated: 2026-09-27