00:00I'm here today. The chair has been made aware of the valid basis for the
00:05gentleman's point of personal privilege. The gentleman from Kentucky is
00:07recognized for one hour. Roughly three weeks ago, the Speaker of the House said,
00:16let me tell you how stupid Thomas Massey's comment is. In an article said
00:21that Johnson says Republicans are here to work and will remain in Washington
00:25throughout September, according to the House calendar. He goes on to say, that
00:31is a nonsensical statement by someone who is not participating as a full member of
00:37the Congress, and it's really sad that he doesn't, unquote. Well, I'm here today to
00:46let you know that I'm a full participating member of the House of Representatives.
00:51In fact, when other people want to go home, I'm here to work. I'm here to get
00:58justice for the Epstein victims, the survivors. I am here to get the price of
01:05food and fuel down for our constituents. We've got solutions, we just refuse to
01:13pass them. So what happened a couple weeks ago is I introduced the Epstein
01:19Files Transparency Act 2 discharge petition, and I predicted that the House
01:26would take days off the calendar in order to avoid a vote on this again. If you
01:32remember a year ago, we had the Epstein recess, I call it. My colleague Ro Khanna
01:39and I have been very successful in collecting names. We were just two
01:43signatures short of 218 on a discharge petition, and the leadership of this
01:49body recessed this body for weeks to avoid swearing in one member that would
01:55have been the 218th vote. I was here, I was ready to work to be a fully
02:02participating member of Congress. Well, the speakers saw otherwise, the leadership
02:09here saw otherwise, and they kept Congress shut down for weeks. We came back, I got
02:16that 218th signature, and the bill that Ro Khanna and I co-authored became law. Every
02:24member, except for one member of this House, voted for our legislation that they
02:29had criticized for months. If it was so bad, why did they all vote for it? That
02:35bill went to the Senate, it passed by unanimous consent. If you ask the senators,
02:39can you pass one of our House bills, what will they say? Well, we'll see if we can get it
02:44on the docket, that's going to take at least a few years.
02:46Three days, we got to get a 60-vote threshold, we, to get overcome the
02:51filibuster, and so it's going to be a while. How long did it take them to pass
02:56the Epstein Files Transparency Act? They passed it before it got there. It left
03:02this House, and on the walk between the House and the Senate, they made a
03:07unanimous consent to pass that bill as soon as it got there, and nobody objected. The
03:12president himself signed that bill. He had earlier said it would be a hostile act to
03:18even support that bill, and what came of it? Three million files released. Now, we've
03:26yet to see justice here in the United States, but we watched a British
03:31ambassador to the United States lose his job. He was sacked. We saw the Prince, the
03:39Prince of England lose his title. We saw the former Prime Minister of Norway arrested,
03:47convicted. Maybe not convicted yet, but arrested. We saw the Minister of Culture in
03:53France receive the same fate. CEOs, presidents of universities resigned over a hoax. Somebody
04:04should have told him it was a hoax because that's what we were told, that it was a
04:09hoax. Folks, it wasn't a hoax, and there's still three million of those files
04:13that are being withheld at the Department of Justice, and the ones that have been
04:18released have been overly redacted in contravention of that law. So am I a fully,
04:24what would a fully participating member of Congress do if he got a law enacted
04:30against the will of the president, against the will of the speaker, against the will,
04:33against all odds, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the country will not
04:38follow the law? What would a fully participating member of Congress do?
04:42Well, I think he'd do what I did. I wrote, along with Ro Khanna and Teresa Ledger-Fernandez,
04:48by the way, when did it become a dirty word to work across the aisle? When did that become
04:54forbidden? I thought that was supposed to be a good thing, to form coalitions. Oh, Massey,
05:01he, you know, he can't get anything done. He can't get people to agree with him. It was 427 to
05:091 was
05:10the vote on the Epstein files. Come on. I think that's a pretty big coalition. But it was more than
05:19just getting the files released. My colleague Ro Khanna and I held the biggest press conference
05:24that's ever occurred in Washington, D.C., in at least a decade, for as long as I've been here.
05:30Is that something a not fully participating member of Congress would do? I don't think so.
05:36Why did we do it? To give a voice to the survivors. We gave them a venue to speak to
05:44you, the people in
05:45power. The people who were hiding the files at the DOJ, at the FBI, at the U.S. attorneys.
05:52For the first time ever, we gave them a voice. We gave them a platform. And they were brave. They
05:58stepped up. They told their very tragic and sad stories. And they compelled the rest of this body
06:08to do the right thing after resisting for so long. So that gets us to where we are now on
06:14the Epstein files.
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