00:02I'm here today. The chair has been made aware of the valid basis for the
00:07gentleman's point of personal privilege. The gentleman from Kentucky is recognized
00:10for one hour. Roughly three weeks ago the Speaker of the House said, let me tell
00:19you how stupid Thomas Massey's comment is. In an article said that Johnson says
00:24Republicans are here to work and will remain in Washington throughout
00:28September according to the House calendar. He goes on to say, that is a
00:33nonsensical statement by someone who is not participating as a full member of the
00:40Congress and it's really sad that he doesn't. Unquote. Well, I'm here today to
00:48let you know that I'm a full participating member of the House of
00:53Representatives. In fact, when other people want to go home, I'm here to work.
00:59I'm here to get justice for the Epstein victims, the survivors. I am here to get
01:06the price of food and fuel down for our constituents. We've got solutions, we just
01:14refuse to pass them. So what happened a couple weeks ago is I introduced the
01:20Epstein files Transparency Act 2 discharge petition and I predicted that the House
01:28would take days off the calendar in order to avoid a vote on this again. If you
01:34remember a year ago we had the Epstein recess, I call it. My colleague Ro Khanna
01:41and I have been very successful in collecting names. We were just two
01:45signatures short of 218 on a discharge petition and the leadership of this body
01:51recessed this body for weeks to avoid swearing in one member that would have
01:57been the 218th vote. I was here, I was ready to work to be a fully participating
02:05member of Congress. Well, the speakers saw otherwise, the leadership here saw
02:12otherwise and they kept Congress shut down for weeks. We came back, I got that 218th
02:19signature and the bill that Ro Khanna and I co-authored became law. Every member
02:26except for one member of this House voted for our legislation that they had
02:31criticized for months. If it was so bad why did they all vote for it? That bill went
02:37to the Senate. It passed by unanimous consent. If you ask the Senators, can you
02:42pass one of our House bills, what will they say? Well, we'll see if we can get it
02:46on the docket that's going to take at least three days. We got to get a 60-vote
02:50threshold to get overcome the filibuster and so it's going to be a while.
02:57How long did it take them to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act? They passed
03:01it before it got there. It left this House and on the walk between the House and the
03:08Senate, they made a unanimous consent to pass that bill as soon as it got there
03:12and nobody objected. The President himself signed that bill. He had earlier said it
03:18would be a hostile act to even support that bill. And what came of it? Three
03:25million files released. Now we've yet to see justice here in the United States, but
03:31we watched a British ambassador to the United States lose his job. He was sacked.
03:38We saw the Prince, the Prince of England, lose his title. We saw the former Prime
03:46Minister of Norway arrested, convicted. Maybe not convicted yet, but arrested. We saw the
03:54Minister of Culture in France receive the same fate. CEOs, presidents of universities,
04:04resigned. Over a hoax? Somebody should have told him it was a hoax. Because that's what
04:09we were told, that it was a hoax. Folks, it wasn't a hoax. And there's still three million
04:15of those files that are being withheld at the Department of Justice. And the ones that have
04:20been released have been overly redacted in contravention of that law. So am I a fully, what would a fully
04:27participating member of Congress do if he got a law enacted against the will of the President,
04:33against the will of the Speaker, against the will, against all odds, and then the Chief
04:38Law Enforcement Officer of the country will not follow the law? What would a fully participating
04:42member of Congress do? Well, I think he'd do what I did. I wrote, along with Ro Khanna and Teresa
04:49Ledger-Fernandez. By the way, when did it become a dirty word to work across the aisle? When did
04:56that become forbidden? I thought that was supposed to be a good thing, to form coalitions. Oh,
05:03Massey, he, you know, he can't get anything done. He can't get people to agree with him.
05:10It was 427 to 1, was the vote on the Epstein files. Come on. I think that's a pretty big
05:18coalition,
05:20but it was more than just getting the files released. My colleague, Ro Khanna, and I held
05:25the biggest press conference that's ever occurred in Washington, D.C. in at least a decade, for as long
05:31as I've been here. Is that something a not fully participating member of Congress would do?
05:36I don't think so. Why did we do it? To give a voice to the survivors. We gave them a
05:45venue to speak to
05:46you, the people in power, the people who were hiding the files at the DOJ, at the FBI, at the
05:53U.S.
05:54attorneys. For the first time ever, we gave them a voice. We gave them a platform, and they were brave.
06:00They stepped up. They told their very tragic and sad stories, and they compelled the rest of this body
06:10to do the right thing after resisting for so long. So that gets us to where we are now on
06:17the Epstein files.
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