Thomas Massie
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Thomas Massie is a Republican member of Congress from Kentucky. John Kiriakou has described him as a personal acquaintance, they have attended Washington Nationals baseball games together, introduced through his friend and attorney Bruce Fein, who writes legislation for Massie, and as "absolutely lovely" with "not a malicious hair on his head," saying elsewhere that he has "deep respect" for Massie. Kiriakou has noted that Massie never criticizes Trump personally, only policy, after Massie's wife died, Trump reportedly sent him a long, kind and apologetic text or call, and Massie considered endorsing Trump as a result.

Kiriakou has said Massie votes with the president more than ninety percent of the time, and that the minority of votes where he diverges represent positions most conservatives would agree with on reflection. In Kiriakou's analysis, the only plausible explanation for the Israel lobby spending approximately $30 million to remove Massie from Congress is his opposition to U.S. funding of Israel and his opposition to foreign interventionist wars: "America first is exactly the opposite of what the Israel lobby wants. They want Israel first."

Massie's primary opponent at the time of Kiriakou's remarks was Ed Gallerin, a retired special forces veteran. Kiriakou described Gallerin as an attractive candidate in other contexts but expressed hope that he would lose Massie's specific district. Earlier, Kiriakou had also reported that the Washington Post said Trump was already laying groundwork to recruit a primary challenger against Massie, while noting that inside Massie's district itself, people didn't care and loved him regardless.

At one point Kiriakou cited Massie's continued presence in Congress as proof that AIPAC's strategy of primarying insufficiently pro-Israel incumbents does not always work as intended, "Massie's one," he said, naming him as the exception to the pattern. On policy, Kiriakou says Massie is a frequent and vocal advocate of the position that the Constitution is clear only Congress can declare war.

That assessment did not hold: Massie lost his 2026 primary, and Kiriakou says he was crushed by roughly 11 percentage points, a loss he attributes largely to Massie's support for Palestinian human rights, which angered Trump. Kiriakou says Massie sponsored and personally engineered the discharge petition that forced a vote on releasing the Epstein files, a vote that passed 419,1 in the House and 99,0 in the Senate, which Trump had to sign but then immediately said he would not respect his own signature, ultimately releasing only one tranche of documents. Trump's handpicked successor for the seat, in Kentucky's most conservative and most Republican district, was a retired Navy SEAL.

The $35 million seat

John Kiriakou cites a Thomas Massie primary in which two sides spent 35 million dollars, almost entirely outside money, on a single House seat paying 180,000 dollars a year. He says AIPAC spent the money because Massie does not support Israel's agenda, part of a pattern of primarying any member who is not fully pro-Israel. He has repeated the same figures elsewhere, framing the spending as AIPAC "buying a congressional seat" and noting he expected to take heat for saying so.

When the strategy backfires

Kiriakou notes that AIPAC's willingness to primary anyone less than fully aligned can cost it the seat outright, a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. He cites an incumbent New Jersey Democrat who voted with Israel roughly 90 per cent of the time and was challenged by a candidate who did so entirely: the incumbent lost, the challenger lost too, and the winner was the pro-Palestinian candidate. "You end up hurting your own cause."

The price of backing release

John Kiriakou cites Massie as the clearest case of what happened to Republicans who supported releasing the Epstein files. Massie became one of the administration's top political targets: outside super PACs, mostly those affiliated with AIPAC, spent thirty-five million dollars to remove him from a job paying a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, and the president personally flew to his district to rally against him.

Kiriakou pairs him with the Kentucky Republican's Democratic co-sponsor on the transparency act, noting that the two were the ones who forced the issue when the president would not simply order the documents released. He also points out that Massie has led opposition, alongside the same Democratic partner, to the intelligence-sharing provision of the defence authorisation bill.

The transparency test

Asked in 2026 which potential presidential candidates genuinely prioritise transparency rather than private agendas, Kiriakou reduced the entire field to two names, and Massie was the Republican one: "There are only two who prioritize genuine honest-to-god transparency. For the Republicans, it is Thomas Massie. For the Democrats, it is Ro Khanna." Surveying the rest of the 2028 field afterwards, he repeated the exclusion: "I don't think anybody besides Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna really believe in transparency."

Spain's North African enclaves

Kiriakou, who calls Massie a friend of the programme, credits him with catching a change in American policy that had gone unremarked: a post reporting that it is now official United States policy to oppose Spain's colonies in Morocco, and to call them an occupation, alongside $40 million given to the Moroccan government. Massie's question, "How the heck did that get into a US law?", is one Kiriakou repeats without answering, raising it while discussing the 2026 Ceuta crossings and the possibility that American and Israeli intelligence saw them coming.

Graded as a case officer

When Kiriakou began ranking politicians on how good a CIA case officer each would make, Massie was the first name he put at the top of the scale: "Thomas Massie is my S." He discloses the relationship rather than concealing it, "I know Thomas Massie. We're very friendly with each other. We have a great friend in common, and so we all go to baseball games together", and adds that he was "very disappointed that he lost his congressional race, but he's going on to bigger things."

The grade rests on the quality Kiriakou treats as the operational one throughout the exercise: Massie "is most definitely the kind of person that people want to be close to. He attracts that kind of attention, positive attention. I think he'd be a successful case officer."

See also

- AIPAC
- Bruce Fein
- John Kiriakou
