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.[1][2][3] 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.[4]
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.”[5]
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.[6] 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.[7]
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.[8] On policy, Kiriakou says Massie is a frequent and vocal advocate of the position that the Constitution is clear only Congress can declare war.[9]
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.[10] 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.[11] Trump’s handpicked successor for the seat, in Kentucky’s most conservative and most Republican district, was a retired Navy SEAL.[12]
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.[13][14][15] 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.[16][17]