Judging Freedom - NATO, Spying & the CDC w/ Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY)

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

NATO, Spying & the CDC w/ Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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gentle guidance and encouragement to create these incredible changes for yourself and see what good can come from them. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, March 30th, 2022. My guest today is my dear friend and intellectual and ideological

colleague, Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky. Congressman, it's a pleasure. Welcome to Judging Freedom, and thank you for joining us. Well, I hope I'm judged fairly. And the same from me to thee. I had on my show in the past two weeks people that are fans of yours. One, Colonel Douglas McGregor, West Point graduate, career military, who quit the CIA when George Bush was peddling lies about the reasons for invading Iraq. And on different segments of Freedom Watch, I asked the same question, what is it that the American government really wants out of the Ukraine-Russia conflagration. And they both said regime change in Moscow. So when I heard Joe Biden spill the beans the other day and then the White House try and walk it back, I thought to myself, these two guys are right. Antony Blinken

and the State Department crowd are globalists, and that's really what they want. What do you think, Congressman? Well, yeah, and Putin is not a globalist, so he's a problem for them, I suppose. I don't think Ukraine should be a custody battle. I don't think this, you know, it's like Ukraine shouldn't be part of a Soviet Union or part of a European Union, in my opinion, given its geographic significance. But that's up to the Ukrainians to decide. And I wish our government would not be meddling in their affairs. Of course, we were meddling in 2013 and 2014, part of the revolution that overthrew their government. We were in there prodding. That's

pretty well acknowledged. And so what's the end result of all of this going to be? I do not know what the end result will be, but think of all the lies we've been told about COVID over the last two years by the media and by our government, and then consider what you're being told is happening in Ukraine and take it with a grain of salt. So what happens if some Russian tank commander misreads his GPS or intentionally fires over the border in Poland and kills some Polish soldiers and American soldiers and destroys a few hundred million dollars worth of American military equipment, and the globalists in NATO go, here's our chance, let's enter the war. What, if anything, will Congress do about that? Well, everybody needs to keep a cool head here and understand that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty does not obligate us to war, and it doesn't circumvent the

constitutional requirement that Congress takes a vote before the president commits acts of war or commits us to war. In fact, a lot of people talk about Article 5 of the NATO resolution, which is the joint commitment, if one nation is attacked, then the other nations must rush to its defense. But they forget to talk about Article 11 of the NATO Treaty, which itself says that the provisions of the NATO Treaty have to be carried out in accordance with and consistent with the constitutions of the respective member states. In other words, the NATO treaty itself admits and discloses that you still have to follow the U.S. Constitution and that that treaty does not obligate us to war under any circumstance and it cannot obligate us to war. But we all know what old Joe will do. He'll

probably follow the blatantly unconstitutional, though never challenged in a federal court, war powers resolution, which will allow him to commit American truths in 90 days and then another 90 days, and then he'll go to Congress. I don't know what will happen in Congress. With the exception of your fellow Kentuckian Senator Rand Paul, the Republicans in the Senate seem to be beating the drums for war. They're certainly beating the drums for squeezing the Russian public, squeezing every last drop out of the ruble for the Russian public. And of course, that has an economic effect over here as well, which they don't want to talk about. Yeah, some of my colleagues are trying to make us co-belligerents in this war already. This is not a world war. They're trying to get us to commit

offensive weapons into this war. They're trying to get us to commit to a no-fly zone in this war, and all of those would unambiguously make us co-belligerents in this war, which is the last thing we want to do given that Russia is a nuclear power. So again, I hope cooler heads prevail. I hope the Constitution will prevail. But a lot of my colleagues, you know, they violate their oath of office regularly, which requires them to follow the Constitution. Do you have a feel for how the Congress would vote if President Biden appeared at a joint session and said he wanted a declaration of war on Russia in order to comply with his understanding,

which means Tony Blinken's understanding, which means a globalist State Department understanding of the NATO treaty. How would the Congress vote? Well, there would be maybe a handful of Democrats who are principled on this. Barbara Lee, for instance, who was the only one who voted against the wars in the Middle East consistently. there'd be a handful of consistent Democrats, but the large majority of them, 95 percent, would go along with what Joe Biden wants. And then there would be perhaps as many as two thirds of Republicans who would probably vote for war. And or I mean, it's not a vote for war. If they had to take a vote for war, they might not take that vote.

The problem is the slippery slope where they would just give their authority to the president rather than actually taking the vote. What we should have is a vote. And there may be some way to force a vote here in Congress, even using the unconstitutional war powers resolution of 1973, it calls for expedited parliamentary procedures in the House to bring this vote. They can't keep it in a committee. They cananna, here in Congress, and the Republicans circumvented even the unconstitutional war powers resolution of 1973 to keep us from having a vote on Afghanistan. Well, they're not going to want to commit themselves, particularly those who secretly

want war, but don't want to have to justify a vote in favor of war as they seek re-election. Let's switch gears just a little bit, Congressman. I think it was either earlier today or yesterday you were grilling a deputy director of the FBI about whether or not they have the president's son's laptop, and even more importantly, whether or not they have and use this blatantly unconstitutional spyware that the Israelis gave them to use for a couple of years called Pegasus. This spyware, of course, the government does not go and get a search warrant. The user of the spyware doesn't even have to engage in phishing, P-H-I-S. They simply type in the cell number of the person whose information they want to bingo. They have everything in your mobile phone. Did the FBI reveal whether or not they have this and if they're using it?

Well, first of all, let me address Hunter Biden's laptop. The FBI representative there claimed that he didn't know where the laptop was. Didn't they seize it? Yeah, but they still don't. He doesn't know where it's at. I mean, it's sort of ludicrous. But my hat's off to Matt Gaetz, my colleague. He submitted the entire, entire contents of Hunter Biden's laptop to the official congressional record on unanimous consent. So now Hunter Biden's contents of his laptop are now in the congressional record for all time.

But moving on to actually something that's more targetable or discreet, the question about the Pegasus software, and I don't care what name it goes by. There may be other brand names of this software, but the FBI paid $5 million for a license to this software from an Israeli company who produces this software. And my question was, you know, paraphrasing myself, but did you take that for a test drive? Are you using it? Or did you just spend $5 million for nothing? And the FBI says they are not, I mean, you have to go back and parse his words. This was the assistant director of the cyber division at the FBI. He said they are not like currently using it or something like that. It seemed like there was a little bit of wiggle room. So I moved on to the next question, which is, have you detected the use of Pegasus in the United States, wouldn't you be monitoring for the use of this software by foreign actors

or even domestic actors who've maybe got a license to it? And at that point, he referred me to a lawsuit that Apple has against this group and told me there was information in the media that I could find out. But finally, he conceded that he would be open to giving me a classified briefing on that because there may be things that they didn't want to disclose in public. At which point I conferred with my colleague on the other side of the aisle, Ted Liu, who, who I think believes he was spied on. Well, he knows he was spied on and tracked, and he's concerned about this Pegasus software himself. And so I conferred with him and he followed up with a question and got the FBI individual to commit in no uncertain terms to briefing us on Pegasus. And so I'll have a lot

of questions behind closed doors. Frankly, I think the Constitution requires those things to be disclosed to American citizens if they're being spied on, but maybe they want to keep secret their means for detecting this stuff. I don't know, but I'm looking forward to that briefing. So the Constitution requires that they get a search warrant before they spy on American citizens. They don't get search warrants because they don't have probable cause because they just want to spy on everybody all the time and gather everything they can. I have written about Pegasus. You're right. It does have different names to conform to American URLs, but the New York Times reported that it was used by the FBI for about two years, the last year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration. I don't have many nice things to say

about Attorney General Merrick Garland, but he did tell them, shut it down, we're not going to use it anymore. Now, the following part of the story sounds like it's out of a script from the Sopranos, the hardware and the software stored in a warehouse in New Jersey. And it's not an FBI warehouse. It's a warehouse that the Department of Justice leases for storing files and old documents. Now, I know New Jersey pretty well, but I haven't been able to find that warehouse. You can't make this stuff up, Congressman Massey. I don't know if you want to ask him that in private, but oh, how I wish your interrogation of these FBI officials could be in public and on national television, because whatever you have a right to know, most respectfully, the rest of us do as well.

I suspect you agree with me. I agree completely. And you have to be so careful in the way you ask the question and then study the answer in order to inform the next question. It's like a dance with veils or playing 20 questions or peeling back the onion. And the FBI are experts at getting witnesses to say things that may not be true, but that also makes them experts when they are the witnesses being questioned. They know how to evade these questions, and that's what makes it so difficult. And I've already formulated in my mind how to ask these questions. It's like when I asked Merrick Garland how many agents or assets of the federal government were present on January 5th or January 6th in the crowd and agitating to enter the Capitol or entered the Capitol themselves. Now, I didn't say how many FBI agents.

I didn't say how many people working for DOJ. I didn't say agents specifically. I said assets. And it could have been CIA. It could have been some department we don't even know exists. And so that's why I asked the question that way. By the way, he refused to answer me based on what he cited as DOJ policy. The next time somebody tells me it's not their policy to allow Congress to do oversight in their department, I may tell them it's my policy to file articles of impeachment against anybody whose policy is to evade congressional oversight. Good for you. Now, speaking of filing things, you recently filed, along with a number of your colleagues, a lawsuit which actually educated a lot of us. I always thought it was the FAA that required airlines to force their passengers to wear masks. It turns out it's

the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the same group of people that claimed they had the authority to regulate evictions of tenants that didn't pay their rent. The Supreme Court said they didn't, but took their time in doing so. Now you have asked a federal judge to declare that the CDC doesn't have this authority because Congress didn't give it to them. And even if Congress did give it to them, Congress can't delegate away powers that were delegated to it by the Constitution. Tell us about the lawsuit and who's involved, Congressman Massey. Yeah. So 17 congressmen, one of them is a senator, Senator Rand Paul and I, I'm leading this lawsuit, have filed a lawsuit against the CDC. Now, we all know that faceless bureaucrats are

the ones who are doing Joe Biden's bidding, but we don't even know sometimes which bureaucracy to file the suit against. But we discovered it is the CDC who claims the imprimatur for implementing this mask mandate on airplanes. And it turns out they're citing the very same statute that you just referenced, that they cited when they claimed they had the power to control state regulated real estate contracts, i.e. the eviction moratorium. But here's what that statute says. Congress said that the CDC can use fumigation. The CDC can destroy livestock in order to contain, you know, a contagion and other things. OK, well, the CDC said, well, other things means an eviction moratorium. And the Supreme Court came and shot them down and said, no, if other things doesn't mean anything you want it to mean,

it has to be other things like the things that were listed in this statute. Correct. Correct. And so they've claimed the CDC claims that other things includes forcing human beings to wear masks. No, the the the statute gives them authority to destroy livestock and insects. It doesn't give them the authority to treat us like livestock and insects. Nicely put. I mean, the whole mask thing on the airlines, I mean, it doesn't even have a rational basis because you have to wear the mask when you're sitting there. You don't have to wear the mask when you're eating or drinking, as if the COVID virus knows not to come

out of your nose or mouth while you're eating or drinking, but only to come out of your nose or mouth while you're sitting there. The whole thing is preposterous, absurd, degrading, demeaning, and profoundly unconstitutional because each of us owns our own faces and we decide what go on them. Have many or any other governmental entities joined you and Senator Paul in this litigation? Well, there are three lawsuits that I know that are running concurrent with ours. The state of Texas and Representative Beth Van Dyne joined Ken Paxton in a lawsuit. And then we've got our lawsuit, which includes 17 members of Congress. JetBlue airline pilots filed a lawsuit similar to that because they make the pilots wear a mask. I don't want my pilots deprived of oxygen.

Anyways, and then, I mean, we're supposed to make sure they have plenty of oxygen, right? The plane, the cabin is supposed to regulate that. In any case, and then just yesterday, Ron DeSantis led 20 other states, I think, in filing a lawsuit as well. Now, here's the significance, Judge. The CDC is supposed to meet again and decide on April 18th whether to keep this thing going, this mask mandate on airplanes. But the judge in our case has told the DOJ and the CDC to respond with, to give him their response to our request for an injunction by April 8th. So that means there's somebody at the CDC and the DOJ that's going to have to do something before April 18th.

And they may decide, and this is our great hope, that the burden of complying with this lawsuit and the threat of losing this and having in no uncertain terms their power checked may be greater to them than just getting rid of the mask mandate. Right, right. So they may try to make our case moot, which would be OK with me. All I want is for people to not be treated like livestock and insects and to breathe freely again. And if the CDC wants to go into retreat instead of receive the wrath of a judge who I believe is going to is going to issue an injunction against them,

then then let's have that. We'll be watching. Congressman Thomas Massey from Kentucky, what a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me on, Judge. Judge Napolitano, thank you for watching Judging Freedom.