Congress

Why Thomas Massie isn’t worried about Trump’s primary threats

Published

1 year ago

March 11, 2025

President Donald Trump has long been able to bend Republican lawmakers to his will with a single online post. The mere hint of a threat that he might announce a member “SHOULD BE PRIMARIED” is enough to bring most GOP members into line.

Not Rep. Thomas Massie.

The 54-year-old former robotics engineer brushed aside that precise threat from Trump Monday night, even with the president vowing to “lead the charge” against him after Massie made clear that he would not vote for the Trump-blessed spending bill pushed by House Republican leaders.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Massie met the threat with a bemused shrug and a well-practiced joke about the situation: “He’s going after Canada and me today. The difference is Canada will eventually cave.”

Massie has earned the right to his lighthearted reaction. The president used almost the same language five years ago, after Massie single-handedly forced his House colleagues to return to Washington and vote in person on a Covid-19 response bill at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

Trump at the time labeled Massie a “third-rate grandstander” and said he should be thrown out of the Republican Party. Massie went on to handily win a primary challenge, helped in part by the fact that his opponent had a history of racist posts online.

After the spending bill passed Tuesday evening, Massie said it “feels just like” the day he opposed the pandemic bill and suggested that “the missives directed at me weren’t to get me to change my vote — I never change my vote.

“I think they were to try and keep the other Republicans in line until they get this over to the Senate,” he added.

In a follow-up post Tuesday, Trump again labeled Massie a “grandstander,” also putting his title of “Congressman” in quotation marks.

Since rebuffing the last MAGA onslaught, Massie only burnished his maverick credentials. He won a spot on the House Rules Committee as part of a deal hard-right members struck with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That gave him considerable sway over what legislation made it to the House floor.

Later he turned against McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, playing a leading role in trying to get him replaced as speaker when the new Congress met in January. He relinquished his seat on Rules, and amid it all, his high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Rhonda, died.

“I don’t know how to say this without cussing, if they thought I had no Fs to give before, I definitely have no Fs to give now,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently.

On Tuesday, Massie responded to Trump online, calling a post attacking him “misleading.” However, he didn’t directly blame the president and instead said it was a “tweet from Trump’s account.” He separately made clear that he thought the House legislation he was opposing was not part of “Trump’s agenda.”

Massie said in an interview that he thrived on the criticism from the most powerful Republican of the 21st century: “I had the Trump antibodies for a while — I needed a booster.”

Yet it’s far from clear that he is immune from an all-out political assault from Trump. The president, caught up in his own reelection, never really engaged in Massie’s 2020 race, and Trump went on to endorse him in 2022 as a “conservative warrior.”

This time, the presidential attack was preceded by critical posts from top Trump strategist Chris LaCivita — indicating that there potentially could be more political firepower behind a new effort to oust Massie.

Besides the spending bill apostasy, there’s other reasons for Trump and his political orbit to take aim at the Kentuckian: Massie was one of six members of Congress to endorse Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign; another, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), was forced out of Congress after Trump endorsed against Good in a tightly contested primary last year.

Massie has a reservoir of support among the libertarian-oriented, fiercely anti-spending Republicans who came up as part of the tea party movement and now have moved toward MAGA. A handful spoke up in his defense this week, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who said Massie “has worked harder than perhaps any member of Congress to bring federal spending under control.”

Johnson offered mild support for the maverick: “Look, I’m in the incumbent protection program here,” said Johnson. “Thomas and I have had disagreements, but I consider Thomas Massie a friend.”

“I just vehemently disagree with his position,” he added. “But I’ll leave it at that.”

The question is whether Trump will actually follow through with his political threats this time. There’s reason to be doubtful: Trump recently threatened primary challenges against other dissident Republicans, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), without following through with an immediate endorsement. And history has shown that Trump does not have an especially long memory when it comes to Capitol Hill grudges.

Massie seemed well aware when he asked if Trump would hold a lasting grudge. “It’ll blow over,” he said.

Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Leon Black tells House Oversight he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes

Published

14 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor’s prepared remarks.

“I don’t understand why people — including members of this committee — would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,” Black said in his opening statement, obtained by Blue Light News.

Lawmakers, however, filed into Black’s scheduled transcribed interview Friday morning already suspicious of their witness. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters he believed Black’s testimony had “the potential to be the most groundbreaking” of anything the panel has heard so far in its long-running Epstein investigation.

Comer also said the committee had reason to believe that Black had signed nondisclosure agreements with some of Epstein’s victims.

Black, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, did acknowledge in his prepared remarks that he was aware of Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction at the time of their association but that “Epstein told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID.”

“Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others,” he continued. “I wish I had not.”

Black also told lawmakers that he knew Epstein for 18 years before he began paying him in 2013 for tax and estate planning. At that time, Black said, he saw Epstein surrounded by some of the world’s most powerful people — among them former President Bill Clinton, tech mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates and then-White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler.

And he appeared to suggest that he saw Epstein as legitimate, in part, because of those who chose to associate with him: “Epstein appeared to me and to many others to have redeemed himself: [H]e served on several prestigious boards, hobnobbed with leading people in academia, the arts, business executives, and numerous world leaders.”

Clinton and Gates have already spoken with Oversight investors about their ties to Epstein; Ruemmler has agreed to sit for an interview with the panel in July.

Black said he ultimately fired Epstein in 2018 “after growing tired of his relentless pursuit of more and more money from me for professional services, his mistruths and misrepresentations … and his failure to repay most of a $30 million demand loan that I had made to him.”

He also acknowledged the allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against him in litigation, which he called “demonstrably baseless” and “entirely fabricated.”

In one recent case, the judge found that the law firm that had been representing Black’s accusers and the plaintiff in the case were “engaged in serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case.” However, the lawsuit — brought by a woman who claimed to have been raped by Black when she was 16 — was allowed to proceed.

“There are numerous allegations of real abuse by women — by survivors — against Mr. Black,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters Friday morning.

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP agenda gets tenuous Trump lifeline

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump handed Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline Thursday to get Republicans’ agenda back on track next week.

But hard-liners’ festering discontent over Trump’s stalled election bill could jam the chamber again.

For now, members plan to return Monday and press forward on a long list of major legislation before Independence Day recess, including fiscal 2027 funding bills, the annual defense policy bill, a kids online safety bill and negotiations for a third reconciliation measure lawmakers want to stuff with party priorities.

Trump Thursday instructed the band of GOP hard-liners to lift their procedural block of House floor business. Still, some are doubling down in new ways.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who engineered this week’s impasse through a blockade of procedural votes, said if leaders want her support to advance legislation next week, they’ll need to attach the SAVE America Act to the defense policy bill.

Senior House Republicans feel joining the bills would kill the must-pass defense legislation that typically wins bipartisan support. And Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that attaching the two measures would also sink the defense bill in the Senate.

Meanwhile, another hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy, responded to Trump’s call to lift the House gridlock with a new list of legislative demands for House leaders.

Johnson, for his part, focused on the positive. He told reporters at the Capitol after meeting Trump that he and the president are “on exactly the same page” about stopping “any blockade in the House.”

He also said Congress would be transmitting the housing affordability bill it cleared this week to the White House, after the president abruptly reversed course Wednesday on a signing ceremony for the bill and demanded Senate passage of the controversial election overhaul first.

What else we’re watching:

— HISPANIC CAUCUS BRACES FOR CHAIR’S SUCCESSOR: Hispanic Caucus members are still reeling from Chair Adriano Espaillat’s electoral defeat this week. But they’re warily preparing to welcome his successor — with some conditions. Darializa Avila Chevalier — a Democratic Socialist who ousted Espaillat in New York’s primary Tuesday, said Thursday in a statement she plans to join the CHC when she gets to Congress, which is all but guaranteed in November.

— COMER TO GRILL EPSTEIN-LINKED INVESTOR: Investor Leon Black will speak to House Oversight Friday for an interview Chair James Comer has called “the big one” in his panel’s investigation of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “It’s going to be hard for him to deny the questions we’re going to ask,” Comer told reporters this week.

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Riley Rogerson and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

The Lincoln Memorial should be green with envy: This reflecting pool stayed clear

Published

7 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Still blue waters, abundant waterfowl, promenading tourists and barely a whiff of mildew — that is the vision President Donald Trump has struggled to turn into reality this month at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

But that has long been the reality just a mile-and-a-half down the National Mall, where another reflecting pool floats just under Capitol Hill — and under the radar — without a scummy green film floating on top.

As the algae-tinged drama has played out at the Lincoln Memorial, little attention has been paid to its sister pond which is slightly smaller, more obscure and managed by a different entity — the Architect of the Capitol, not the National Park Service.

Both are expensive and challenging to maintain, but the trapezoid-ish Capitol Reflecting Pool hasn’t faced the same intractable problems that have plagued the long and skinny pool to the west.

“Anytime you have a water feature in general … they are beautiful, they’re amazing, but they’re problematic because they degrade faster over time than pretty much anything else you’re going to have,” Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin said in an interview Wednesday. “They require pumps, require pipes — corrosion, animals, diseases, bacteria, algae. There’s a lot of things that go along with that.”

Austin’s agency drains the Capitol pool each fall and sometimes in the spring to evaluate the basin and make repairs. Employees go in with heavy equipment to “remove the sludge that collects throughout the year,” according to a 2017 AOC report.

Then masons repair cracks and other issues with the concrete basin and plumbers tackle pipe and pump problems before refilling the pool. The draining, repairing and refilling can all happen within a week, depending on the extent of work needed, according to an internal AOC bulletin.

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

In contrast, draining and refilling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool typically takes about a month.

There is no evidence that the National Park Service or White House sought the AOC’s expertise with reflecting pool maintenance before embarking on the recent renovations across town, which included spraying the floor with an “American flag blue” rubberized coating.

The Park Service has some experience with the Capitol pond: It managed the body until 2011, when Congress assumed control for itself in an omnibus spending bill — scuttling NPS plans for a shallower pool with an overnight draining system.

Instead, the Architect of the Capitol proceeded with a $7.3 million renovation that included draining the pool, thoroughly cleaning it and making repairs to the concrete.

Today, families of ducks call the Capitol Reflecting Pool home, and AOC craftspeople even fabricated and installed ramps to help ducklings make their way in and out of the water. (Some congressional fiscal hawks briefly balked at the expenditure.)

This week, a trio of dead ducks found at the Lincoln Memorial pool increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s renovation, including the use of high-concentration hydrogen peroxide in the water to combat a recent algae bloom.

On Thursday, eyewitnesses who posted on social media reported the water appeared closer to sparkling, though some residual algae was spotted.

The White House did not address questions about whether it had consulted with the legislative branch on how to maintain a water body before embarking on the Lincoln Memorial project.

“Today, the Reflecting Pool is crystal clear and is reflecting perfectly,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement, calling it a feat “only an expert builder like Donald J. Trump could accomplish.”

Austin also declined to weigh in on why the water at the Lincoln Memorial has been so much more troublesome than the Capitol’s.

“I will not say that our full reflecting pool is without problems, because it certainly does have some issues,” he said. “It’s also smaller, so that’s part of it, too. And it was kind of formulated in different ways, so it’s kind of hard to compare apples to apples on this one.”

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

The Capitol’s pool, sandwiched between two parking lots and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial was completed in 1971, making it about half the age of the Lincoln Memorial’s. It has not always been without blight, however.

In 2020 there was an algae bloom during a stretch of particularly hot weather. And in 2008, when the pool was still under NPS control, at least two dozen dead ducks were removed from the water after avian botulism took hold. These days, some cracked stone can be spotted along the perimeter.

Several lawmakers who exercise oversight of the Capitol campus declined to say much to compare and contrast the two reflecting pools.

“I want to thank the Architect of the Capitol for keeping it clear and keeping it clean,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview this week when asked if his time on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee gave him any insight into the pool.

“Size matters,” added Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), a member of the House Administration Committee.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee, said he believed the Trump administration’s rushed approach to the Lincoln Memorial rehab was the most obvious distinction between the health of the two pools.

“I mean, anybody with an eighth-grade science class could have predicted that this was not going to go well,” he said.