Rep. Massie, Tucker Carlson Seek New ‘Church Committee’ To Investigate FBI Interference in U.S. Politics

Jan. 7, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The new session of the House of Representatives will create a new Church Committee to investigate misdeeds, illegalities, and crimes committed by United States intelligence agencies, with a focus, it appears, on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), yesterday, a guest on the Tucker Carlson Show, announced that, reporting that it has the approval of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

On his Jan. 3 show, Carlson called for a “new Frank Church Committee designed to discover what the FBI and intelligence agencies have been doing to control domestic politics in this country. They’ve been doing a lot, but no one in Washington wants to talk about it. This topic is effectively off limits ... for almost 50 years.”

The Church Committee was a special Senate Select Committee, whose investigation in 1975-76 revealed the wrongful practices of the CIA in its MK-Ultra project, and the FBI with its COINTELPRO.

Carlson had previously emphasized the role of the FBI in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots, its control of elections—“The FBI is now a bigger force in American elections than any single group of voters”—and control of the media. But there may be more that the new Church Committee may investigate. Recall that in his Dec. 15, 2022 program, Carlson reported on a source who, having seen classified documents, said the CIA had assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and Carlson posed the release of the classified documents.

In his Jan. 6 show, Carlson said, “So we spent all week telling you about the fight on Capitol Hill over who’s going to be the next Speaker of the House.” There was a standoff. “Well, during that period, Kevin McCarthy decided to make some changes ... and one of them is something that we’ve been talking about and certainly thinking about for quite some time which is the creation of a committee modeled after the famous Frank Church Committee of the 1970s that will look a lot more closely at the influence of the FBI and the various Intel agencies on domestic politics....

“Kevin McCarthy’s going to do that.... His plan we have just learned is to appoint really one of the most honest and dogged members of Congress ... Thomas Massey of Kentucky to head that committee, the new Church Committee ... who joins us now.”

Massie: “Thanks Tucker. It looks like I’ll probably be on that committee but I can’t say that I will run it. I will say that ... while we’ve seen this drama on the House floor, behind the scenes along with those people who withheld their vote for Kevin McCarthy until they got the transformational changes in the House and the way the House works, we were working ... to make sure that this Church Committee [is created]. We’re making sure that this committee wasn’t going to be fenced in, that it wasn’t just going to be a show committee. We wanted to make sure that we have full jurisdiction, that if we stumble onto something at another three-letter agency that they don’t say ‘whoa that’s out of your jurisdiction,’ or if we find out there’s more than a violation of the First Amendment right, if there are other civil rights that are being violated, we’ve secured a guarantee that we can go wherever the evidence leads us.”

Carlson: “Frank Church certainly attempted it, and the Congress attempted it again, in 1976, with their special committee on assassinations. Those committees bumped right headlong into a wall of secrecy, and it drove a lot of them those members kind of crazy. Are you prepared for this, honestly, awesome task?”

Massie: “I think we are and we’ve been laying the groundwork for that. [Rep.] Dan Bishop (R-NC), ... [Rep.] Jim Jordan (R-OH), we’ve been talking to the [House] Intel committee which has the authority to get all of that information. By the way a lot of this is going to play out down in the SCIF [secured rooms]. You’re going to have to trust the people that are put on this committee, and I’ll tell you what if there’s something fishy going on, I’ll come out of the SCIF and tell you. But a lot of it will be behind closed doors; they’ll be classified information but if we find anything illegal or unconstitutional, we will bring it forward.”

Carlson: “I’m so grateful that you’re doing this, and I really hope that if you find anything like that, to the extent you can tell us about it, you will. Thomas Massie ... thank you.”

The outcome will depend on the vision, or limitations, of the committee members, and the geometry put into place around them by an informed, truly patriotic citizenry.