The drama for the Speaker vote was just settled, with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally winning the vote on the 15th ballot. As I also just reported, it just got a little physical when a member had to be restrained from going after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) after the failure of the 14th ballot.

But in the meantime, Tucker Carlson did an interview with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and made a big announcement on a huge win being part of the deal that the objectors had made with McCarthy. I wrote earlier about some of the things that allegedly were involved in the deal.

Tucker announced how part of the McCarthy-holdouts deal was the formation of a “Church Committee” — a committee modeled after the committee in the 1970s formed by Rep. Frank Church — to look into how the FBI and intel agencies may have been “weaponized” to interfere in domestic politics. Tucker also noted that McCarthy had agreed to put Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on that committee, a guy who is always trying to get the truth and get to the bottom of things — a perfect choice for a dogged pursuit of justice.

.@TuckerCarlson suggested forming a new “Church Committee.” @GOPLeader is making this happen in the House rules package. I’ll serve on it, and we will go wherever the evidence leads us. pic.twitter.com/86gGvlGD5V

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 7, 2023

Massie said that while a lot of their work would involve reviewing things in a SCIF so that it couldn’t be done in public if there was anything he found that was illegal or unconstitutional, he would come out and tell us what it was. Massie also said they wanted to make sure that they were “not fenced in” — that they could follow where the evidence might lead them, and that it just wouldn’t be a “show committee,” that they would have “full-jurisdiction” and they weren’t limited. He said he believed that they had been given that.

If they are given free rein, that’s an incredibly important thing they just got, particularly after all that we have seen with the Twitter files and the involvement of the government in trying to suppress speech, including things like the Hunter Biden laptop and even as I wrote about earlier, the effort of Rep. Adam Schiff’s office attempting to get journalist Paul Sperry banned from Twitter. There’s a ton of stuff that such a committee with power could uncover and that could potentially hurt the swamp big time.