🍻 In This Week’s Hill Spill Newsletter: Massie Gets a Frontliner, Patel’s Five-Hour Judiciary Circus and a Lawmaker’s Factory-Fire Problem

🍹 Welcome to this week’s Hill Spill — Capitol Hill’s favorite Thirsty Thursday newsletter! They cut the week short and still managed to generate this much content!

The House punched out a day early before the midterms. Massie says they weren’t heading home — they were ducking a Hegseth impeachment vote. He also snagged a frontliner on the Epstein discharge petition, which should make the return trip extra spicy. Kevin McCarthy got a portrait. Kash Patel sat through five hours of oversight where the big topic was bestiality. And Cory Mills’ grenade factory actually exploded. Sometimes we over here at Sources Say question whether we are actually living in a simulation…

Scoops incoming. We’re sitting on a few things we think are going to be bangers. Can’t say more yet. Stay close.

Pour something strong_, we’re just getting started. 🍸

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has caused no shortage of headaches for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and this week he upped the ante, dropping a privileged impeachment resolution on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and recruiting a frontliner to sign on to his Epstein files discharge petition.

“We’ve got the Epstein recess and the Hegseth holiday,” Massie told us, pointing to the break that hit just as the petition was headed for the magic number and needed seven legislative days to ripen.

Massie walked us through it Thursday evening, after Johnson canceled the day’s votes and sent everyone home. Notably, the House left a day early in its last week before Election Day — a move some credit as a decision specifically designed not to force a vote on the Hegseth resolution.

The tension boiled over when Speaker Mike Johnson publicly wrote off Massie’s impeachment push as a "publicity stunt by someone who wants attention," doubling down in defense of the administration and arguing that Hegseth had done an "extraordinary job". Johnson also dismissed him on the floor, calling him “not participating as a full member of the Congress.”

Rather than stick around to face a potential floor fight on the 48-hour resolution window, leadership abruptly yanked Thursday's votes off the calendar and sent everyone packing — effectively running out the clock to dodge the showdown.

Frustrated by the early adjournment, Massie pushed back.

Utilizing a question of personal privilege—a rarely used procedure—he took to the floor for an extended speech to air his grievances and challenge the decision to cut the week short. “Well, I’m here today to let you know that I’m a full participating member of the House of Representatives,” he said in his remarks. “We’re calling off Congress? And we’re in the majority?”

Johnson brushed off the uproar, insisting the resolution would have been easily tabled anyway and vowing it will face that exact fate the moment they return.

“He knew we would get to 218,” Massie told us. Leadership says the schedule is the schedule, but Massie is not buying it.

That frontliner helping him get there is Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.). Up to now, the GOP names on this thing have been the usual suspects—members who are already problems for leadership and mostly not coming back. Massie lost his primary. Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman both gave up their seats to run for governor in South Carolina and came up short. Marjorie Taylor Greene signed the first petition and is already out of the building. Fitzpatrick is a different kind of signature: a former FBI agent in one of the most competitive seats in the country.

On the petition itself, he gave us the GOP list: Mace, Fitzpatrick, Norman, and himself—four Republicans. Reps. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) missed the last two days of session, and Massie expects them back. “We’ll get to 218 as soon as we get back,” he told us.

Then there is Hegseth. Massie introduced a privileged impeachment resolution carrying a 48-hour window, and that window died when the House left early. On the Hegseth front, the Kentucky Republican is cautiously optimistic that his push to oust the cabinet secretary could be even more successful after the election, when retirees and those who lost their bids may YOLO and back the thing.

“If he had had the votes to table it, he would have tabled it,” Massie told us. He is bringing it back, and he will read the whole thing out on the floor again. “Which is also inconvenient for them, because I get to read the whole thing over.”

As for why leadership can’t quit dealing with him, Massie said: “I figured out how to count cards, so they just locked the casino doors.”

Kevin McCarthy held the gavel for just under nine months. This week, he got a portrait.

“The ceremony was longer than his speakership,” one lawmaker told us shortly after the ceremony wrapped.

This week we took a trip down memory lane and uncovered some new deets while chatting with sources about one of the most chaotic stretches Congress has seen in recent history.

The unveiling drew current and former lawmakers plus a batch of administration officials, a fair number of whom were in those hallways for all of it. His allies turned out, and they turned out well. Former Reps. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) both spoke.

“Few people have sacrificed more for House Republicans over the past two decades than the man sitting before us today,” McHenry said. “Excellence is the capacity to take pain. Everyone in this room got to witness Kevin McCarthy’s legendary tolerance for pain.”

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who administered a fair amount of that pain, saw the clip and replied on X that he’s “less about tolerating pain” and “more about administering it.”

He has been going all week. After Gaetz posted about “untold stories from those McCarthy weeks. George Santos piled on with his own list. Jim Jordan floating “co-speakers.” Elise Stefanik never tossing her hat in. And “the motion to reveal the votes for ‘other’ that was like pulling teeth only to find out they were for Kevin.” Santos also said he got mocked for pushing back on people voting against speakers over gay marriage. He did not vote for Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.). Gaetz’s reply was, “LOL. I actually forgot about the part where George Santos voted against Tom Emmer......and then yelled at everyone else for voting against Tom Emmer.”

Santos saved a separate note for the canvas itself.

“Hey what’s with the wedding ring missing? These artists miss the simplest stuff! Other than that I’m loving the post Congress thin McCarthy!” he posted.

Which brings us back to how he got the gavel in the first place.

One source said that during the initial negotiations, McCarthy told Gaetz it seemed like he wanted the gavel. Gaetz quipped that he “didn’t need a portrait.”

Things got messy and extremely personal. The source told us, “Kevin told Gaetz he deserved the job because he spent more nights in Marriott hotels than in his own bed. Gaetz told him his marital problems were none of [his] concern.”

Then there is Speaker race 2.0. One source’s account of that room had Drew Ferguson asking for Elise Stefanik to read out the “other” votes after numerous rounds, and they were all Kevin.

“It was Kevin’s plan the whole time to keep enough ‘other’ votes, which were never read out by name, to keep any candidate from getting enough votes to be speaker designate. And when Elise read the votes out and they were all for Kevin, everyone in the room knew Kevin was behind it. He and Garret Graves were next to each other and they just looked down at their phones,” another source said.

That whole stretch was unwell in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. Santos sprinting down a corridor holding a baby. Everyone insisting they were fine. McCarthy said he wasn’t going to leave early. Then he left early. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Back to this week, where the guest list said the rest. As far as we could tell, no living former speaker attended although the Republicans did post supportive statements on X. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was in the Capitol that day and opted out.

Most of the members who ousted him declined to comment for this story.

Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) was the only one willing to give us a statement. “I know he worked very hard to become speaker. He deserves to have his portrait displayed,” he said. “Though we had our differences, I don’t wish him anything but success.”

Anywhoo, leadership races are already heating up, with all eyes on Scalise, Emmer and Jordan as members speculate on whether the majority flips. The portrait stays either way. Everyone shaping the next one has to walk past it on the way in.

Former House Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley stopped by the pod this week to give us the real behind-the-scenes breakdown of how leadership races actually work!

With 20 years in the House, Joe has seen it all — from the secret ballot lobbying to the classic "members who swear they're with you, right up until they aren't."

He gets into the Pelosi-Hoyer dynamics, why Nancy always seemed to know members' districts better than they did and what it was really like inside those rooms.

Plus, he opens up about his race against AOC —what he’d do differently, and why his read on her potential 2028 moves might surprise you.

Grab a bev and check it out! 🍸

FBI Director Kash Patel sat through a grueling five-hour Senate Judiciary oversight hearing this week, and the headline everyone walked away with was completely bizarre: bestiality.

It started when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) questioned a June memo that quietly dropped automatic hiring disqualifiers for certain FBI applicants.

CBS News first broke the story in August: the June 16 memo changed how the bureau evaluates past incidents of bestiality or animal cruelty, meaning it is no longer an automatic knockout if the conduct happened before the applicant turned 18. Patel’s defense on the dais was that the bureau “did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked.”

Then Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) took the microphone and things got kind of lit.

“Why would you even get into bestiality?” Kennedy asked.

“We are not into bestiality,” Patel shot back. Patel tried to explain that the old rule disqualified anyone who participated “on either side of it,” which prompted Kennedy to ask if that meant the animal was out too. Patel laughed off the moment, noting that the bureau has great canines and wouldn't be kicking them out. He insisted the policy change wasn't his original idea and that his gut reaction mirrored Kennedy's—until staff showed him actual cases. Naturally, the internet responded with a tidal wave of memes.

Remaining true to his folksy, deadpan interrogation style right there in the committee room, Kennedy didn't let up.

He pressed Patel on the logic, remarking that if someone applying to work with him had engaged in that kind of behavior, they wouldn't make the cut.

Politics aside, the internet discourse was aggressively niche and hilarious.

Inside the bureau, however, officials aren't sweating the optics. A source familiar with the policy told us this is “not even close” to real heat, explaining that the tweak was meant to clarify polygraph language so trafficking and assault victims can apply without auto-failing a checkbox. “That’s all,” the source said. “It doesn’t mean they’re automatically hired.”

Here is where the situation gets a little messy. As CBS News' reporting pointed out, the policy trigger is strictly the applicant’s age at the time — not a proven record of forced coercion. The new requirements don't cleanly separate candidates who were victimized from those who weren't. If the bureau's intent matches Patel's public defense, the drafting left a glaring loophole and that gap is the actual story hiding underneath the punchlines.

Judiciary Democrats want the paper trail. The day before the hearing, they wrote to Patel demanding the unredacted June 16 memo, all preceding drafts, a list of who signed off, and aggregate applicant numbers, setting a deadline of September 28.

A phoenix rises from the ashes. Sometimes, those ashes are a grenade plant in North Florida.

Not long after losing his primary by 13 points, soon-to-be-former Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) posted a truly unwell photo on X and Instagram — complete with a tight polo, a big watch, a wall of fire and water and the caption: “A Phoenix rises from the ashes. Our fight is far from over!”

Naturally, this week his grenade factory was literally on fire. I mean, who among us.

Friend of the newsletter Roger Sollenberger was first to report the news off a source: a building at Mills’ grenade factory had exploded, though thankfully with no injuries.

The Taylor County Sheriff’s Office later confirmed that two people were on site Wednesday night at Pacem Defense in Perry — a security guard and someone in the main office. Neither was hurt, but the building is a total loss. Neighbors said they heard it and felt it, and ATF, DOD and the state fire marshal are now investigating. No cause has been determined yet.

Sollenberger also noted the plant had been closed for about a year and that the company still owes tens of millions to a Canadian lender.

Multiple sources texted us asking whether this looks like an insurance fraud situation. Unclear. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This week's cocktail doesn't really need a lot of explanation given the above section.

Ice in a highball, pour, done. Fresh grapefruit, please. The bottled stuff is sad. Gin also works.

Salt the rim and it becomes a Salty Dog. We're not doing that this week. We've used up our entire allotment of dog material.