AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. This is Democracy Now!

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show on Capitol Hill as the Pentagon is asking Congress for $200 billion for the war on Iran. We’re joined by Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna of California. He and Republican Congressman Thomas Massie led the unsuccessful effort to pass a War Powers Act in an attempt to rein in President Trump’s ability to wage the war against Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Representative Ro Khanna, we thank you so much for being with us. If you can start off by talking about, in the Senate again, a War Powers Act trying to rein in Trump being scuttled yesterday, and what you think can happen at this point?

REP. RO KHANNA: The American people have already soured on the war. We’ve lost 13 American service members, and it’s counting. The price of gas is up 27%. And now Donald Trump is saying that he’s going to come to Congress to ask for $200 billion to fight in Iran, a total betrayal of his promise that he was going to focus on American needs. To put that in perspective, $200 billion would pay for free public college for every American kid, $10-a-day child care. It would fully fund special needs education. And we’d have more money left over. So, I do believe that Republicans now — some Republicans — are beginning to see that this is hurting the American economy, hurting American workers, and they may start to speak out against the war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Representative Khanna, The Wall Street Journal reported that an extraordinarily small group of people made the decision to go to war, including Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, Defense Secretary Hegseth. But a lot of leading U.S. diplomats and figures, officials working on the Middle East were entirely excluded from these conversations and learned about the war through — like we did, through social media and the news. Your response to that?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it’s been totally irresponsibly planned. I mean, the reporting is that they did not anticipate that Iran would strike the Strait of Hormuz. They didn’t anticipate that the price of oil would go up. They didn’t anticipate the difficulty of actually getting regime changes. Killing Khamenei and having him replaced by his younger son did not topple the regime. They had no end game. They didn’t even understand how they were going to get the, quote-unquote, “enriched uranium,” 400 kilograms of enriched uranium at 60%, that is buried under the nuclear facilities. So they had a split even in their administration, as we see with Joe Kent’s resignation, as we see with Tulsi Gabbard saying she didn’t look at the intelligence, she just let the president make the decisions. And they didn’t consult any of the expertise.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go from Epic Fury, what President Trump has called the war on Iran, to what some are describing it should have been called, “Epstein Fury,” a distraction from what President Trump is very concerned about. On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee walked out of a closed-door briefing with Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, less than an hour after Bondi repeatedly declined to say whether she would comply with a subpoena requiring her to appear for a sworn deposition on April 14th. You’re a part of the House Oversight Committee, and you are the co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Can you tell us what happened late yesterday?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I was there. Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy attorney general started out by praising me and Thomas Massie for passing the bill. But then, when we started asking basic questions, like whether she was going to comply with the subpoena, she equivocated. When I asked her why they did not release the files of survivors naming names, they basically said, well, they were protecting survivors. That’s not true.

So, we have insisted that she needs to come, under oath, on April 14th. James Comer has reiterated that. And I expect that will happen. She will have to answer, for hours and hours, questions about why there are still 3 million documents being hidden, why there was a cover-up of those files that implicated Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: What was that hearing all about? A surprise to you, too, from the day before. You had been calling for her to testify. And yet she wasn’t even under oath. And if you can talk about Comer, the head of the House Oversight Committee, incredibly, insulting Congressmember Summer Lee, telling her to stop “bitching”?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it was a sexist slur against an African American woman. It was totally uncalled for. He owes her an apology. He owes an explanation. I mean, that just harkens back to an ugly past period in American history.

I believe she came there to try to earn some goodwill. She was, like I said, gracious initially about saying, actually, we needed the law. By the way, she herself acknowledged that it was more than Epstein and Maxwell, that there were many men who went to that island, who were either implicated in horrendous behavior or who covered it up, and that this was not a hoax. But I think she really was trying to get out of her testimony in terms of the subpoena. It’s not going to work. That’s why House Democrats didn’t ask long questions. We didn’t want to give her an excuse not to show up at the deposition. She’s going to show up. And that’s where the American people will get answers.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for being with us, Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna, on the House Oversight Committee. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!