Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says “I thought the pace of assault was pretty heavy last week. If anything, it’s picked up this week.”

See below for video and a few highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s press availability this afternoon – lots to talk about, that’s for sure!

• “I thought the pace of assault was pretty heavy last week. If anything, it’s picked up this week.”
• “Even my friend Marco Rubio, who is now Secretary of  State, when he was in the Senate advocated for increasing federal relief funding. We often talk about Sudan, where there’s more people die every day than Ukraine and Gaza combined, and yet we spent a year trying to open up relief to folks under assault and we’ve now even got literally medicine rotting – American paid for medicine rotting – because we’ve cut off all of that assistance. I believe it’s illegal. I believe it is morally wrong. It is also against our national security. And we’re going to continue to put as as much pressure as possible to try to bring some sunlight to this process.”
• “Elon Musk and his gang should not be defunding programs by name on the basis of a tweet. And unfortunately, that seems to be where we’re headed…what appears to be, in the the press, a 25-year-old with no experience potentially manipulating the Treasury payment files and we can’t get an answer on that yet “
• “We’ve seen this buyout offer put out to our federal employees, which I believe is illegal. And let me assure you, there’s no money the budget. Matter of fact, our funding for the federal government runs out March 14th, so federal employees who take this sham offer have no assurance that they’ll get paid…” 
• “Back on the national security side, this again I believe illegal, non-paid-for offer went out to all the CIA employees. And it just boggles the mind…I’m sure Elon Musk and his crowd don’t know that it takes a year and a half to get a CIA clearance to go into the agency. It takes years to be trained. To somehow offer across-the-board buyout offer will weaken the United States of America real time…”
• “I appeal to folks across the state, if you are community leader or other people need to stand up and speak out. I hear from some local leaders, I hear from businesses, well if they just keep their heads low, maybe this will pass by. This is not a time to keep your heads low. This is such an indiscriminate attack on rule of law, on our nation’s payment systems, on our nation’s privacy and our nation’s law enforcement, that if you’ve got a time to raise your voice, it’s now “
• “Remember we’re talking about Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, who’s calling for eliminating these foreign aid programs, which frankly the whole foreign aid budget is a fraction of his personal net worth. Elon Musk who has ties to China – his largest Tesla factory is there, he gets most of the batteries from China. He’s never said a bad word about Chinese leadership, yet he’s criticized American and European leadership virtually on a daily basis. For us not to know who are working on this DOGE task force, it violates every operating principle around keeping our nation’s secrets safe, about trying to protect the payment flows, the idea that they are in looking at all of the Treasury payments down to the individual level…”
• “Where is the leadership of the banking community to say, we don’t want the payment system of America being manipulated? Let’s get these DOGE kids up in front; they ought to be identified, we ought to know their records, we ought to know if they are have even classification review. And if they don’t want to do that entirely, they ought to at least do it in a classified setting. But we’ve got nothing. This is a group of folks run amuck. And we are all going to be tested now, whether we’re going to stand by rule of law or going to allow…potentially the dismantling of  our national government.”
• “I think that men and women who serve our country in arms, in the defense world, the fact is they are more representative of minorities than the general population. I know in many cases our African-American population is about 10%, 11% in the country, I believe that in the military in some branches of the service it gets as high as 20%. We’ve seen for example in the Latino community, a huge number of folks who sign up as defenders of our country in the military, the Army being a…path to the middle class. I think it is disrespectful and outrageous that Donald Trump is trying to change American history and let’s face it, whitewash it, by taking out respect for Dr King or recognizing the contribution of  a whole lot of folks across our country that from different backgrounds that make up our Armed Forces. I think this does nothing to strengthen our country; if anything, that kind of effort to whitewash history I think will weaken our country…we’re having a hard enough time as it is recruiting the right men and women to to do these jobs. If it appears that  the military, which in many ways was a path towards the middle class, particularly for minorities in America, is now not going to be as friendly to those Americans, I think it weakens our country “
• “I can tell you the amount of pressure that has been brought to bear on my Republican Senate friends who were willing to vote against or thought about voting against the Bobby Kennedys or the Tulsi Gabbards or the Russell Voughts, it has been unprecedented. And at some point I hope some of them will speak out with the level of detail that I know, I think people would no matter how strong a Republican or MAGA supporter you may be, I think people would be repulsed at the kind of threats that are being made.”
• ” I think it’s important for people to speak out and speak up. I hope that the demonstrations though will focus on where the challenge is – let’s convince some of our Republican friends to stand up…They had a lot of folks protesting at Tim Kaine and my office the other day. I hope they’ll protest at Republican members….”
• “The only way we stop this lawless action is to speak up and speak out and say this is not why Donald Trump got hired. He got hired promising that he was going to try to lower grocery prices. And instead, he’s attacking our workforce, he’s attacking programs for the most vulnerable, he’s going off and making irresponsible claims that somehow America is going to pick up the cost and potentially send troops to Gaza  – that’s wacky. All that would do is let off the hook wealthy countries in that region like Saudi Arabia and the  who ought to help on the rebuilding, let alone what it would say to the rest of the world about the 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza. This is the height of irresponsibility. If this is what you signed up for, then you’re getting it. If you signed up for what you thought was going to be a focus on lowering inflation, bringing down grocery costs and making America safer, this is not what is playing out and we’re only on day 18.”