Video: Sen. Mark Warner Warns That If Trump Fires Fed Chair Jay Powell, “we would see a market meltdown that is unprecedented”

See below for video and a few highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability, held earlier this afternoon.

• “First I wanted to give you a quick overview, particularly for those of you who aren’t in Southwest Virginia, about my trip last week – six days that included a NASCAR race in Bristol and throwing out a first pitch for the Salem Red Sox in minor league ball, but it also included a huge amount of consternation and fear from communities all across the region…others who came across the region were saying that if Medicaid gets cut or particularly if Virginia rolls back the expansion, then that clinic and candidly others across the region will probably have to close. Matter of fact, depending on how deep the Medicaid cuts go, we could see virtually every hospital west of Roanoke close down...So there is real concern and consternation – and these are communities that voted for the president, many of them north of 70% – with some of the effects that are going to hit them if the proposed cuts and the continued chaos keeps coming down from Washington. So I’m going to do all I can to try to reassure, but we’ve also got to make sure that some of these cuts don’t stand.”
• “It really just baffles me that if Congress is continued to be ignored as we appropriate funds and dedicate them towards programs and if this administration can then pull back those funds regardless of what Congress says, why do you even have a Congress? And we’re at that level of fundamental question and again I just hope my my Republican colleagues you will stand up and say, ‘No, the Constitution gives us the power of the purse; we’re not going to let that be taken by an executive of any party.”
• “[It’s] frankly just stunning to me that action hasn’t been taken…the continuing dribbling out of stories about Secretary Pete Hegseth… the fact now that the secretary – and he’s not denied this – shared that same information on his personal phone with family members, his wife, his brother, his lawyer, all who by the way have jobs now at the Pentagon; if that’s not nepotism, I don’t know what is. But the fact that he continues – if this comes out as true, where he took this information that got conveyed to the Pentagon in a classified form as NBC is reporting…and then took that information and simply copied and pasted it onto a nonsecure chat on his personal device…he’s been clearly lying…If this came over a classified channel, and the commanders in the region thought it was classified, and as I’ve mentioned before, I challenged the secretary to go down to Hampton Roads to visit Norfolk Naval Station and to visit with the family and friends and crew mates of those folks who were on the USS Truman home port in Norfolk…those families know and I heard it big time at a town hall a couple weeks back, those families knew that if that information had got out their loved ones would have been put in harm’s way. So this is again a case…regardless of all the other chaos that’s coming out of the Pentagon and the disarray, our men and women in our armed services deserve better. They deserve a secretary that they’re going to have faith in. And I feel that Mr. Hegseth has clearly lost the faith of both the civilian and the military commands. And clearly by this careless treatment of of secret information is also I think interfering with our intelligence alliances, because our allies won’t share their classified information with us if we don’t take appropriate care. So I’m hoping that the president will stand up and do the right thing. If he doesn’t, I do hope that my Republican Senate friends who care about national security – and I know they care – will find their voices and say ‘This is just a bridge too far with this careless handling of information on a personal phone that includes your family members, from information that clearly the commander in the region thought was classified, and conveyed it in such a appropriate manner to the Pentagon.'”
•  “These unjustified attacks against Jay Powell, as chairman of the Fed, would be bad enough in and of themselves. But remember what’s happened already beforehand, this administration has already treated our allies around the world as if they’re enemies, instead trying to side for example with Russia against our European allies. So those alliances are frayed. Then you had these tariffs, which attacked friend and foe alike…Why are we tariffing Australia – a country we have a free trade agreement with, a country we have a surplus agreement with, a country that we’re going to be building submarines with for Australia in Virginia? No answer. Then you take on, so you’ve got this uncertainty in the markets already, and then you have a direct attack on the independence of the Fed. The Fed has been set up for over a hundred years to be appointed by the president, the Fed governors, but then independent. And much of the faith that resides in our government, and the dollar being the ultimate backstop, the safe currency, is based upon the idea that the Fed will do the appropriate things to rein inflation and try to lower unemployment. And they don’t need politics interfering. If the president were to try to fire Jay Powell, it would end up in court and we would see a market meltdown that is unprecedented. We could literally see the security of the dollar being the world’s reserve currency put in play. No one would like that more than China, who is using this time to frankly reopen a series of of trading conversations with countries that we’ve been saying for the last 10 years under Biden, under the first Trump, even back to Obama, be careful about how you do business with China, they don’t play fair, it’s not a system that protects your intellectual property. But when then we become so erratic, we are pushing literally countries particularly in Asia back into China’s arms. It is bad policy, it is bad politics, it is bad for our economy. And if this threat were to be carried out, you think the market turndown we’ve seen right now, it would turn into a meltdown. And people’s… their interest cost would go up; you want to buy a home...there would be a much higher interest costs, because people would not be willing to buy treasuries, because they wouldn’t trust that they’re not going to be potentially manipulated by politics if Trump took over the the Fed’s independence. And we’ve seen this in other nations, we’ve seen it when you we saw Liz Truss get thrown out in a very short time in her time in the UK because she had such a screwy economic plan, and she tried to undermine to a bit the the integrity of the Bank of England and the markets just kicked her out and her party kicked her out. We are seeing that – we’re on that path here in this country with consequences that would…be much worse for our economy and frankly much worse for the global economy. So this is playing with a level of fire that is unprecedented. And again the question is going to be, you know the law states that the Fed chair is independent, that’s what it was set for…Is anyone on the Republican side going to call that out and say don’t do it? You hear a lot of quiet rumblings, but it doesn’t mean much unless you’re willing to talk to the press or talk to your people about this, the concern that every person who knows Econ 101 should have about these unwarranted threats against the independence of the Fed chair.”
• “Remember, candidate Trump promised he’d end the Russia Ukraine war on day one. We’re now approaching day 100 and we’ve seen no resolution. And I think frankly, the administration has been suckered into believing Vladimir Putin. And again this administration has been willing to defame and denigrate the Ukrainian president, the efforts of the Ukrainian people to fight back against the aggressor. He’s been willing to kind of put in play a relationship with our NATO allies who strongly support Ukraine. And I think he’s been played by Putin. I think…Putin has no interest in a real truce; he is winning on the ground because we have pulled back some of our support, the Europeans are trying to fill that but there are certain things that only we can fill. And if America walks away, I think Putin will feel they have an even freer hand to try to take back more territory from Ukraine and ultimately dictate terms. That is bad for the Ukrainian people, it is bad for security in Eastern Europe. A Putin unleashed that’s successful in Ukraine I believe will go after the Baltic states, will go after Poland. And we will either be honoring our Article 5 commitments to NATO and have American troops in harm’s way, or we will see a reconstitution of a Russia/Soviet empire on nation states that have turned into democracies and that have assumed that by being allies with America they would have mutual protection. All that is at stake if we walk away from something that anyone who was familiar with this problem and this issue would have realized could not be solved in a simple fashion. And being suckered by Putin is in my mind one more example of this strange hold that Vladimir Putin seems to have on Donald Trump. Remember, Russia was only one of the only countries that wasn’t had additional tariffs put on on so-called liberation day – more than a little bit bizarre here.”
•   “On the broader question… this kind of chaos, our adversaries – and I don’t just mean China and Russia who use this potentially for cyber attacks – but whether we’re talking about the Houthis who are continuing to launch missiles against ships in the Red Sea…they see chaos and they also see opportunity…So our men and women in uniform deserve better, they deserve a secretary that has got the experience to lead the largest military and the most powerful military in the world. Clearly this guy does not have it, that treats classified information with the appropriate level of secrecy, because lives depend upon it. And I think these actions make us less safe. And it also undermines hugely the morale inside the DoD. I see it more firsthand in the intelligence community, because as vice chair of the [committee] I have deep ties with a lot of our agencies. And people are enormously concerned that allies may not share intelligence with us anymore. They’re concerned because their workforce as well feels threatened by the DOGE actions…Who’s going to work for the intelligence community, or for that matter DoD, if you feel like you can get fired with no cause. And that is what is happening with this DOGE efforts –  firing with no cause, no performance review, pure trying to hit a number. So you’ve got the lack of morale, you’ve got the chaos by all of the folks at the top and the feuds that are going on, and then you’ve got this mistreatment of classified information. That triple whammy is again a clear reason why Secretary Hegseth should resign or be fired.”