Video: On Minneapolis Shooting, Sen. Mark Warner Says “if this had not been an officer & it was the other way around & a bystander had shot an individual & with the same type of vehicle, you know, they’d be charged.”

See below for video and highlights (bolding added by me for emphasis, as always) from Sen. Mark Warner’s press availability earlier today.

• “First, the tragic shooting in Minneapolis yesterday. You know, I think we’ve all seen the video. I think the officer needs to be held accountable. The challenge we have is, you know, we’ve given ICE so much money. They have a budget bigger than the FBI. They have the budget bigger than, frankly, the French military. And it appears that in ICE reporting itself, that each agent is almost given a daily quota of people to be round up. And I believe that kind of pressure, I have no idea what the record of the officer who conducted the shooting’s background, but we do know when you’re trying to fill 10,000 new slots, you’ve got a much shorter time for training, you may not have the kind of ability to do crowd control. And it appears in this case that while it was a single shot, there needs to be a fulsome and thorough investigation and everyone needs to be held accountable. It is, again though, the bigger question is when the president almost always over the objections of the local mayor and governor, puts this level of federal forces on the street in a confrontational mode. Oftentimes these ICE agents, masked as we’ve seen…picking up kids picking up moms as they drop their kids off to work or dads on their way home or I think the statistics in Virginia said that about 75% of the people who had been arrested had no prior criminal background. So the whole idea that the president said we’re going after just the bad guys has not been proven at all. And instead, by this kind of again quota-driven roundup approach, you end up with tragedies similar to what took place yesterday in Minneapolis. So more facts to come, but the facts all do need to come out.”
• “On what had been taking up most of my time this week and that is monitoring the situation in Venezuela. There was a second brief for all of the senators yesterday. I attended and received some of the same message. I want to say at the outset…Maduro was a bad guy and Venezuela and the region are better for him being gone. And also the military strike was extraordinary…so that part is remarkable. But it’s also, just on the plain face of it, this was a military action. It was not a legal action. And as such… the War Powers Act that my friend Senator Kaine is going to put forward today, I will clearly be voting for that War Powers Resolution.”
• “…there is such a precedent being set here that if we can go in and and um snatch a leader of an adjacent country because we simply feel like that leader may have offended our law…international law, as kind of feeble as it is, still set some guard rails. This would sound like an absurd example here I’m going to give you, but what happens if the president of France decided that he didn’t like the president of Switzerland? Could the French military go in and snatch the president of Switzerland? Well, you might say, you know, that’s crazy, that will never happen. I mean, that’s as crazy as the United States government thinking it might invade a NATO ally like Greenland. We are in the kind of the period of the theater of absurd almost with some of these scenarios. But there is clearly a precedent setting here that removes America’s ability to make a moral standing argument when it takes out takes out a bad guy in terms of what go goes on going forward.”
• “I’ve got to really wonder whether the Gen Z folks really want our country to be spending billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars you protecting and controlling Venezuela…at the very same time they want a job and they want lower costs. Because the ability of for us to control Venezuela really is going to be dependent upon how long we keep the fleet, the armada…off the shores of Venezuela. Our ability to strangle their economy is based upon interdicting the boats, because without the ability for Venezuelan oil to to flow to other markets, Venezuela is bankrupt. I mean, we were told it’s literally days away from not having enough foreign currency reserves to pay any of their postmen, to pay any of their street cleaners, to pay any of their cops. And well, the violence level has been relatively low on the streets of Venezuela. If folks suddenly start not getting paid, you could have real chaos. And if you are running the country to use the president’s terms, you know, what role would we then have to pay to restore order. And how, I know the president has said we’re going to go ahead and take this 35 million barrels of oil that Venezuela has got stocked in its reserves and sell it. That’s not something the United States does as a nation state. We have companies that do that, but we don’t do it as a nation state. So there’s still a whole lot of questions to get answered. And again reminding everyone that on Saturday the president promised Venezuela’s oil is going to pay for this cost of this whole operation. Does that mean paying for the cost of this the fleet to be for a year or two off the coast of Venezuela? We still don’t have questions on that as well or we don’t have answers on that as well and particular that what is this costing our country on a daily basis are facts that I’m trying to ascertain as quickly as possible.”
• “Do we really want Donald Trump on his own, with no oversight, running Venezuela for a year plus without any legal constraints, without any financial constraints? Could they spend willy-nilly. Whe War Powers Act would say you can’t do anything else in Venezuela without congressional approval. I think that is needed. I think it’s necessary. And I hope and pray that enough of my Republican friends will find their courage to do that.”
• “What means ‘held accountable’ is if this had not been an officer and it was the other way around and a bystander had shot an individual and with the same type of vehicle, you know, they’d be charged. I’m not going to draw any legal conclusion. I saw the image. I saw what happened. I think there needs to be a thorough investigation. And if criminal charges are warranted, so be it. If there is the decision by the court that this was an act of self-defense, so be that as well. But for a community that at all appearances seems like it’s on edge at this point, failure to go ahead and at least put the officers through appropriate due process proceedings, I think would send a really bad signal to the community.”
• “I think at the beginning of the year when the president would muse about Greenland, you know, it became kind of a late-night joke. There was lots of joking about it on the floor of the Senate. It doesn’t sound as much like a joke now in light of the actions in Venezuela. But let’s take a take a moment to look at this. First of all, the United States already has an existing treaty with Greenland, with Denmark, that allows us to pretty much do what we want. We have a military base there. I’ve not reviewed the treaty, but people who have said you know we’ve got pretty much whatever, even in terms of extraction of minerals through the existing treaty. So why the saber rattling? Why the hreatening posture? You’ve already had our major European allies stand up and say you got to respect the sovereignty of Denmark. This is not funny anymore. This goes to the heart of our NATO alliance. If the biggest player in NATO, the United States, is threatening a smaller player, just because it wants a piece of its territory, that just doesn’t work. If the president were to take any kind of aggressive steps towards Greenland, you could very well have the core of the NATO membership, particularly at least the continental members like France and Germany and others, come out strongly against America. You know, the idea that we would use military force to take Greenland would destroy NATO. The most successful treaty organization post World War II would be kaput. And you know who would uh love that? Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Xi in China, the Ayatollah in Iran. If America were to be so stupid as to break up the strongest alliance in modern times just because of a whim that the president has about Greenland. Again, I think his comments early on in the administration kind of got an eye roll when he talked about this. Now when he’s trying to, you know, and particularly some of his aides who keep saying, you know, when he says he’ll follow through on well, even with the weak kneed-ness of many of my Republican colleagues in terms of them giving up congressional power, I got to believe, I got to believe that the vast majority of my Republican friends would not abide a military adventure against a fellow NATO recipient.”
• “If [the War Powers Act] did become law, I think even this president would not be as brazen as to completely ignore a specific congressional action directed at his current specific actions in Venezuela. The more likely occurrence is if it doesn’t pass, are there ways to use the power of the purse, the appropriations tool to cut back on some of his preferred spending? That unfortunately, as you well know, is a much longer process. We still haven’t finished the appropriations bills that are funding the current fiscal year, which started on October 1st. So there is the ability to cut back on funding on other parts of the government. End of the day, though, I think you know, presuming if it doesn’t pass, to try to make sure that we do appropriate oversight…but if I don’t control the gavel in the intelligence committee…our ability to kind of force the administration to appear and to lay out its rationale and expose when there’s been problems and be transparent is pretty undermined. And I’ve never seen a level of kind of being as dismissive of Congress, both sides, than this current Trump administration.”
• “The offshore wind project in Virginia we’ve been working on for more than a decade. I 100% support it. When complete, it was going to be able to power 400,000 homes in Virginia…Dominion was about 65% to 70% of the way completed. It’s roughly a $10 to $11 billion project. So, if you’re a Dominion customer, as I am, you know, our money is in that project. It’s not some outside corporate money. Our ratepayer money has already gone into these costs. We were on the verge of being, you know, this not only being a success for Virginiaians in terms of…ultimately lowering their utility bills, but it was also…we in Virginia were going to be kind of the East Coast hub of offshore wind. And again, this was one of those ones where the administration wanted to kind of hide what they were doing because it was either  somebody said, I think it was even Christmas day or the day right before or they came in with this order and the order is saying, well, oh my gosh, we’ve got national security concerns. I say baloney. Chair and vice chair of the intelligence committee. If we would have heard national security concerns, we would have been briefed on that repeatedly. This project’s been going on for more than a decade. They’ve received all of the permits. And the irony of and the insanity of this stoppage is, you know, those existing offshore wind projects that are already operating, they’re not ordered to stop. So, how are some of these now all subject to some national security issue as of, you know… birds… but the new one’s not. It just doesn’t pass a smell test. I think this is entirely, it’s not based on science. It’s not based on legitimate national security needs. It is based on Donald Trump’s personal dislike of windmills because he at least, I’ve been told, he believes that it deals with the aesthetics of his golf course over in Scotland. So, Senator Kaine and I are working on trying to add a filing into the court brief  before January 16, I think it’s next Friday the brief will be be submitted. But we want to weigh in on behalf of the literally hundreds of thousands of Virginiaians who would have gotten served by this clean energy source – and weigh in on behalf of the rateayers who’ve already got these sunk costs. Who is going to come in and reimburse these rateayers on sunk costs, particularly after you know again this had been fully vetted and fully approved through a very very long regulatory process?”
• “The US government somehow taking the oil out of the storage bins in Venezuela, transporting it someplace where it could then be sold at market price, and those proceeds somehow going back as you indicated even potentially into private bank accounts? The US government doesn’t do this. So, I’ll be anxious and I do want to see how they will procedurally do this. And I do know they’ve, you know, Venezuela’s got such a cash crunch, they need this money desperately. But the president has said American taxpayers aren’t going to be stuck on the dime on the hook for any of this. So, I want to make sure as we continue to prop up Venezuela, we also make sure American taxpayers are paid back for the literally daily costs of keeping 20% of our fleet off the coast of Venezuela.”