See below for video and highlights (bolding added by me for emphasis) from Sen. Mark Warner’s press availability earlier this afternoon. For more on Sen. Warner’s views on the Venezuelan situation, see here (I’m not going to repeat all of it below).
- “This is literally the New Year really starting off with a bang…we are now where this action which was taken without any congressional consultation. Secretary Rubio did try to contact me after the raid had started…It really goes against the basic tenets of our system, you know, the ability to declare war, the ability to take this broad a military action. And I completely reject that this was somehow simply an execution of a warrant. It just doesn’t pass the smell test when you send in the Delta teams and you literally have an armada off the coast of Venezuela for months.”
- “So this puts us I think on a very dangerous path. the underlying reasons and rationale for this extraction. It was bold. But the question is kind of what next?...it appears that this extraction had very little to do with drugs and drug running and much more to do with oil. And the idea that the American people could potentially have their sons and daughters who serve in the armed forces be troops on the ground in Venezuela to secure their oil. We’ve seen this movie before. We saw that when the Bush administration promised that the invasion of of Iraq would be costless, that Iraqi oil would pay for it. That wasn’t how it played out.”
- “I’ve sat on a number of briefs around Venezuela. I’ve never heard the current acting president Rodriguez viewed as anything other than a loyalist to Maduro and to Chavez before Maduro.”
- “So, an awful lot of questions, questions about what motivated this extraction. What was the legal reasoning? Couldn’t it be used by other nation states against our allies around the world? And again, it’s the Western Hemisphere is something I’ve been interested. I was an exchange student in high school in Argentina. You we have often treated Central America and South America with almost benign neglect. But if in many ways over the last 70 years, there has been one theme from Democratic and Republican administrations that we were trying to change our image as a colonial or imperial power and looking to try to work with countries in those in that region in a collaborative way. Well, it looks like that 70 plus years of bipartisan foreign policy has been thrown out the window with a new I guess he’s calling it the ‘Donroe doctrine’. What does that mean in terms of how Central America and South America will view us? Will it unite them against us or this whole kind of 1950s notion of spheres of influence? If we have the sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, does that mean China is okay to take any country it wants in East Asia? Does that mean that Russia can take and reconstitute the old Soviet Union against nations that are now democracies? Where do we head from here? This afternoon, I hope to start getting some of those answers when the Gang of Eight will be meeting with the Defense Secretary, the Secretary of State, and I believe the Attorney General and others. I’ve got a lot of questions I need to get answered, particularly since so many Virginians are already in harm’s way, since most of the the armada that has been assembled off the coast of Venezuela actually is homeported in Norfolk. And I’ve got a lot of questions before we put those sailors and soldiers in harm’s way, particularly if at the end of the day, this is about trying to take Venezuelan oil and not about restoring democracy or for that matter even breaking up some of the drug activity that’s coming out of Venezuela.”
- “We have already incurred costs in the tens if not hundreds of millions by deploying this fleet, by deploying this armada…I want to know what the plan of the next steps will be. Our military, as we saw the other night, they executed brilliantly, but they’ve got to be led by a commander-in-chief that’s got a real plan. And I don’t see that real plan. I think it is obviously, at least from the president’s own words, that this is about oil. It’s not so much about stopping drugs or it’s sure as heck not about trying to bring some stability and democracy back to Venezuela, which for a long time was one of our closest allies in South America. So I’ve got a lot of questions for Secretary Rubio. I’ve worked well with him. I appreciate the fact that he tried to contact me, but it was not as the rules are, you’re supposed to contact and consult Congress before a strike, not after the strike. So I’ve got a lot of questions about where we where we go from here and do they really the notion that this was a law enforcement action doesn’t pass the smell test at all. And are they really going to stick to the idea that it is okay for any big country to go in and snatch a leader of a smaller country if they simply make the claim that they’ve they’ve violated the large country’s laws? And that seems to be the precedent that was set. And I hope they can disabuse me of that notion.”
- “The Gang of Eight was set up for exactly this circumstance. You take the leadership, Democrat, Republican, of the House and Senate, and the leadership of the intelligence committees. We absolutely know how critical it is to keep confidential information confidential. It’s never leaked. So, I disagree with my friend Marco Rubio. This is exactly the kind of circumstance where you would notify the Gang of Eight at the most confidential level before an attack took place. And the idea that they’re trying to argue that this is simply some kind of law enforcement action, it doesn’t pass a smell test.”
- “…in a normal circumstance, you know, that’s why we have the committee structure, that you should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. You should be able to do more than one thing. You know, we clearly will vote on my friend Senator Tim Kaine’s resolution, War Powers Act about Venezuela. I will be voting for that resolution, and I’ll be anxious to see so many of my Republican friends who’d been, you know, quietly issuing concerns about the buildup, about the strikes on the so-called drug votes. Will they find the courage to to actually vote their convictions and what they’ve said privately? Time will tell. And then yes, the fact that we’ve got, you know, close to 24 million Americans that have seen their health care costs skyrocket. And remember, health care costs going up, you know, it’s not just the folks who lose the tax credits under the ACA, but if you suddenly put 10, 15, 20 milion more people in the uninsured basket, they will show up at the emergency room…oftentimes where they can’t pay the bill…raising everybody’s rates...my Republican friends had plenty of chances to kind of extend the existing program. They chose not to. I think we’ve got to focus on that. And we’ve got to focus, I would think, you know, the president and all of us ought to take a lesson from the elections whether they be in New York, New Jersey or anywhere around the country, but particularly here in Virginia. What people want is affordability. They don’t want their health care costs going up.”
- “But if we think about affordability in Virginia, one of the crazy things the administration recently did by basically cancelling all the wind projects, offshore wind, you know, that project was running basically $10 to $11 billion….Dominion using ratepayer money has spent $7 billion. It was going to power 400,000 homes. I’ve been supportive of this project and again I appreciate the fact it’s had broad bipartisan support. It was going to make Virginia a leader in wind power across the country. By cancelling that, if we can’t get it reopened, you’re going to have a bunch of sunk costs and you’re going to have utility rates go up. So we’ve got questions around international circumstance. We’ve got health care. We’ve got the affordability issues around utility rates. We’ve been working for some time. I’ve got a broad set of bipartisan bills around housing. We need more housing supply. And then something that’s not made a lot of attention, but I’m smack dab in the middle of is which is crypto legislation around market structure. So, you know, this is going to test whether whether Congress can actually do its job, and that job will be made a heck of a lot easier if it can be done in a bipartisan fashion.”
- “I’ve obviously visited the detention center in Farmville and the detention center in Centreville trying to improve conditions. I mean, I think we all agreed we needed to slow the flow at the border. But slowing the flow of people coming in at the border, which the president’s been successful at, doesn’t mean we all wanted to agree with…thousands of masked ICE agents picking up moms dropping off kids at daycare, picking up dads going to work. And again, the hypocrisy here – Venezuelans were allowed into America under a program called TPS, Temporary Protected Status, it was granted a number of years back. Trump got rid of the TPS protection for Venezuelans. Now you’ve got this potential chaos. And if the chaos in Venezuela leads to more lawlessness, you could have more Venezuelans trying to leave Venezuela and heading either into other countries in South America or back up towards America. That doesn’t help us either. So I know all immigrant communities, but the Latino community in particular has been under huge stress. We continue to try to help particularly when we see, you know, Americans being snatched. We’ve got a right to help there. And unfortunately, it is shown what the president initially said was we he was only go after the the quote unquote bad guys who’ve violated American law. I think the numbers at the end of the year were less than 25% of the people who’ve been picked up in Virginia had violated any laws at all. So, we are helping out, but it’s also why my fear is with this, you know, this action now in Venezuela, it throws even more uncertainty into the mix. And I think the attorney general has said, well, these Venezuelans can now apply for refugee status, but even the processing of refugee process had been dramatically slowed in the last few months. So there’s a lot of questions we got to get answered.”
- “…the idea that we would walk away from that whole order by giving a green light for big countries to take on small countries with no repercussions, that scares the heck out of me.“
- “…what I was hopeful before Christmas…after the president’s policies took a shellacking in elections in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, you know, frankly all across the country, and he seemed to get more and more thinking he was an absolute power. The level of discontent from my Republican friends who I know love our country kept rising. But the rubber’s really going to hit the road this week. You remember in many ways, President Trump was elected because he said he was going to take America out of endless wars. Well, he’s struck Venezuela. He’s attacked in Nigeria. He’s now threatening Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba. I mean, are we just going to give this guy a blank check to do whatever he wants using the best military in the world? But read the Constitution. That’s not the way the system’s supposed to work. And I desperately hope that my Republican friends, and many of them are my friends, will do the right thing and actually step up and voice their concerns and do the kind of oversight that our system was set up for.”
- “…if you go back to the Constitution, the power to declare war was specifically given to Congress. And that’s because, you know, we had just freed ourselves from a monarchy and we didn’t want to put in a single individual, in the past the king, the ability to drag a country into war. So there was always this notion that you’re supposed to talk to Congress…This shouldn’t be left to one individual….Secretary Rubio is right, you might not be able to with this action that required an element of surprise that you wouldn’t brief all 535. But that’s what we set up, the Gang of Eight. Marco Rubio was a member of the Gang of Eight. And when we didn’t get briefed appropriately, sometimes under Biden, he was mad as hell. And so the idea that you’re only going to brief after the event has started doesn’t pass a smell test. Isn’t what the setup was. And the reason you have the Gang of Eight is because it has never leaked. I take this job very responsibly being chair and now vice chair of the intelligence committee. I know that secret information if it’s handled sloppily could cost people’s lives. We saw that kind of sloppy handling by Pete Hegseth with the Signalgate effort earlier where plans for a strike in Yemen were discussed on a nonsecure line that had a reporter on it….So the idea that that you you we treat secret information secretly, but the Gang of Eight is set up very exactly for this purpose. If you’ve got a surprise action, you at least consult with Congress. And let me tell you, it’s usually a call hours before the action takes place, but at least it meets the the Framers; intent that it’s not a single individual taking our nation into war. And when you do it only after the fact and when it appears now that the reasoning was not even really what was given to the Congress and the people beforehand that it’s about drugs, but it’s about securing the oil in Venezuela…”
- “I think now that [Maduro]’s out, he should be put on trial. I mean, he’s a bad guy. Let’s not pretend that he didn’t drive Venezuela straight into the ditch that the Venezuelan people in 2024 overwhelmingly – against threats to their own personal life because Maduro supposedly had a great secret police that would you know arrest and sometimes kill opposition – they went out and by a two to one margin voted him out. And again, it was a huge mistake back in 2024 for us not to to try to push the region to get rid of him then. But his bad actions don’t justify this kind of action without taking it to the American public, without taking it to the Congress, without trying to build some kind of international support…our kind of moral high ground on that has been hugely undermined…”
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