See below for video of Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability. A few things that jumped out at me include:
- “I want to start with thinking back a year ago, and I’m wearing the pin today for flight 5342 that crashed, killing 67 individuals, into the Potomac…And as we saw from the National Transportation Safety Board report, this accident could have been prevented. And I think we all need to commit ourselves to making sure it never happens again.”
- “I think the American public has seen the images of the killings in Minnesota. They know that ICE is an agency that now has run amok, that it needs guard rails. And before we fully pass the final funding bills to keep the government open, we’ve got to have some of those guarantees in place that this will be dealt with…we’ve got to put reforms in place. And again, I think it is evidence that the American people in many ways who’ve been caught in their homes, not just here in the region, but across the whole country with the major snow storm, you know, their eyes don’t lie. They all have seen the video. So no matter how much the administration had to mischaracterize for example Mr. Pretti, who was an ICU nurse, as they tried to characterize him as some kind of bad guy want-to-be terrorist — all false, all lies — when people saw the video, they believed their eyes, not the lies that come out from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who by the way should be in any normal administration would have been fired by now. They saw with their own eyes, and I think again finally the White House and some of my Republican friends are saying he,y we’ve got to put some guard rails in place. And my hope is that we can continue to work through the afternoon and tomorrow and over the weekend as necessary to to get that in place.”
- “Then finally, if this wasn’t enough, we saw evidence last night that the FBI and the Justice Department was launching an effort to collect voting data from Fulton County, Georgia. Now, the idea that this Justice Department, which, you know, says it doesn’t have time to finish getting the Epstein files released, but suddenly finds time to pursue a politically motivated complaint because of the president’s obsession about his loss of Georgia in 2020. And his loss of the election in 2020 is really a misallocation of resources…this doesn’t pass the smell test… But what really set my hair on fire was who appears at this FBI raid. The director of national intelligence, Tulsa Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard has no domestic election security responsibilities. She has responsibilities if there is evidence of foreign malign influence. By the way, she has personally dismantled the foreign malign influence center that was set up under Trump 1. So why was she showing up here if there is a foreign intelligence connection to this 2020 election case? You know, one, we should have heard about it; and two, if she’s got that evidence, it is her duty to report it to the intelligence committee, which she has not. So the only other reason she may be there is that it has been reported that she is out of the president’s favor. She’s not been included in in senior intelligence meetings. She’s not been briefing the Gang of Eight. She may be in Donald Trump’s doghouse and she may be trying to kind of curry favor with the president…”
- “I was actually in Hanover County about 10 days ago… Hanover County is known as a very conservative community. But I think the citizens have risen up and say they don’t want this kind of facility in Hanover County, you know these detention centers. I visited the center in Farmville, which was a former private prison. I’ve visited the holding facility up in Chantilly. If this is the will of the community, I want to try to work with them. And again, I think this is the kind of evidence that we’ve got to put reforms around ICE. If Hanover County is coming, I think at a 6 to 1 vote, I believe the vote was to say, ‘hey, we don’t want this with the current ICE practices, protocols, procedures coming into our county,’ that ought to be a message to all of my friends and particularly the Republican members in the Virginia delegation, that they ought to join us in putting some guard rails on ICE… And again, a factual evidence point of this is Hanover County. Hanover County is – as somebody who’s run multiple times in Virginia, I think I’ve only won it once back in 2008 – it’s a very conservative community. And if the community turned out in large numbers last night and the local Board of Supervisors said, ‘heck, we don’t even want an ICE facility,’ that ought to be an indication that we’ve got to put some guardrails in place. And I hope that that message is received by as many Republican senators as possible.”
- “Listen, what we tried to put forward was a reasonable set of reforms. In a sense, it was to try to move back move back ICE procedures and protocols to where they were years ago. I’m sure at the end of the day, it won’t go far enough for some folks on my side of the aisle. I’m sure it will be too much for some of them. That’s the nature of a compromise. But I’m not going to negotiate what is essential, what could be taken out or what could be added back in this call. I will add one thing that I’m hoping, particularly when you now see this evidence of what’s happening in Fulton County, where it appears there’s starting to be efforts from this Trump Justice Department to potentially interfere with our elections. I sure as heck don’t want to see roving ICE patrols showing up at Virginia polling stations in our primary or if there is a referendum on redistricting. You know, our polling stations should be free from outside interference, including interference from ICE. So that’s something I want to hope will get into this reform package.”
- “It appears the president’s obsessed about his loss [in 2020] and can’t, you know, can’t get out of it. It really begs the question of why the Justice Department, which can’t do its job on the Epstein files, get that information out, can take resources away and put them on on this kind of case or why so many FBI agents have been, you know, delegated to doing immigration rather than doing, you know, election security or doing, you know, counter espionage or frankly sex crimes…. It appears to me that [Tulsi Gabbard] is somebody who’s desperately trying to get back in the good graces of her boss, Donald Trump. She’s been clearly excluded from most of the national security activities in terms of our actions in Venezuela, Iran, questions around Greenland, elsewhere. And so if this is a feeble attempt to show up and just get back in the boss’s good graces, that is not the role of the director of national intelligence. And if it doesn’t worry you, if it doesn’t concern you, that she’s taking the eye off the ball of how we deal with our foreign adversaries, it should.”
********************************************************
