Video: Sen. Mark Warner Talks About Iran War Disaster After 1 Month; the Trump-Caused Mess (Including ICE Agents) at Airports; Data Centers and AI; etc.

See below for video and highlights (bolding added by me for emphasis of key points) from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability.

• “Good afternoon everybody and welcome to my regular update from Washington; it’s been one hell of a week. Let’s start  with the fact that we are approaching as of tomorrow a month in to the war with Iran. And let me be clear at the outset –  this is a war of choice chosen by Donald Trump. There was no imminent threat. I have seen all of the intelligence.  I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Iranian leadership has been awful for years.  But the reason why people haven’t acted before is because everything that has happened was predicted by the  intelligence. If we start a war with Iran, they will strike their our Gulf neighbors. They will close the Strait of Hormuz where 20% of the world’s oil, 20% of the world’s natural gas goes through. This was all predictable.”
• “And unfortunately in this war so far, we are seeing the Iranians who have not only still ballistic missile capabilities but drone capabilities literally bleed down American and Israeli interceptors.  So we keep shooting off missiles that cost 2.4 million bucks a piece to take down an Iranian drone that costs $50,000.  That’s a bad deal, particularly because you know, we could have taken the Ukrainian technology that has figured out how to shoot down these drones. They offered it to this White House in December and this White House blew them  off. We’re paying the price of that. And increasingly protecting our troops or Israel protecting its cities or the Gulf neighbors protecting their cities,  they’re not going to be able to do this. In a longer term war of attrition, even though our military has been brilliant, well, some of the balance shifts to Iran because they can just hang in.”
• “And then you would have thought with these predictable things like closing of the Strait of Hormuz or bombing energy facilities in the ulf, that we would have been prepared. But we are now, and let me be clear on this – not my words, but the International Energy [Agency] – said we’re in the worst energy crisis of our lifetime.  Worse than when many of these Arab states shut down oil to America  in the early 70s and we saw those long lines. We are about to see $4 gasoline.  We’ve seen the cost of diesel fuel go up to over $6 a gallon and 80% of all the trucks in America use diesel fuel. So that will drive up the cost of everything they deliver.  We have seen jet fuel become almost unavailable at any cost.   Airlines have already jacked up ticket prices and one airline, United, has even stopped long haul flights. Not all of them, but many  – if you want to go to Asia, you want to go to Europe, you’re not going to have the same number of options. We’ve seen fertilizer prices. I talked to a farmer in Amelia last week go up 40% just as farmers across Virginia are getting into the growing season. And the fertilizer problem was made worse not just because of the materials that come from the Gulf, but because our farmers were already reeling from fertilizer restrictions that come from our tariffs on Canada. We’ve also seen a  lot of other, you know, not directly oil-related shocks to the economy.   Lots of the aluminum that comes from the world comes from smelters in the Middle East. They are closed down and aluminum  prices are at an all-time high. Helium, and I didn’t understand this, helium which is used in many of our chips that we use in all of our data centers and all of our military devices use helium.   After America, most of the helium provided by the world comes from the Middle East, that is basically slowed down to almost nothing.  And you know that will drive up cost.”
• “And then one that also should have been predictable is that while we only get a certain percentage about 10% of oil from the Middle East, the Gulf, in America, in Asia they get 80%. So a whole lot of countries in Asia are shutting down their economies on a forced one-day-a-week vacation because they don’t have enough fuel for their workers to go to work. So, anything we buy from Bangladesh or Vietnam or the Philippines is going to go up in cost. All of the chips we still depend on Taiwan to supply us are going to go up in cost.   And the remarkable thing is if the president, this is his words, not mine, says, ‘ok, I feel it in my bones, we have declared victory’,  these facilities to get reopened and supply chains to come back. It will be months.  So, don’t expect any Virginia driver to suddenly say gas prices are going to go back to where they were $2.81 a gallon when this is over. Don’t expect that trucking costs that have got $6 plus a gallon diesel are going to go back to normal.”
• “And all of these other – the natural gas that comes from the region, literally had to take it all out of these facilities because they were afraid if a bomb hit you could have a fireball. None of this is going to happen quickly. And where are we a month in? Well, the president said he wanted regime change. We don’t have that.   Matter of fact, we’ve got worse Iranian leaders. Getting rid of their enriched uranium? Well, that would require boots on the ground, minimum of soldiers guarding the perimeter while people would go into these bunkers and take this very volatile enriched uranium in canisters out. And let’s be clear, what the Iranians would do then is they would shoot their own missiles  toward these bunkers and can potentially, you know, bury alive our troops.  You know, the question of getting rid of their missile capacity. No, we’ve taken out a lot of interceptors, but they’ve still got plenty left, and they got  thousands of additional drones. And if we don’t change how we shoot them down, we’re going to run out of interceptors. And on the question of the Iranian Navy, we’ve sunk a lot of their ships, but they still have 500 plus these little speedboats where you can put a sea mine or a bomb on them and they can easily can continue to control the Strait of Hormuz.   So what have we actually accomplished? We have knocked off some of their leadership. We have degraded some of their capacity.  But there is a very real possibility if we declare victory tomorrow that the Iranians come out and say, ‘hey, we just took on United States and Israel and fought them to a tie.’ A wounded Iran in that region still poses a huge threat.”
• “These are all questions that should have been debated.  And frankly, if the president wanted to choose this war, he needed to provide us – particularly those of us in the intel community who could have foreseen all of this – answers to well, if this happens,  what then? And he sure as heck owed the whole American public that if we’re choosing to go to war with Iran, here’s our risks. Here’s what we could, you know, honestly expect to accomplish.  None of that happened. So, we are a month in with about ground troops moving towards the region. We’ve got things like our sailors who were on the Ford and some of the escort ships that have been deployed from Norfolk now coming on about nine months. We see the enormous challenge with a fire on  the Ford and breakdown of some of the plumbing. you know, even with our best ships in the world, there’s reasons the deployments are normally only six or seven months. I feel for those sailors who, you know, don’t know what’s next and our fliers and our Marines and Army that are headed to the region when the goal now or when we’re going to be when the president’s going to declare victory is when again his words, he ‘feels it in his bones’.  What kind of message does he as commander-in-chief give to our troops in harm’s way?”
• “Let me add one last thing that’s kind of the ultimate cherry on the cake. Because this administration has now chosen to relieve sanctions on Russian oil and Iranian oil, Russia, our adversary against our ally Ukraine, we put $10 billion into Putin’s pocket to spend on his war machine going against our allies, the Ukrainians, who are using American equipment. And what’s even worse, the partial relief of sanctions on Iranian oil for that oil that was already in transit means $14 billion to the hardcore anti-American, anti-Israeli regime in Iran.   Can you just fathom that for a minute? We are funding our enemy who’s shooting at our troops, shooting at cities in Israel, shooting at our allies in the Gulf. And by giving them $14 billion of non-sanctioned Iranian oil, that’s a lot of money for a country like Iran.  So we’re going to stay tuned on this. But it is incredibly disturbing that we didn’t plan for these obvious outcomes and unfortunately I believe it put the world’s best military, our American forces, in a level of harm’s way that’s unprecedented.”
• “Next subject – DHS and TSA. We’ve got to get them funded.  You know, we’re still offering the idea of if we can’t decide on reforms for ICE and CBP, fund everything else, release the hostages and keep fighting about..ICE and CBP.   One thing I can tell you, we sure as hell shouldn’t leave town for any kind of break with airports overcrowded to frankly a national security risk.  And the idea that the president has put ICE agents with no responsibility into our airports. And I hear from TSA agents, there’s been public reporting as well, that our TSA agents who are already stressed or feeling on edge, their words, or spooked by having all these ICE guys wander around the airports, which also, I’m sure, freaks out a lot of the passengers.  Let’s get this resolved. Let’s reach a compromise. The Senate shouldn’t leave town until it’s done.”
• “On the question to a slightly better piece of news, I was really happy to see that power is now being generated from Virginia’s offshore wind project. It’s had to go through a heck of a lot of obstacles.  Literally, the Trump administration trying with no reason to shut it down.   Thank goodness the court said that would be a complete waste. So, we’re seeing some of the power start to flow;  ultimately when this project is completed, it will literally power about 860,000 homes in Virginia. That doesn’t meet all our needs. But to have that from a offshore source of wind that is climate good and carbon-free, we need more electricity of all types of sources, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear.  And I’m glad to see that Dominion and the project supporters have hung in and now we’re starting to see some of the benefits and those benefits will only grow as they build out the rest of the project.”
• “Finally, I want to talk about a bipartisan bill that I introduced…called Sammy’s Law. It’s named after a young man named Sammy Chapman and he unfortunately  through usage on social media got sent drugs laced with fentanyl and died. This law would require the biggest platforms that have more than a billion dollars in revenue and certain number of users to actually make sure they report if there is evidence that the user is using terms that may indicate he or she’s going after drugs or going into anorexia or having other mental health issues, and would actually require these platforms to work with and have an interface with the Federal Trade Commission that actually has the ability to monitor that. So far they’ve not done because there was a get out of jail free card called Section 230 that says these platforms owe no obligation to their users or any responsibility for the content. That might have been a good law in the 1990s; it is a huge burden on parents today. And I think the worm is turning. We saw just I believe this week a court case that said that Meta, which is mostly think about as Facebook, and YouTube, they’re actually going to be held liable for some of the damage they’re doing to parents, to kids and their parents. So parents have a really tough job navigating any guard rails on social media and Congress totally, you know, was absent. I had lots of bipartisan legislation as long as 10 years ago on this, we could never get any traction. And…as challenging as social media platforms are, they are going to be tiny compared to the power of some of our artificial intelligence platforms. AI, I’m still optimistic about long term, but short term we’ve got to put constraints on data centers so they don’t pass on costs. We’ve got to make sure the AI community actually helps deal with the job dislocation that I think will be enormous over these next two to three years. I think we’re going to see a record number of college graduates coming out graduating in May of this year without jobs. And I can go into huge detail on that. But I do think Sammy’s Law is a good step on  social media. I think the court cases are a good step, but I do think boy oh boy, because a lot of the social media companies are now the AI companies, they are so huge. They owe an obligation to bring about this technology with some guard rails to pay their fair share and honestly help us figure out through this short-term job dislocation. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure they step up and pay their fair share.”
• “And I would add quickly, you know, this is a debate that’s going on in our legislature right now. And if they are able to secure a revenue stream, since we are the data center capital of the world, what happens in Virginia will be followed by other states. So again, my appeal to the AI tech guys is sit down at the table with us, pay your fair share, help us figure out this transition, make sure data centers are not robbing people unfairly of their power or water. We got to get it done.”
• “Unfortunately, the Senate Majority Leader, Senator Thune, who is a very decent guy, basically asked us to stand down. But this [situation at the airports and with TSA] this can’t go on.  This cannot go on. I mean, the only thing that would be more terrifying than the long lines is to see if, you know, god forbid there was a some kind of incident at an airport where you’ve got lines of people outside of the security perimeter. You know, we are entering into something that is not only a huge inconvenience, not only a hit on the economy in terms of air travel that’s already more expensive because of the Iran war, but also we’re getting into the period where there could be security risks. And I almost feel like the idea that the president decided to deploy ICE to our airports, it’s almost like a thumb in the eye of those of us who want to see meaningful reforms since they are not – don’t take my word, literally take the words of TSA agents that it’s kind of scaring them and putting them on edge.   The president’s got to meet us halfway, or even 40% of the way. We got to get this done.”
• “Listen, I think data centers need to pay their way. Shouldn’t be helping raise electric rates. They need to have their own energy generation source that’s not passed on to consumers. I think that they need to make sure that they’re not overusing water, need to make sure that they their backup generators are not adding to pollution in the region.  And I think they need to actually as an AI industry contribute more to the great worker dislocation that’s coming.   You know, yesterday I used I think inappropriate words when I called out a proposal by Congresswoman AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders about putting a one-year moratorum on data centers. I didn’t agree with the idea, but I think I probably overspoke. But you know, I understand the rationale behind AOC and Sanders’s proposition. I’m just not sure a one-year moratorum which would only affect data centers that are three or four years out. There’s already enough permitted and in the queue that’s going to dramatically increase the supply and we already see with the existing data centers a entity like Anthropics Claude program that has hit the software industry… I literally had one of the top venture capitalists in the country saying he’s preparing to write down to zero the value on all his software investments because the idea of hundreds or thousands of people working on software when one or two with an AI tool could be better. That is going to rock the job market. And so I think not only we need to make sure the data centers pay their own freight and are properly screened and don’t overuse water and need to be, you know, let’s face it, if we close them down in Virginia, they’ll simply go to another state and there are still counties that would get a lot of revenue. But I think the AI industry writ large needs to chip in more on what I think will be the – and I feel so much stronger on this than I did even in December – what will be the most dramatic job dislocation for entry level jobs particularly of people coming out of college that we’ve ever seen. And AI already and data centers already are terribly unpopular.  AI was recent poll was viewed as less popular than ICE the enforcement agency. And I don’t want us to you…lose the AI struggle with China; and two there’s going to be a lot of innovation.  There could be just incredible things particularly around medicine that could come out of AI and increased productivity. But this short-term transition is going to be tough and we really need the industry to step up….I’m open to all ideas. I respectfully disagree with the the one-year moratorum, but I did use over-the-top language. You know, I get why they suggested it. I’m more interested in how we can make sure that this new emerging industry where there is more capital than anything I’ve ever seen come to building these data centers and these models that they got to pay their fair share.”