Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says His Concerns About a “Corrupted Election” in 2026 Goes Up “Five-Fold with Bill Pulte” as DNI

See below for video and highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability.

• “Today’s going to be probably a pretty long day in in the Senate. We have one of these infamous voteramas that people all over the state will say, ‘well, what in the heck is that?’ And having been here a number of years, I know what it is, but it’s not always that meaningful.”
• “Earlier this week, the president took an action that even surprised me. I felt this administration has done so many inappropriate things. But this week when President Trump decided to select Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence, he even shocked me. Mr. Pulte has no national security experience. Not even sure he has a security clearance. And the irony of that is that when the law was written after 9/11 to create the position of director of national intelligence, it was created so that it would be coordination between the 18 intelligence agencies. And the law is very clear. You have to have national security experience. Mr. Pulte completely violates that letter of the law and spirit of the law. And what we do know about Mr. Pulte is he’s been branded as Donald Trump’s most vicious attack dog. he is willing to do *anything* that the president wants, including weaponizing confidential information. He’s been able to take a rather benign position as director of Fanny and Freddy, the housing agencies, and Mr. Pulte does have experience in that area, and literally use confidential secret information and leak it into criminal complaints against people like Tish James, the New York Attorney General, Lisa Cook, the member of the Federal Reserve Board, Adam Schiff, my colleague from California. So if he could actually take that kind of confidential information, think for a moment if he has literally the keys to our 18 intelligence agencies and all the information he could get a hold of, misuse, weaponize. It’s jaw-dropping. And I’ve seen rarely as much universal pushback from anyone in the intelligence community and frankly, even finally some of my Republican friends to say this guy is not the right guy and I’m going to continue to push back on him.”
• “We are coming at a time when we also have to renew what’s called FISA section It is really one of the most important tools the intelligence community has, literally on a weekly basis stops violence in in America…helps us arrest bad guys around the country. It is an ability to for us to listen in to two foreign adversaries talking to each other outside the United States. And the idea that we’re going to somehow be able to renew that, I think it’s terribly important, but renewing that with this kind of insulting pick to the intelligence community. And the irony, again, not irony, but the absurdity of this is Donald Trump thinks this guy is so good that he can still continue to be head of the mortgage industry and mortgage regulators and director of national intelligence. Two jobs at the same time. It’s an incredibly bad choice. It’s an incredibly bad judgment. And Bill Pulte should not be the director of national intelligence.”
• “The second issue I want to touch on is reconciliation. Now, that’s the voterama thing. This is where if you get a chance to deal with the budget and you only have to pass with 51 votes, part of the price of that is you have to go through a day where any senator can put up any number of amendments. The basic reason the president’s trying to add this $72 billion is to go to ICE. By the way, ICE and CBP, the Customs Border Patrol were funded $140, $150 billion in the big ugly bill. The idea that we would put $72 billion more into ICE when we haven’t seen any reforms, when we’ve seen what happened in Minneapolis, we’ve seen more recently what happened up in New Jersey…I strongly object to that. This is particularly at the time, remember this is these are your taxpayer dollars when Virginians are feeling the cost of rising cost of energy, rising cost of gas, groceries, you name it. and this is the president’s priority. Completely misaligned and I will obviously oppose it. Although in some of the amendments, we will be able and I’ll be anxious to see whether my Republican friends do, to actually eliminate the $1.8 billion slush fund that even the Republicans said was too much. Now, I don’t trust this White House that say they’re not going to bring it back. Even President Trump hedged on that yesterday. So, I’m going to ask, we’re going to ask all our Republican friends, if you don’t think it should be there, let’s end it and end it for good. Because my fear is not only will the president use this as a slush fund to pay off those marauders, rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, but I think he could pay those and other groups like the Proud Boys to actually interfere in our elections. So, we’ll challenge our Republican friends to put their money where their mouth is on getting rid of this slush fund.”
• “Finally, the issue a little bit closer to home, data centers. I mean, I hear an earful on the question of data centers every time I’m out, particularly Northern Virginia, but also increasingly I saw this week, for example, Hanover County turned down a major data data center. And the issue is this. We we’re not going to stop artificial intelligence. We have to put guard rails on it. But I also think we need guardrails on data centers. So, I’ve joined with my friend Chris Van Hollen on his bill called Power to the People, which would require new data centers to demonstrate and prove that they are not taking power in a way from the grid that would drive up energy costs for consumers in the neighborhood. I think it’s a good first step. I frankly think we need a more comprehensive data center legislation which I’ll be proposing shortly that deals not only with making sure consumers are not hit with increased electric bills, making sure that these data centers don’t abuse water rights. I think there needs to be appropriate setback guarantees from a road or from housing. And I think we need to also look at the backup power. Some data centers say, ‘well, we’ve got clean power,’ but then if you’re burning diesel running generators, health hazard pollution risk. So, we need a comprehensive approach. And I think not just around data centers. be coming out as well about national security needs and individual consumer protections here, as well as the fact that we have to raise resources from the AI community to make sure that the job dislocation which I fear will be enormous over the next couple years, that these folks can benefit from the upside of AI and that’s going to need need a major retraining program. So we’re starting with data centers, putting a marker down with Chris Van Hollen’s bill. I’ll come out with a little more comprehensive. But this is at least in kind of central and northern Virginia probably the issue I hear about the most um from voters outside of rising gas prices.”
• “…the idea that I can convince a bunch of Democrats who were leery about extending this under Donald Trump to start with with now someone who is a known leaker of information, confidential information, whose simp pure qualification is being a Trump attack dog, makes it virtually impossible. Now, we’ll see what happens. I think reasonable members of the administration I’ve talked to realize what a problem this is. But realizing it and doing something about it are two different things. I’d also say that I very much believe and the remarkable thing about this if [Pulte]’s allowed to stay even as a temporary he gets about six months. Six months puts him through the election. I’ve been as you’ve heard from me on a regular basis concerned about the security of our elections this year. That concern goes up many fold if Bill Pulte is allowed to stay in this job, because we know he will do whatever the president asked, and the president has been very clear that he thinks that Republicans ought to control the elections, count the votes. The idea that a director of national intelligence, I had this concern with the prior DNI Tulsi Gabbard, but it is five-fold with Bill Pulte, to take a piece of intelligence true or not and use that as a reason to put ICE troops or federal troops at elections or shut down polling stations or grab voting machines. If we have a corrupted election in 2026, I don’t know how we ever come back.”
• “…the idea that the Donald Trump’s personal lawyer who’s now been promoted to, you know, acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, who defended until he didn’t, the Trump slush fund. I’d like to give everybody a fair shot, but I don’t think I can’t see a world based upon Mr. Blanche’s performance to date that would ever get me to vote for him. I think again, the president is surrounding himself, his popularity is at an all-time low, he’s surrounding himself with yes men, surrounding himself with sycophants. And you know, I’ve talked about the danger that poses with the director of national intelligence. There is equal danger as well if the United States Attorney General falls into that category.“
• “I’m also, as a former governor, smart enough not to weigh in to a budget dispute between two Democratic controlled chambers. I will say this, I think we need to maintain our pro-business reputation in Virginia. And I think the deal with data centers, it’s frankly better to put it at a federal level because then that can apply to data centers all across the country. If states want to put other incentives or other barriers in that would be up to them. But doing this at the federal level I think is the right way to approach it. I also think as I said you know electricity is one of the issues, but we’ve got to deal with data center’s use of water, and there has been improvements there but we’ve got to be clear on that. We got to deal with setbacks so you can’t you know put these data centers and yards later them back up against the neighborhood. We’ve got to deal with frankly the generator power that is used when the main source of power is offline. So I think we need a more comprehensive approach…we got to have guardrails on on data centers. We’ve got to have guardrails if you think your kids are exposed in social media to potential harm, psychological or otherwise, the harm that could be posed by a chatbot is exponentially greater. We’ve got to deal with the national security risk. Mythos, the Anthropic project, literally could break into virtually all of our most classified systems. And Mythos will be passed by another product soon. So, we need a pre-testing regime before these devices are released, just from a national security standpoint. And then I still think the biggest issue is, and I hope I’m wrong, but I think and while AI may create a bunch of jobs downstream for the next 3 to 5 years, I think it’s going to eliminate a whole lot of jobs for people coming out of college. And we, these tech companies who are approaching, you know, trillion dollar valuations, they have to help pay for getting these folks back into the workforce, particularly after they’ve done everything right and graduated from college.”
• ” I think there was a very good study in in kind of around the Roanoke Valley about water usage. Actually, total water usage has gone down. That doesn’t have anything to do with data centers, but has to do with the, you know, different kind of flush toilets, shorter showers, the washing machines that maybe take a little bit longer but don’t use as much water. And I actually think many of the data centers are starting to  reuse the same water. So I don’t think it would be all that hard to create both restrictions on energy usage or have those usages increased consumer rates, water setbacks and backup power. And I think it should be done at the federal level. I mean, having a national standard here and kind of tying it to something like a Energy Star rating, you know, there’s a lot of things the federal government does like gives all these data centers accelerated depreciation. Maybe you could hold off on giving that for a few years if you don’t meet this criteria. The good thing about doing it at a federal level is that it levels the playing field. Then if states want to go beyond that or provide additional breaks, they can still do that. But at least make sure that consumers can can know that a data center promise is going to be met if it’s in federal law. And part of this as well deals I think we need to take a a really hard look at the non-disclosure agreements that many counties will sign to try to attract these data centers. And I know, we got a lot of land in Southwest Virginia, and the revenue that comes from these data centers is very attractive. So, I’m not against a community choosing that, but there ought to be a base level set by the feds that says if that data center, if you choose to put it in your community, you’re not going to pay higher electric bills, you’re not going to misuse water, you got setbacks, and you got backup power that’s clean.”
• “The president calls anything that doesn’t suit his needs meaningless. He ignores court orders. I mean, Congress needs to reassert its article one powers,  the power to declare war. And this war of choice which we’re approaching I think day 85 or something, has driven up gas prices, has not gotten rid of the Iranian leadership, they’re even worse now, Strait of Hormuz is still closed, Iran’s still attacking our allies and our bases in the region. It’s a disaster And the American people know it. And the idea that this guy is going to continue it. I remember when the USS Ford, which I visited with their families, who were on the longest deployment since the Vietnam War, paid a real toll on on those families and sailors. You know, the peak of the war where Trump was saying, well, I’m going to decide in my gut when to end this. That’s again disrespectful to the men and women who protect our country. So, I think we’ll have a chance to vote on this again in the Senate. My good friend Tim Kaine has been our leader on this, and I’m going to continue to vote to restrain the president’s misuse of taking our nation into war, a war of choice without some level of congressional approval.”
• “… every report I see says that, you know, all of the energy reserves all around the world are being basically depleted to nothing. So I think you’re going to see even more expensive oil, more expensive gasoline coming out. You know, there was something that said I think the cost of the war just to date from last week are about $760 per family in America. So, if we don’t get it on when we revote, it may take another week or two, but I can tell you this, this war is not going to get any better because when you start a war of choice and you don’t have a plan, this kind of thing comes back and bites you. And the president at some point will declare victory and I’m happy for him to declare victory tomorrow, but no objective analysis will show that America or the region is safer because of this war of choice. And that will be a legacy that I think will haunt him the rest of his life.”
• “I generally think when it comes to land use, the federal government shouldn’t dictate that. I think the state or more importantly the locality should make those decisions. And I again point to a county that’s rapidly suburbanizing but still pretty rural, Hanover County, very very Republican. And they voted, I think the board of supervisors voted unanimously, to turn down a massive 270-acre data center. So I think that those decisions should still be left to the communities, but I do think if a community decides to go ahead, and one of the reasons I don’t I think we ought to get rid of these non-disclosure agreements because many times the local government will sign those and you don’t know how much water or power is going to be used. But if we had this at least minimum federal standard around power, water, setbacks and backup power, that could give assurance of communities even if the board of supervisors takes the data center, that there’s some minimum floor of guarantees of how they will be built and operated.”