Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says U.S.-Israel Relationship “Fractured”; They “have made a strategic error by putting all their eggs in the basket of Donald Trump”

See below for video and highlights of Sen. Mark Warner’s conversation this morning with Meidas Touch.

• On Bill Pulte (this is mostly the same stuff he’s been saying for the past several days, including almost word for word the same as in his weekly press availability on June 18: Pulte is completely unqualified for the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) – e.g., he has no national security experience, doesn’t even have a security clearance, etc. – his only “qualification” is total “toady” to Donald Trump, is willing to weaponize sensitive/private information, could threaten our intelligence relationships with other countries, etc.  So now, Pulte is going to be acting DNI, and “the damage he could do is incredible.” Also, Pulte could take a fabricated piece of intelligence (e.g., a supposed “terrorist threat”) to use as an excuse to send ICE or even troops to the polls, stop elections, cheat at the elections, etc.
• On the Middle East, including the Iran deal and the U.S.-Israeli relationship,  Sen. Warner said: “Well, I think [the US-Israeli relationship has] been fractured. I think…Prime Minister Netanyahu thought he had this incredibly close tie with Donald Trump and that he could convince him to do most things. And you know, the one thing that is the case – and I think virtually everybody has learned this – at the end of the day, Donald Trump cares about one thing and that’s Donald Trump. And you know, the fact that he is declaring victory after Iran, I’m glad he’s ended the conflict…we don’t need more soldiers killed…we were not going to bomb the Iranians into submission…as good a salesman as Donald Trump is, there is no way that [he] is going to convince anyone other than complete sycophants that America’s better off now than they were at the end of February, when he started his war of choice… I think we need to sometimes separate the people of Israel from the Israeli government, just as I think you know we asked the rest of the world to sometimes separate the American people from the current American government in terms of Donald Trump. And I think things like um you trying to presume the idea that Israel should stop the war in Lebanon if that actually happens, but I doubt it will. I think it also is has been a huge mistake within Israel to simply become, where Israel used to be a bipartisan issue where Israel and the Israeli government in particular has said all right we’re just going to side entirely with the Republicans, we’re going to side entirely with Donald Trump, we are not going to try to build a bipartisan sense of support for the right of Israel to exist. And I think that strategy, as we see this even further deterioration between Netanyahu and Trump, is is not good long-term for Israel. And I think this was a conscious political decision that the prime minister made and I think it is coming back to bite him….I’ve been a longtime supporter of Israel, but I got to the breaking point on the last set of resolutions and voted for one of them to make sure that the Israel, the settlers were not continuing to do I think outrageous things on the West Bank and to use for example bulldozers in southern Lebanon to destroy Lebanese homes. I think you will see more of that coming forward. And I do think that that as someone who still very much believes Israel’s right to defend itself, they have made a strategic error by putting all their eggs in the basket of Donald Trump. And we will see how this continues to play out.”
• Finally, on data centers, Sen. Warner also repeated much of what he’s said previously, including the following: “I don’t think a moratorium is going to put the AI genie back in the bottle. We are going to be grappling with AI for the future. We’ve already seen for example…one of the AI companies, Anthropic, actually shared with our government a new model called Mythos that could break into all of our classified networks. We are entering into a realm of potentially even existential issues. My bill, though, was to say, all right if you were going there ought to be a federal standard that if you’re going to build a data center one you got to get local approval, two you can’t lie to the locality you have to disclose what the terms are, and the data center shouldn’t pass on any cost of electricity water backup power, it needs to be set back from communities. And…what I would do is take away the data center and the tech company’s ability to claim accelerated depreciation on their taxes if they don’t meet these standards. So you need both a requirement and you need a stick, and I think that is a good combination. There is a linkage between the use of tax benefits to build these if you’re taking those away if you don’t meet certain criteria….There’s also been efforts to say well let’s charge a token tax, because how AI measures their usage is tokens or how much electricity they’re using. The challenge with those approaches though is, you know what we don’t want to do since AI is not going to go back in the in the bottle is to push American entities to using Chinese models that are open- source and cheaper because many of those Chinese models I think pose huge national security risk. This is an area that is extraordinarily complicated. The low-hanging fruit though is let’s make sure that the data centers pay their fair share and the communities get to make that decision whether they want them or not. There are still parts of Virginia for example that want these data centers but they sure as heck ought to know what they’re getting into before they make those commitments… I think leading on putting responsible restrictions on data centers make an enormous amount of sense. But even if you had a national moratorium on data centers, the data centers will pop up across the border in Mexico or across the border in Canada…we cannot we have unfortunately and this is just I would argue with anybody on this factually based, the models are moving ahead so quickly and this will not be put back in the bottle, and there ought to be responsible sets of legislation around and the sure as heck the tech companies ought to be paying more and we got to make sure that there is a transition for workers that are displaced. That’s where I’m going to spend my time….There’s got to be testing. We are talking about the possibility of some of these models having making things so vulnerable that you could, you know, I don’t want to sound alarmist, but you could have planes fall out of the sky. You got to have financial systems shut down. There are they we are approaching points where we’ve got to have guardrails. And you know, we failed miserably on this with social media. I had bipartisan legislation for years. We can’t fail again on AI, without putting some guardrails in place.”