See below for video and highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s appearance this morning on “Face the Nation.”
- In this clip, Sen. Warner says “we have only got preliminary assessments” regarding the destruction of the Iranian elementary school, “and I want a thorough investigation, but what I don’t want to do is jump to the conclusion – whether it was Centcom or whether it was a Defense Intelligence Agency – that’s what thorough investigations are supposed to be for.”
- Warner continues: “Clearly, it was an American strike. Again, I feel a little disappointed that the president tried to deny that at first or say it was even the Iranians. This is where, you know, what we’ve got — the words of the president of the United States are terribly important in moments like this. And unfortunately President Trump has — uses loose language all the time, didn’t ever come to the American people on this war of choice and say what our goals are, and we still don’t know other than the four goals he outlined, I’m not sure we’re going to accomplish…this is having a huge economic effect in Virginia…This is why we want the investigation. This school, though, was absolutely adjacent to an Iranian military base. That does not excuse what happened. But that’s why before I cast blame on – whether it was the military or DIA – I want to get the facts. I think we’d all do a better job…from facts rather than suppositions.”
- In this clip, regarding the terrorist attack at ODU, Sen. Warner says “Unfortunately under this FBI, Director Kash Patel…has fired many of the top counterterrorism folks, counterespionage folks, and he has taken — and I reported this many times — close to a third of our FBI officers off doing counterterrorism or doing sex crimes and put them on immigration enforcement. I knew this was going to come back and bite us, and I believe while there may not be a direct relationship here, we know in all of the offices they have taken these fbi agents off their critical cases and put them on immigration enforcement, I think that was a mistake.”
- Sen. Warner continues: “I want to find out how this guy was able to still be on the loose. And we’ve got to get an investigation. But we’ve got to get an FBI that is back focused on protecting the homeland and preventing, whether it be terrorists or espionage taking place…These are the things you have to plan for if you are planning on going to war on a war of choice. This is a war of choice.”
- Finally, in this clip, Sen. Warner says “there was no imminent threat to the United States” from Iran. “The decision to go to war in this case was a choice by President Trump...I’m not sure we have reached a successful conclusion on any of [the four main goals Trump had laid out]…And now we are in this circumstance where he’s going to decide, I guess when he ‘feels it in his bones’, I guess was the quote the president used…Is that the criteria when we have literally 13 service members killed and have a lot of those sailors on the Ford that are home port in Norfolk, Virginia, and waiting for him to feel right in the bones? That doesn’t seem to be the right criteria.”
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