Video: Sen. Mark Warner on Some of Trump’s $1.8B Slush Fund Going to 1/6/21 Rioters – “Is there no line that goes too far?”

See below for video and a highlights/transcript (bolding added by me for emphasis) from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability, held earlier today.

• “Where I want to start is on the…reconciliation bill. As you know, we went through a long fight  with the Trump administration over reforms to ICE  and Customs and Border Patrol.  We didn’t get the reforms – I think reforms that most Americans have supported, which would include, you know, adding body cameras…not having ICE agents masked, having to operate on  the same protocols that our police forces operate under. So even though ICE and CBP have got about $170 billion in the Big Ugly Bill from from last summer,  Mr. Trump, along with his allies, have said they need $72 billion more – $72 billion that they’re trying to pass through what’s called the reconciliation process, which at the end of the day means they can simply pass with  only 51 votes rather than 60. So we will go through either tonight or tomorrow, the infamous voterama, where the minority – in this case the Democrats – will have a chance to offer unlimited amendments. And I’ll be offering a number of amendments as as we try to litigate this.  In this bill, as  even though some of the Republicans are opposing it, is a billion dollars for President Trump’s vanity project his ballroom.  You’d think spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money could be better spent. It could be better spent, for example, trying to help out  motorists who’ve seen now with close to $5 a gallon gasoline. It’d be better spent if we ended the war in Iran, where we made progress yesterday through my dear friend Tim Kaine’s effort on the War Powers Act resolution. We finally got enough votes  to procedurally tee it up to vote one last time to get it sent it over the House. But I spent some  time as well looking at what a billion dollars – remember this is for the ballroom and the security around the ballroom, the ballroom that was supposed to be paid for entirely by private donations –  but a billion dollars if we spent it here in Virginia could pay for rent for a year for 46,000 Virginians. A billion dollars could pay literally for the health care costs of about a quarter of all the Virginians who lost their health care through Medicaid cuts. A billion dollars could pay for two-thirds of the cost  of those Virginians who lost their health care through the ACA tax credits – all things that have been cut. Or a billion dollars could literally pay for a couple of years of food for folks who’ve lost their SNAP benefits. So the idea – and we’re finally even seeing some Republicans revolt against this – that we’re taking a billion dollars of your  taxpayer money and spending on a ballroom when Americans are hurting as much as they are is outrageous. And the initial draft took out the billion dollars because it didn’t pass the procedural test. The Republicans are scrambling trying to figure out a way to stick it back in. But this is endemic of the approach that President Trump and his allies are taking to kind of a not caring about America’s economic issues – and the President said it himself – and instead focus on vanity projects, focus  on whether it’s ballrooms or arches or other personal issues, where  the Trump family enriched itself.”
• “…my background before I got in politics  was in mobile phones. I actually started  the company that became Nextel. So, I know a little bit about cell phones.  So, a year ago, Trump set up another Trump scam called Trump Mobile, headed up by a CEO named Patrick O’Brien.  And Mr. Trump literally solicited $100 deposits on this Trump mobile phone from about 500,000 Americans. Well, those Americans are wondering what ever happened to that money. And just recently, it’s been announced that they  are going to start sending out the phones. They promised these phones were made in America. They’re NOT made in America. They  come with parts from China. Anybody who knows the mobile phone business knows, unfortunately, that’s where most of the parts come. It will be assembled in America. There’s no  idea what the rate plan will actually be. There’s no idea what kind of quality this knockoff phone will  have. But this is one more example of the Trump family enriching themselves at the cost of Americans. So I have written a letter to this Mr. O’Brien to try to get answers. As somebody who grew up in the wireless business, I know this field and American consumers need to be warned about this scam. And I think it’s going to clearly enriching the Trump family, is going to do nothing to provide better, cheaper  American-made wireless service.”
• “And…the other outrageous effort by Mr. Trump to enrich himself  or his allies. You may recall that  President Donald Trump brought a $10 billion lawsuit against his own  IRS.  Filed this suit, then went into negotiations with his Justice Department and settled. So on the basis of I think most of us would agree was a a suit that had no merit, he has now received a payout of $1.776 billion of taxpayer money that can be used as a slush fund for him to pay off whoever he wants.  You know, I know he’s indicated probably the people who attacked the capital on January 6th. the invaders, the rioters. I was here on January 6th.  These folks were looking to destroy property. And frankly, if they’d gotten a hold of any elected official, Democrat or Republican, their life would have  been in jeopardy. The idea that Trump is going to take taxpayer money and pay them off for their criminal behavior?  Is there no line that goes too far? And if that wasn’t enough, buried in this agreement is a get-out-of-jail free card for Donald Trump and all his family and all his  affiliated  companies, that they can no longer be pursued for any tax violations, past or future.  You know, our country is based on the sense that everybody is equal under law.  Clearly, this is not an attribute that Donald Trump believes in or subscribes to. And just remember, as those payouts  go out, it comes from Virginia’s taxpayer dollars.”
• “Well, it is amazing that when you don’t have a political future, you suddenly find courage to do what  you’ve talked about doing privately for some time. This war in Iran is hugely unpopular. We’re I think day 82 or 83.   We’ve not accomplished any of the goals set out.  We have an energy crisis that’s reflected not only in high gas  prices, but it’s also reflected in higher fertilizer prices, higher costs for diesel fuel where most of the products are delivered to market in  trucks. Those costs have gone up dramatically. So it is the unpopularity of the war and it’s some  new courage found by the fact that you don’t have to answer to Donald Trump. The next step will be – and I want to again commend Tim Kaine, he’s really led this effort, this was the eighth vote we had, he’s been quietly chipping away – this is was a procedural vote. Now we actually have to allow it to the actual resolution to be voted on. Some  of these rules are a little arcane. and when we vote on that next, whether it’ll be this week or when we come back for Memorial Day…I would also point out that  because there was a majority reached in the House on their own version of the War Powers Act, you will probably  see a House vote this week that very well may pass as well. So finally, the Congress is starting to use some of its constitutionally guaranteed powers.  Remember, Congress is supposed to declare war, not simply the president acting on his own. And I sure as heck  hope that more Republicans will find their courage to do what they’ve all said to me privately, gosh, this war stinks. How are we getting out of this? And end of the day is we may end up the best of the outcomes will us ending up back with an uneasy truce with Iran and the equivalent of what the we had under President Obama, the so-called JCPOA, where we had access to some of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and were able to monitor it. Of course, that agreement, which now looks pretty damn  good  President Trump tore up in his first term. So the irony will be if that becomes the new status quo, will it cost billions and billions of to our military, 14 American soldiers killed and…energy prices at record highs that will not come down anytime in the short term.”
• “Listen, we need relief [from high gasoline prices]. The best way to get relief  is, frankly, to end the war.  I’d  even be willing to put an excess profit tax on some of the oil companies who are making record profits during this war.  The Republicans control the legislative process. They have decided not to raise the issue of  pausing the gas tax at the federal level.  In terms of pausing at the state level,  I’m no longer governor, so I’m going to leave that to the governor and the General Assembly. I will say this, the challenge around pauses on the gas tax is it’s easy to  pause, it’s harder to unpause. And we all know…out in southwest Virginia, we’ve still  got a lot of needed improvements on I-81, on 460,  on trying to make sure we’ve got north south routes down on to Martinsville. So, I think any particularly state legislature would  probably think for a while because the trigger becomes once you pause, do you ever unpause it? And if you don’t  have those revenues, an already fairly bankrupt transportation fund would be further in the red.”
• “Well, first of all, I’ve not seen the governor’s executive order, but if it does put out guidelines, I would support that.  Remember, our election workers do this out of a sense of civic duty.  The idea that they could be threatened or harassed, or the idea that you could have federal agents and…whether it be the military or what would even scare me more is ICE. Remember, you’ve got many of these ICE agents that have been hired are folks that couldn’t get hired by  an FBI or a police department.  We need to have free-and-fair elections and I am extraordinarily concerned that this president or people in his administration could use a false piece of intelligence. And as the vice chair of the intelligence committee, I’m following this closely. And that false piece of intelligence be used as an excuse to send troops or ICE to the polls. And if we have a corrupted, federally interfered-with election anywhere in our country, then I don’t know how we ever return to the norm of free-and-fair elections. This should not be a partisan issue. Everyone who who believes that every vote should be counted should stand up. But  I believe the threat is real and I’m looking forward to seeing what the governor says. And again, you don’t have to take my word for it. The president of the United States has said, you know, he thinks Republicans ought to  take over particularly the counting in about 15 locations across the country. The president’s own words.  We’ve seen his director of national intelligence go down and confiscate voting machines in Georgia, totally against the law, totally against  her responsibilities as director of national intelligence where she spoke to focus on  foreign threats, not be involved in domestic criminal activities. So, I’m looking forward to what the governor says and I hope it’s going to be a strong executive order. Now my fear again would be, we have to also preclude this at the federal level, because the idea that the president or his allies would try to federalize elections over a state’s governors. This is 2026 in America. We’re not in Russia or China where they don’t have free elections. Again I hope any efforts to interfere in  the election will be greeted with broad bipartisan pushback.”
• “Well, again, we’re going to see this year, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence. And this again Junior Ranger book, that’s passed out mostly to children, we’re going to see a big upsurge in tourism.  And the idea that this administration that’s so against American diversity is trying to whitewash, literally and figuratively, our history and Virginia’s history, is outrageous. I mean, any nation that forgets its history is going to repeat itself. I fear at times with the undermining of the Voting Rights Act, we appear to be doing that. And I don’t think there is any lack of  factual basis that General Lee who took an oath to protect the constitution of the United States, then when Virginia left the union he went against that oath. And I don’t think you’ll find many historians that didn’t say the one of the major causes of the Civil War was slavery. That’s a factual statement. And to take that out and are we going to suddenly say there was never slavery in America? Are we going to say there was never a period of Jim Crow? Are we  going to say in Virginia we never went through massive resistance?  It’s disrespectful to our history. It’s disrespectful particularly to African-Americans who were the brunt of a lot of that bias and prejudice.  So I absolutely think we cannot allow the altering or whitewashing of our  history.  We have to tell the good, the bad, the ugly. Because that’s at the end of the day, even our founders knew this, and in order to form a more perfect union, we are not a perfect union yet but we are on that path. If we don’t  continue on that path by simply ignoring the parts of our history that we don’t like, then we are going against the very tenets of what the founding fathers established 250 years ago when they declared independence from the from Britain.” 

WARNER & KAINE STATEMENT ON BUDGET COMMITTEE ADVANCING PARTISAN GOP MEGABILL

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine (both D-VA), members of the Senate Budget Committee, released the following statement after Senate Republicans voted to advance partisan budget legislation, which Warner and Kaine both opposed, that abandons the regular-order funding process and provides billions of dollars for President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda:

“We’ve all seen the effects of the Trump-Vance immigration agenda: Renée Good and Alex Pretti shot and killed in broad daylight by federal agents, families rounded up, and children separated from their parents. Americans want to feel safe and want lower costs—but instead of focusing on that, Republicans have decided to approve billions of dollars in new DHS funding through a partisan process, the same one they used last year to give ICE and Border Patrol $140 billion with no safeguards and to cut taxes for the wealthy. Now they are using it again to enlarge the ICE and Border Patrol slush fund by another $70 billion.

“As families across the country are struggling with rising costs for groceries, housing, health care, and energy, Senate Republicans are also attempting to add another billion in taxpayer dollars to pay for President Trump’s ballroom—once again showing Americans exactly where their priorities lie. We call on our colleagues to vote against this bill when it comes to the floor.”

Video of Kaine slamming the legislation in a Budget Committee hearing today is available here.