Video: Sen. Mark Warner Rips “disaster”of Trump’s Iran MoU, the “irony of signing it at Versailles”

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

• “The president, I guess, signed a a memorandum of understanding with the Iranians yesterday in Paris. Although the irony of signing it at Versailles, which has been the place of many awful treaties on a historic basis, awful to America, awful in terms of the end of World War I in terms of causing  other challenges with World War II. I mean it just you couldn’t make a more historic blunder.  So where are we days after this war of choice?  One thing we absolutely know is that America is not better off. Our people’s not better off. Our economy is not better off. Iran took on both the United States and Israel and at least played them to a tie. And we will be paying the price for this, unfortunately, I think for a long time to come.”
• “So what’s in the memorandum? Well, it says that Iran won’t develop a nuclear weapon. That has been the Iranian government’s position for the last 15 to 20 years. There is nothing new there. The agreement mentions nothing about Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. One of the things Trump said at the outset, we got to get rid of their ballistic missile capabilities. Well, we now know they’ve got about 60% of their missiles left, 50% of their launchers, and we have actually used up so many of our missile interceptors, we and Israel, that Iran could continue to dribble these missiles out and make our bases vulnerable. We’ve not taken away that capacity. And then this agreement doesn’t even mention missiles. It mentions the Strait of Hormuz. Well, the Strait of Hormuz was open before  the war took place, and this agreement says Iran won’t mess for maybe 60 days. But what then? We went into this war as well. Trump said we got to stop the Iranian proxies in the region. Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen. This agreement doesn’t even mention the proxies. What it does do though is it immediately lifts sanctions on some of the Iranian oil, which means that tens of billions of dollars will go to the Iranian regime. The regime, by the way, which is more radical than the regime before the war. We killed the supreme leader, but we’ve got his son, and his son, since we killed this his dad, his wife, and his kid, this guy is more radical. And the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has more control than they had before the war. That is not good. And on the proxies, there is a effort here that Iran is going to get $300 billion. $300 billion. How much of that will end up in the hands of the Houthis or some of the  Iranian-backed militia groups who are in Iraq and elsewhere? We still have bases. How many Americans will be attacked because of this flow of resources to the Iranian regime? And then on the issue that was the driving force, you know, we got to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon. Well, they’re going to talk about that for 60 days. And if anyone thinks that the Iranians are going to make a better deal with Donald Trump than they made with Barack Obama with a challenging deal called the JCPOA 15 years, 12 years ago,  I hope I’m wrong, but at least when we had the Obama deal, we had eyes on their nuclear capabilities. And it was not just us. It was us, the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese who were on the non-Iranian side. Now, Russia and China are backers of Iran. So, again, I’ve always been amazed at Donald Trump’s ability to sell stuff, but except for the most sycophantic toadies, this will go down as a I believe a disaster. And again, not my words, some of my Republican Senate friends. And the irony as well and I think about you know we’ve got a large Iranian diaspora particularly in northern Virginia and those communities so wanted to see a regime change and literally the Iranian people rose up in January and more than 30,000 were brutally murdered by the regime. One of the things this deal also does is says the United States is not going to mess with Iran going forward. So the idea that the president said in January, we’re going to rise up people of Iran, we’ll be there to help you. In this memorandum, he basically says, ‘America, hands off Iranian regime. Do whatever you want to your population.’ What does that make us look like around the rest of the world? What does that make us look like with our Gulf allies?”
• “We hope gas prices will come down, but that’s on oil-based gas. But natural gas, we’ve got a lot of the facilities in the region that are permanently damaged. Fertilizer costs for the growing season in Virginia are already up 40% because of this war of choice. So, it will be interesting to see how the public reacts. And the fact that the Trump administration leaked this to the press before they gave a version to Congress is again outrageous.”
• “On the second issue, again an area that was my direct responsibility around intelligence, I didn’t think that…President Trump could still surprise me. Well, close to two weeks ago, he suggested for the director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, someone who is a  third generation from a wealthy family that knows about mortgages. Bill Pulte is the head of our mortgage regulatory agencies and  and Fanny and Freddy. Bill Pulte has no national security experience and the law says to be director of national intelligence you got to have national security experience.  Bill Pulte’s one claim to fame is he was willing to take private information about mortgages and try to weaponize that against Trump’s enemies. Thank goodness the courts pushed back. But the idea of that kind of of irresponsible behavior would be now rewarded with having oversight on the  intelligence agencies that make up our intelligence community is a national security risk. And what the remarkable thing again just to finish out the story, it is that I think the president realized last week he’d made a mistake. So he put forward another individual, Jay Clayton, who had national security experience. I know Mr. Clayton. had tough questions for him. But  yesterday the president pulled Mr. Clayton’s nomination for we don’t know how long because the United States Senate was actually going to confirm him, because there have been such bipartisan pushback against Mr. Pulte. So Donald Trump is now playing with our national security as a political pawn. There is a key intelligence tool that we need called section of the FISA law that has expired. Donald Trump is saying he won’t even renew that until he also somehow gets the SAVE Act, which is a voter disenfranchisement bill that has been voted down repeatedly. So, I don’t think this president gives a damn about Americans’ national security. The only good news there is that even though technically the authority around FISA has expired, the communication companies are still cooperating with the government. So we do not have at least to date in the last five or six days a going dark problem in terms of using this tool.  But the fact that we were working on a bipartisan way to get this done, and then Trump throws this live hand grenade in it is beyond belief. And you know many of the issues up here we talk about Democrats versus Republicans. This is not a case. This is reasonable people in both parties know we’ve got to maintain the integrity of our intelligence. We know they got to maintain these intelligence tools. The reason we have even this problem is because Donald Trump has thrown this political hand grenade into this process and Americans are less safe because of it.”
• “On at least one cheery note, we are actually moving later today on a bill called Road to Housing. We’re about 5 1/2 to six million housing units short in America. And we know housing prices are going up dramatically all across Virginia. Matter of fact, the average age of a first-time home buyer is now 41.  That’s outrageous. This is a series of small bills packaged together in what’s called again the road to housing that will make it easier for localities to build new housing, try to decrease some of the undue regulations, give incentives for more housing, actually allow, for example, more what’s called modular housing. I know older people think modular housing is trailer parks. you know, there is a whole ability to  to build  construct most of the house offsite and then bring it in, you know, for smaller houses, cheaper houses. It’s not going to solve the whole housing crunch, but it is finally an example of a bipartisan willingness to take a a series of ideas that can jumpst start housing supply because we got plenty of housing demand. We need more supply and this legislation that I’ve got bills included in the road to housing package, I think is a step in the right direction and will hopefully spur more housing building all across Virginia, from rural to urban to suburban. So a little bit of good news there that I think we’ll get voted on again this afternoon.”
• “Unfortunately, I think Bill Pulte will probably show up for work on Monday and the only reason he’s showing up is because Donald Trump decided to slow down a confirmation of his own appointee. It’s mindboggling.  And again, there was so much bipartisan push back about Pulte. Now I think I imagine someone will file a lawsuit because Pulte does not have the minimum requirements of the law of national security background, but I am again so terrified of the damage that Mr. Pulte could do, either on purpose or just because he doesn’t understand that you got to keep classified secrets secret. And I am particularly concerned since we know that Donald Trump, we’ve talked about this in the past,we know Donald Trump still can’t acknowledge the fact that he lost in 2020 and has said repeatedly that, you know, he thinks the feds ought to take over voting in certain areas. He thinks the only way  that his team could lose this fall is if there’s cheating. So I am terrified that Bill Pulte could fabricate a piece of intelligence or take a piece of intelligence and use that as an excuse to try to interfere in our elections to call out troops, to call out ICE. And again, it’s not my words you have to worry about. It’s President Trump’s words himself about saying all of this is on the table. and even some of his his current DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin has not taken the possibility of sending ICE troops to the polls. So I am extraordinarily concerned about the damage Pulte could do to our national security. And we don’t even know when Clayton will get to appear again so that we can move again on a nomination that Donald Trump put forward. Can’t make this stuff up.”
• “…we need to pass beyond Sammy’s law comprehensive kids online safety. And the tech companies, while they say they want to protect kids, fight this legislation tooth and nail. And you know, I’m part of that legislation. It’s broadly bipartisan. I think we have over 70 sponsors, maybe over 90. And  we got to get that done. Number one. Number two, it’s as scary as social media is to our kids, I think artificial intelligence is scarier. We’ve already seen court cases brought by by families who’ve lost a a young person to suicide because they were encouraged into suicide by a chatbot. That is outrageous. And we need to pass legislation that actually addresses the ability of these chatbots to drive our kids into mental health or into crisis. We also have had promises repeatedly from the tech companies that they will not do what’s called non-consensual nudes. You know, you get a a picture of a 12-year-old’s face and then you put an adult body nude on that with these AI tools. That’s outrageous. and we get lip service from the tech companies, but we got to pass a law and hold them responsible and have them pay penalties because otherwise, as bad as social media has been for our kids, AI could be worse. And this whole approach that sometimes the administration has had of we don’t want to put any guard rails anywhere on AI will be a disaster. And I think they’re even starting to come around not only because of concerns about kids, but there was this new AI I won’t go down this whole path, but there was this new AI tool called Mythos that literally could break into every one of our classified systems, break into our banks, break into our potentially our water systems. And  we’ve got to have some level of mandatory testing before these new models are released because this could get beyond the ability for humans  to actually deal with some of the downsides. So extraordinarily important that we take a holistic look at AI from kids to national security to job loss.”
• “In terms of the state of our democracy, I worry about the potential for election interference. I worry about political partisans, frankly, on both sides that try to say that people of the other party are the enemy. I worry that Donald Trump is trying to rewrite American history and frankly in many ways erase the contributions of African-Americans, of Latinos, of women. We in Virginia have got a checkered history on human rights and justice. We were the cradle of the Confederacy and capital of the Confederacy and we were the state in Prince Edward County that shut down schools rather than integrate. You can’t whitewash those stories. And I believe you see even that the celebration of the 250th anniversary, at least that was going to take place in Washington was going to celebrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of our country still striving forward. Unfortunately, Donald Trump has turned this into a political rally for himself. Most of the performers are not going to participate in a partisan event on our nation’s birthday. So, I again just, you know, it’s challenging at times.”