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Lots of interesting stuff on Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability; see below for video and a few highlights…
- “…the absolutely amazing abuse once again by the Trump team of President Trump pre-selling early reviews of his Trump social media posts. Now, when it was first announced, I thought maybe it was a a joke that Trump was going to give to those individuals or entities that would pay $100,000 a month an early glimpse at his Truth Social post. Why is that important? Well, we’ve seen repeatedly that Donald Trump uses his Truth Social posts to move the market, to make news. Oftenimes it seems like a lot of times on Sunday evenings, there’s a post about a new ceasefire with Iran which will help bump up the stock market in the morning. That information if it’s gotten to somebody and they can trade on it is a complete abuse of the system. So what have I done? Well, first I wrote all of the financial services trade organizations, the bankers, the high-frequency traders, the securities individuals saying, you know, please encourage your members to have some decency and not buy into this scam. That probably didn’t do enough, because it appears that a few firms have have bought into this scam. So now I have put forward a law that would prohibit the sale of information of information that comes from a government-based website in any fashion where it would be monetized ahead of the rest of the market. The law would also make it illegal to trade on that early information. I hope the law will get some legs or the bill will get some legs because this kind of blatant gross misuse to simply line Donald Trump and his family’s pockets, trading on what in all definition sure as heck looks like insider information, is again it’s jaw-droppingly corrupt. The fact that there’s not been more across-the-board push back from the financial services sector has been an embarrassment. My hope is by making this illegal this type of activity we can again at the end of the day is we want to make sure that no individual investor is at a disadvantage because somebody could pay off the Trump family a 100red grand and get access to information that moves the market. This is what how people lose faith in the market, how they lose faith in our system. And again, I hope and pray that more people will will step up on on this critical topic.”
- “One…thing, which is critically important, and that’s election monitoring. You know, we just did our primaries on Tuesday in Virginia and the Justice Department sent out election monitors, particularly in in communities like Fairfax and Prince William, which was a little unusual. Historically, election monitors have been sent into communities where there’s been, on a historical basis, large Black populations and efforts to kind of make sure that minority populations are not discriminated against in voting. This effort, and we’re waiting to get a full report, but some of the off-hand comments that I got reported was that you know election officials were being harassed. They were being asked to fill out long-term for forms while they were still trying to keep their polling station open. I even heard a report that I want to make sure is validated that election workers were being harassed if they spoke Spanish to any of the voters coming in. You know, the whole purpose of election monitoring is to maintain safety, security, and the fact that our elections ought to be free and fair and accurately counted. I continue to worry that this administration led by the president is going to try to interfere in our election. So I think we spent a lot of time a few weeks ago when he made that kind of speech that completely failed, didn’t even didn’t even impress his own his own followers where he made rash comments. one remembered attacking China and then four days later he was basically saying China’s okay now. So, I am concerned if officials from the DOJ are not out to protect our vote, but to squash or try to intimidate our vote. What the forces who want to stop free and fair elections is, they want to convince you your vote doesn’t matter. And regardless of who you support or which party you support, um, we cannot have suppression of the vote. So, I hope everyone will do their darnest this year to get out and vote in this year’s elections. We start early vote literally in about 40 days in in the middle of September. And you know to those who want to squash our right to vote, I say you know let’s vote in record numbers to make it clear that there’ll be no ability because the margins will be so great that there’ll be no ability for this administration to to interfere or corrupt the process that needs to be literally sacred.”
- [On the proposed Dominion-NextEra merger], I share the governor’s concerns. We’re taking a Virginia entity that we all know and have worked with for years, Dominion, and having this merger with the Florida Enterprise that may not have quite the same kind of good record that Dominion has. So getting more facts is important. I have not weighed in on on the timeline yet. but I again I would say I generally support what the governor is trying to do to make sure that all Virginians you know can get access in most transparent way possible of the good, the bad and where the problems may lie. I do understand as well you know some of the business reasons that Dominion while a very large company is not one of the top four or five biggest utility companies. So they need a bigger balance sheet if they’re going to move into areas where I hope they will things like small modular nukes SMRs or or see if we can expand some of the renewable energy portfolio that they have. So I’m going to keep a close eye on this. I’m going to follow what the the governor finds and and I’m going to reserve my final comment until I get a few more facts. But I get the business case, but I also get the the the downside case of we don’t want folks in Florida you know losing that connection with our Virginia customers of which we all are.”
- “Todd Blanche, whose only claim to fame is he was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, doesn’t seem to me to be a valid consideration to be the attorney general of the United States. Matter of fact, it’s evident that from his testimony that he still views himself more as Trump’s personal lawyer than the top law enforcement official for our country. That scares the dickens out of me. On the question of what language he gave to some of my Republican colleagues, you know, I don’t claim to be a legal expert, but many other senators think that the promise on getting rid of the $1.8 billion slush fund paid for by taxpayer money, that he didn’t give an absolute ban on that. again, I’ll let the legal scholars determine that. but you what I don’t want to see and this is what my fear is you we have already seen in prior director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard when she intervened on domestic law enforcement activities. We’ve seen Kash Patel I believe abuse the office of the FBI. I think we’ve seen Pam Bondi be a pretty darn incompetent attorney general. Todd Blanche brings nothing but this absolute loyalty to Trump. And that in itself in my mind is is disqualifying when it becomes clear that even if the law says otherwise his first and only major goal seems to be to please the president. That’s not what the job of the US of the attorney general is. The job of the attorney general is to faithfully implement in a fair and balanced way the laws of our land. I don’t think he’s qualified.”
- [“Senator, our next question is from Jaida with ABC13. Hi, Senator. I just wanted to ask if any federal official, Republican or Democrat, misled Congress under oath, do
you believe that person should be held accountable? And does that standard apply equally to Dr. Fauci?”] “Well…do you have any specific example of a witness lying under oath? What what proof do you have? And who are you accusing?” [“Not accusing anyone. Senator, let me reword. Do you believe that anyone should be held accountable under oath if…do you believe Dr. Fauci should?”] “Ma’am, all I can tell you is I mean…here’s what I would say, ma’am. You know, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights gives an American ability to claim the Fifth and not self-inccriminate themselves. That by law is a constitutional right. So, I don’t know if you’re making the assumption that by claiming your Fifth Amendment constitutional right, you’ve broken the law. I think you don’t don’t understand the law or don’t understand that that by its own nature is not an admission of anything. It is just saying you take that constitutional right and you exercise it. I think we get into a fairly scary place if people using their constitutional rights is somehow viewed as in and of itself a violation. That is not the way the constitution was written. You know, whether it is a contempt of Congress, which is a different total charge. I’m not an expert. But again…I hope you would realize that you your right to free speech, your right to religion, your right to have the Fifth Amendment right not to self-inccriminate, those are rights granted by our constitution. It makes our country different. And I just hope people would not be bought into some kind of which would be really scary notion that if you choose to worship a simple way or if you choose to speak a certain line or if you choose to protect yourself by the Fifth Amendment that you are breaking the law because you’re not.” [NOTE: this reporter’s bio indicates that she attended Liberty “University” – the word “University” in air quotes, because obviously this is not a serious institution of higher learning…] - “I want to get a a good description of the behavior of these election monitors around Virginia. Was it appropriate behavior? Or was it an effort to try to intimidate voters into not voting? I don’t have that information yet. I want to get a fulsome report. Two, I still fear that this president or people in his administration are going to try to intervene. The president’s disastrous speech notwithstanding, where he brought up and tried to declassify information that frankly had no bearing on on the issues at hand or was it was so clumsily put together that you know legitimate networks didn’t carry it as news. It was just a bunch of falsehoods. But as we’ve seen, Donald Trump is still obsessed about losing in 2020. He wants to keep relitigating that and if we have free and fair elections in ’26, I believe he and his policies will be soundly rejected. So I don’t think we’re out of the woods at all. It’s why both on the hands of there are a number of voting right groups and others who are meeting on a regular basis to push back when his administration violates the law with lawsuits. And it is going to continue to require me and others to speak up if we see a fake piece of intelligence brought up or or something that’s not been any due diligence done on and that he suddenly uses as an excuse to whether to bring troops or to try to jerk out voting machines. So this is still full-alert time and and I think the full-alert time will even ratchet up once we get past Labor Day.”
