At today's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) slammed Trump Administration officials after a leak of war plans in a group chat.
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NewsTranscript
00:00And good morning, everybody. I want to thank all the witnesses for being here.
00:07I've got to say, I've been on the committee now for 14 years.
00:11And this year's assessment is clearly one of the most complicated and challenging in my tenure on the committee.
00:20And I want to get into that in a moment, but I want to first of all address the recent story that has broken in the news.
00:28Yesterday, we stunningly learned that senior members of this administration, and according to reports,
00:36two of our witnesses here today were members of a group chat that discussed highly sensitive and likely classified information
00:49that supposedly even included weapons packages, targets, and timing, and included the name of an active CIA agent.
01:00Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system,
01:10it's also just mind boggling to me that all these senior folks were on this line and nobody bothered to even check
01:18Security Hygiene 101, who are all the names? Who are they?
01:23Well, it apparently included a journalist.
01:26And no matter how much the Secretary of Defense or others want to disparage him,
01:30this journalist had at least the ethics to not report, I think, everything he heard.
01:39The question I raise is like, you know, everyone on this committee gets briefed on security protocols.
01:45We're told you don't make calls outside of SCIS of this kind of classified nature.
01:51We don't know, and I'm going to ask, obviously, Director Gabbard is the executive in charge of all, keeping our secrets safe.
01:59Are these government devices? Are they personal devices?
02:06Have devices been collected to make sure there's no malware?
02:11There's plenty of declassified information that shows that our adversaries, China and Russia,
02:18are trying to break in to encrypted systems like Signal.
02:23I can just say this, if this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer,
02:34and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired.
02:40As I think this is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior,
02:50particularly towards classified information, that this is not a one-off or a first-time error.
02:57Let me take a couple of minutes and review some of the other reckless choices
03:03that this administration has made regarding our national security.
03:06We all recall, it seems like it wasn't that long ago, but less than two months ago,
03:11in the first two weeks, the administration canceled all U.S. foreign assistance.
03:15Now, some may say, how bad can that be? It's foreign assistance.
03:21Well, U.S. foreign assistance paid for the units in Ukraine
03:26that provide air defense to civilian cities being attacked by Russia.
03:31Foreign assistance paid for guarding camps in Syria where ISIS fighters are detained.
03:39Foreign assistance paid for programs abroad that ensure that diseases like Ebola don't come home.
03:46And until recently, it paid for the construction of a railway in Africa
03:51that would have helped given the United States much-needed access to critical minerals in Congo.
03:57Now that project, China's going to try to finance it.
04:01As well, in the first two weeks, Director Patel, the administration fired several of our most experienced FBI agents,
04:12including the head of the Criminal Investigative Division, the head of the Intelligence Division,
04:17the head of the Counterterrorism Division, the heads of the New York, Washington, and Miami field office.
04:26All individuals who were distinctly and directly responsible for helping to keep America safe.
04:35The irony of it was that currently, the recently dismissed head of the Counterterrorism Division
04:43was involved in disrupting the ISIS attacks planned for Oklahoma City in Philadelphia
04:48and helped lead the effort to bring to justice the key planner of the Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan.
04:55He killed 13 U.S. servicemen and 150 civilians.
05:00That very Abbey Gate effort was actually praised by the president in a State of the Union address.
05:08Yet the response, the administration's response, to these agents, I believe, good works and years of service,
05:16was to force these folks out.
05:19It's hard to imagine how that makes our country safer.
05:22Nor can I understand how Americans are made more secure by firing more than 300 staff
05:28at the National Nuclear Security Administration,
05:31including those responsible for overseeing the security and safety of the nuclear stockpile.
05:38Or by ousting 130 employees at CISA, the agency directly responsible for trying to take on China's Salt Typhoon attack.
05:47Again, after Salt Typhoon, I would have thought folks on that group chat might have thought twice.
05:53Or how we made safer by sacking 1,000 employees at the CDC and NIH,
05:59or actually directly working on trying to keep our country safe from disease,
06:04by pushing out hundreds of intelligence officers.
06:08The amazing thing is that our intelligence officers, they're not interchangeable like a Twitter coder.
06:16These intelligence officers, our country makes $20,000 to $40,000 of an investment just in getting a security clearance.
06:25Literally goes into six figures when you take the training involved.
06:30Can anyone tell how firing probationary individuals without any consideration for merit or expertise
06:39is an efficient use of taxpayer dollars?
06:43And just to make clear that yesterday's story in the Atlantic was not this rookie one-off, it's a pattern.
06:52I want to acknowledge Director Radcliffe was not here in his position when this took place.
06:57But again, earlier in the administration, when a non-classified network was used,
07:04thereby exposing literally hundreds of CIA officers' identities, those folks can't go into the field now.
07:11How does that make our government more efficient?
07:15You know, again, this pattern of an amazing cavalier attitude towards classified information is reckless, sloppy, and stupid.
07:25And perhaps what troubles me most is the way the administration has decided that we can take on all of our problems by ourselves,
07:32without any needs for friends or allies.
07:35I agree that we've got to put America's priorities first.
07:39But America first cannot mean America alone.
07:44The intelligence we gather to keep Americans safe depends on a lot of allies around the world who have access to sources we don't have.
07:54That sharing of information saves lives, and it's not hypothetical.
07:58We all remember because it was declassified last year when Austria worked with our community
08:03to make sure to expose a plot against Taylor Swift in Vienna.
08:08That could have killed literally hundreds of individuals.
08:13However, these relationships are not built in stone.
08:17They're not dictated by law.
08:21Things like the Five Eyes are based on trust, built on decades.
08:29But so often that trust is now breaking literally overnight.
08:33Yet suddenly, and for no reason that I can understand,
08:36the United States is starting to act like our adversaries are our friends.
08:41Voting in the U.N. with Russia, Belarus, and North Korea.
08:45That's a rogues gallery if you've ever heard of them.
08:48Treating our allies like adversaries, whether it's threats to take over Greenland or over the Panama Canal,
08:57destructive trade war with Canada, or literally threatening to kick Canada out of the Five Eyes.
09:05I feel our credibility is being enormously undermined with our allies.
09:10Who I believe, and I think most of us on this committee, regardless of party beliefs,
09:14makes our country safer and stronger.
09:17But how can our allies ever trust us as the kind of partner we used to be
09:26when we, without consultation or notice, for example, stop sharing information to Ukraine
09:34in its war for survival against Russia?
09:39Or how can our allies not only not trust our government, but potentially not our businesses
09:45with such arbitrary political decision? Let me give you a few examples.
09:49You know, as a result of a lot of work from this committee and others in Congress,
09:54we made sure America's commercial space industry is second to none.
09:57From space to launch to commercial sensing and communications,
10:01the United States has taken a record lead.
10:05Yet overnight, this administration called into question the reliability
10:08of American commercial tech industry when Maxar and other commercial space companies
10:14were directed to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
10:19I got to tell you, I've been a business guy, I can't say longer than being an elected official,
10:24but pretty close.
10:26That shockwave across all the commercial space, and frankly, not just commercial space,
10:32I've heard it from some of our hyperscalers in the tech community, has sent an enormous chill.
10:38Who's going to hire an American commercial space company, government or foreign business,
10:44with the ability to have that taken down so arbitrarily?
10:48And it's not just in the case of commercial space.
10:50We've seen that Canada, Germany, Portugal have all been saying they're rethinking buying
10:56F-35s. I've heard from Microsoft and Google directly, and Amazon,
11:00that they're having questions about whether they can still sell their services.
11:05We've also seen foreign adversaries and friends take advantage of this rift
11:12in our national security areas and our scientists.
11:16Germany has already put out ads trying to attract some of our best scientists who've been riffed.
11:23And the Chinese intelligence agencies are posting on social media sites in the hopes
11:31of luring individuals with that national security clearance,
11:35who've been pushed out perhaps arbitrarily, to come into their service.
11:40So no, the signal fiasco is not a one-off.
11:47It is unfortunately a pattern we're seeing too often repeated.
11:51I fear that we feel the erosion of trust from our workplace, from our companies,
11:57and from our allies and partners can't be put back in the bottle overnight.
12:02Make no mistake, these actions make America less safe.
12:07Thank you, Mr. Chairman.