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