00:00That latest headline, crossing the Bloomberg terminal, three service members killed in action, five have been wounded.
00:05And on that note, I want to bring in Mark Warner, the senator from Virginia, the ranking member of the
00:09Senate Intelligence Committee, who joins us on this Sunday morning.
00:11And, sir, I have to start there. We heard the president warn that this could be something that might happen
00:15as a result of these strikes.
00:17Your reaction to this news on this Sunday, that there have been casualties as a result of these strikes?
00:23And I'm heartbroken for the families.
00:28Because, you know, I know our military will always perform exquisitely.
00:34The president warned there would be these potential for casualties.
00:38And this is but it begs the bigger question.
00:42Why did the president choose to start this war?
00:46And what are its goals?
00:48I mean, a week ago, we heard the administration talk about stopping Iran's nuclear program, which, by the way, the
00:55president claimed had been obliterated seven months ago.
00:59Then we heard the president's people talk about Iran's ballistic missile capability, ability to shoot missiles at our bases or
01:07into Israel.
01:08And now it's evolved into regime change.
01:10So what I know, as a member of the gang of eight on the Intelligence Committee, that there was no
01:20imminent threat to America.
01:25So what are his goals?
01:28He owes it to not only the families of those three deceased service members.
01:33There will, unfortunately, probably be more.
01:36He needs to make the case when you start a war of choice, why it was so critical.
01:43And is the goal Iran's nuclear capability?
01:47Is it the ballistic missiles regime change?
01:49And let me acknowledge the fact that the Iranian leadership, the supreme leaders taken out.
01:54I mean, that is good news.
01:55I mean, this regime is awful.
01:58But I can tell you from the intelligence standpoint, we don't have great visibility about who or what comes next.
02:07So there is a very high probability that you could have even more violent Iranian leadership come in and replace
02:17the current leaders.
02:18You could have somebody that's even more brutal to the Iranian people.
02:22And now that the president has called on the Iranian people to rise up, and if they do rise up
02:29and they're suddenly butchered by the Iranian regime,
02:32do we owe an obligation to go in on the ground and protect the Iranian people?
02:38This is why our system says before a president chooses to go to war, you've got to get a declaration.
02:44You've got to make the case to the American people.
02:46You've got to ask Congress.
02:48None of that took place as he chose to start this war Friday night.
02:52So, Senator Warner, to that point, I mean, we did hear the president use war in his speech, which is
02:58a power of Congress, not of the presidency.
03:00In your opinion, was this an illegal act?
03:04I will allow others to debate legality.
03:07What I do know is that the Constitution is clear that when you go to war, the president has to
03:14come before Congress.
03:15We don't have we're not in a country where there is a single monarchical leader.
03:21We are a democracy with co-equal branches of government and the people's representatives, which are the House and the
03:30Senate, need to weigh in,
03:32particularly as we now have crossed the line into American casualties.
03:36And, again, our history of wars in the Middle East, at least in the last 50 years, is not great.
03:45And, again, the president promised his supporters that he wouldn't get into a bunch of wars.
03:50This president has taken eight different military actions in his second term.
03:55And, ironically, as well, just a quick point out that when the Iranian people rose up in early January,
04:02and there were literally hundreds of thousands on the street, the president said at that point he might want to
04:09back those people.
04:11But he was unable to because the military assets that should have been in the region were part of the
04:17aircraft carrier in particular,
04:18that was off the coast of Venezuela on another one of his military forays.
04:22And the European allies that would normally be with us helping put pressure on the Iranian regime were appropriately focused
04:30on the president's,
04:31I think, crazy folly about trying to take over Greenland.
04:35So the idea that America is going into this conflict with potentially only Israel,
04:43I know there are some indications of other nations flying,
04:46but it sure as heck not the coalition of the willing that could have been brought to bear
04:52if the president had made the case of why now and why this was inevitable.
04:57The now late Supreme Leader warned in the run-up to all of this that if there were strikes,
05:01there would be a regional war that would develop.
05:03You were one of only a handful of lawmakers who have been briefed by this administration.
05:08You remember the so-called Gang of Eight.
05:10You received a briefing, as we understand it, on Tuesday around the State of the Union from the Secretary of
05:13State, Marco Rubio.
05:15I'm very curious how what you were briefed on forecasted what has come to pass here in the days that
05:22have followed.
05:22From what we've seen here, the way that this has widened,
05:25the prospects of this lasting not just days but maybe weeks or longer
05:29was something that the administration seemed to have weighed going into that briefing that you had a few days ago.
05:33And was that discussed in the briefing?
05:36Yeah, I can't go into what was discussed in the briefing.
05:39I can say that there were a series of options.
05:41At that point, the president had not made a decision.
05:45Do you believe that, sir?
05:47Do you believe the president had really not made a decision at that point?
05:51I will accept the word of Secretary Rubio.
05:55I was recontacted on Friday.
05:58But the idea of what was driving this, was it our timeline?
06:03Was it Israel's timeline?
06:06I have a lot of questions about.
06:09And there were clear questions raised by many about, well, what happens the day after, the week after, the month
06:16after.
06:17I never got an answer to any of those questions.
06:20And quite honestly, I don't believe anyone, even in the administration, knows the answer to what happens next.
06:29We do not have that great a visibility into Iran.
06:34This is, again, where the Israelis do.
06:37But this is where if we had not burned so many of our relationships with our European allies, who do
06:44have a diplomatic presence in Tehran, more people in country,
06:50I think we might have had a better visibility about what the opposition looks like.
06:56It appears to me that the opposition, while widespread, is not organized in a classic sense.
07:02So I'm not sure.
07:04The president says rise up and take over.
07:07I'm not sure who would rise.
07:09The people might rise up.
07:10But where is the leadership to take over when I think the more likely scenario may be that you even
07:16get further hardliners that are going to be even more brutal to the Iranian people
07:21and may then take their proxies all across the region and strike at American interests.
07:27And just to go a little bit even further, you know, we have Kash Patel at the FBI distracted flying
07:35around the country.
07:36We have the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, obsessed about relitigating the 2020 elections.
07:43You know, what are we doing to make sure that Iranian proxies potentially in our country or people inspired by
07:52Iran or this war aren't going to take actions in the homeland?
07:56I hope that was factored in as well.
07:59You bring up Venezuela, and I think a lot of people cautioned us after that effort to remove the president,
08:04getting Maduro out of Venezuela.
08:06It was not a good analogy to look at what might happen in Iran, but there is the kind of
08:10similar sense of vacuum here,
08:11an unwillingness of the administration, the Congress, the country to get involved on the ground in a place like that.
08:17We see how that's played out in Venezuela.
08:19Effectively, there's been a shuffle of leadership, but a lot of the structure remains in place.
08:24What do you make of the president's entreaty to Iranians that they should kind of make this happen on their
08:28own?
08:28There have been these airstrikes.
08:30What are going to be or what could be the forcing factors that do lead to some kind of leadership
08:35change there,
08:36barring having U.S. forces or others there to encourage that happening on the ground?
08:42Well, my fear is that the president, you know, because the military executed the Maduro operation so brilliantly,
08:51and the bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities was carried off extraordinarily well.
08:58Now, it obviously didn't obliterate their program since they were trying to reconstitute.
09:03But again, it was done in a relatively painless way.
09:08My fear is that the president thought, well, that was easy.
09:11Let me do this again in Iran.
09:14I think most of the intelligence would overwhelmingly say that will not be as easy in Iran.
09:23There's not an organized opposition the way there was in Venezuela.
09:26The single strike was against a single facility back in June when our bombers took off.
09:35But the idea of calling on the Iranian people to rise up, if they rise up and they are brutally
09:44murdered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces,
09:50what obligations does America hold to those Iranians who are responding to the president's call?
09:57I don't think, I don't know the answer to that.
10:00And I think, again, it's incumbent upon the president to tell the American people.
10:04On this morning, we learned that...
10:05What do you think this is going to be our obligation?
10:07On this morning, we learned that three service members have been killed in action, five wounded.
10:10We have Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission warning that the risk of further escalation is real.
10:15Great to spend some time here with a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
10:17Senator Mark Warner of Virginia.
10:18Thank you very much.
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