CNN presenter Jake Tapper asked U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., if he has issues with Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the term “murder” to refer to the ICE agent who shot a woman to death in Minneapolis this week.
Shocker: yeah, he does.
“I’ve got issues with any public official, including the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, calling it domestic terrorism. I’m a little bit old-fashioned. When an American citizen is killed by a federal law enforcement official, we ought to let the investigation take place without jumping to conclusions. I mean, that’s what our system is about,” Warner said in a visit on Tapper’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday morning.
So, this is Warner, former self-styled “radical centrist,” playing bothsides again, right?
I know that some folks are going to see Warner saying, in essence, don’t jump to conclusions, as, I’m trying to be everything to everybody, but I personally don’t have an issue with a senator saying, let the investigation find what the investigation finds.
Particularly when we all know what a fair investigation would find.
The problem being, yes, I get it, that we’re not going to get a fair investigation, which Warner himself acknowledged in the TV hit with CNN.
“I don’t want to claim to be any kind of legal expert, but my understanding is that the administration is trying to completely cut out any state role in this investigation and handle it entirely federal. I don’t think, at least in my memory, that is not the way that you cut out all of local law enforcement in terms of a investigation where there’s been a shooting,” Warner said.
He’s on our side here, just in his own way, is what I’m getting at.
To that point:
“I do think there are concerns when we’ve got, remember, we’re beefing up, ICE 10,000 more agents. They are not getting the traditional five months training. Literally, Jake, the training for the ICE agents now is 47 days. Why 47 days? Because Donald Trump is the 47th president,” Warner said.
“The idea of going into neighborhoods and going after folks is not traditional ICE training. I think this is kind of an Orwellian circumstance where we’ve got cities on edge all across America. We wanted the border shut down, right? I agree with that, but sending ICE agents into community after community where they’re perhaps not fully trained, puts us in, again, uncharted territory, and not something I think the vast majority of American people, want, to be clear,” Warner said.
Warner on Venezuela
“Is it better that Maduro is gone? Yes. Do I think there are bad leaders all across Asia and Africa? Should the American military in parts of South America go after all of those nation-states? Should we be threatening Colombia and Mexico? We may not like their leaders, but they were both elected by the democracies, by their own people. Where does this end? Again? I thought Donald Trump was the guy that was going to take us out of these countless wars.
“And remember, Jake, we have literally 20 percent of our fleet the cost day-to-day of maintaining the fleet off the coast of Venezuela to maintain that oil blockade so that we can get Venezuelan oil, which, by the way, the oil companies didn’t sound too keen about going into. I mean, it’s going to take a couple years to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. Is our fleet going to maintain that blockade for the next two years? What are the costs? What does that do to our military preparedness around the rest of the world?
“This is not the way the president’s supposed to operate. They’re supposed to operate in conjunction, make the case to the American people, make the case to the world, and, frankly, make the case to the Congress.”
Warner on intervention in Iran
“The idea of military strikes, Jake, I know it goes back, the last time America intervened militarily in Iran was 1953, when a CIA-led coup overthrew the Iranian regime to protect oil, by the way, and that, ultimately, most historians would say, was what led to the ayatollahs rise in the 1970s. I think when we mess with the internal dynamics of a country like Iran, which is extraordinarily complex, only half the nation is Persian heritage, we ought to do that carefully. And I don’t think we have enough visibility at this point to start at least planning major military actions when we’ve already struck, as I mentioned, six different nations in less than a year.
“The strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities was successful, but as we showed, it didn’t obliterate the facilities, and public reporting has said Iran is in the process of building back its capability. But the idea, and I want to know what the president talking about, is he simply talking about another airstrike? Is he talking about boots on the ground in Iran to take out military facilities when we’ve already, again, remember, we’ve got 20 percent of the fleet off the coast of Venezuela at this point maintaining a blockade. So, Ford, which is the aircraft carrier down there, it’s supposed to be deployed to the Middle East. Wven America, with its amazing military presence, and our military did extraordinary in Venezuela, we get stretched pretty thin.”