Mark Warner gave CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil hell on the air on Thursday night because the network decided to run the Orwellian Donald Trump “election security” speech – calling it what it was, it wasn’t a presidential “speech”; it was a man who knows the jig is up, desperately clinging to power, grasping for straws, on live TV.
Anyway.
Warner, on CBS air, gave CBS hell.
The folks there must be into sadomasochism, because they invited Warner back on Sunday morning to give Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” more hell.
“There were so many absurdities and falsehoods in Trump’s Thursday night speech, and I’m glad that most media treated it not as serious news. And I know some folks at your network, the journalists, I have huge respect for. I was disappointed that your senior management made the decision to cover it as news,” Warner said, an obvious dig at Bari Weiss, the former New York Times opinion contributor-turned-scorched earth MAGA blogger, who was installed as the head of CBS News when the son of a MAGA billionaire friend of Trump took over Paramount, the parent company of CBS.
It’s this former op-ed writer-turned-blogger, with no experience in news-gathering, who gutted “60 Minutes,” who turned the “CBS Evening News” into a joke with the move to make the lightweight Dokoupil the anchor.
What I can’t figure out right now is, who is about to get fired for giving Mark Warner a vine, not once, but twice, in the past couple of days, to criticize Weiss on air for her continued efforts to cozy up to Trump.
Warner, you see, actually knows stuff – he’s the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the chair when Democrats had a Senate majority, has been leading congressional oversight of what our intelligence community has been doing with respect to foreign interference in our elections for more than a decade now.
Seriously, Tommy Tuberville wasn’t available this morning to flub miserably at parroting Trump talking points?
Trump’s main thrust in his Thursday speech was him playing the hits that he’s been spouting off about since 2016, when he claimed that Ted Cruz had stolen the Iowa caucuses – elections are rigged, except for the ones that he wins.
“The only election that Trump is concerned about is 2020. That was the election that his administration was in charge of. Matter of fact, the director of national intelligence, Mr. (John) Ratcliffe, was DNI then. He’s CIA director now. If there were mistakes made, why is he CIA director?” Warner said, and he’s just stating the obvious here.
Trump put the focus in his Thursday speech on China, even as documents released by the administration to supposedly support the claim actually pointed out that the contemporary intelligence assessments at the time pointed to ongoing Russian efforts to ensure a Trump victory in 2020.
“He goes through this focus on China when he forgets or just omits the biggest country that tries to influence on every election is Russia. We’ve documented that time and again, and the complete conclusion of the intelligence community, 18 different agencies, said yes,” Warner said.
The senator wasn’t done calling out Trump lies.
“If Donald Trump is suddenly interested in election security, why is he taking the cybersecurity agency, which did on a voluntary basis – Chris Krebs did a great job on that years earlier as a Trump appointee – they’ve basically completely downsized it,” Warner said, referring to the move by the Trump inner circle to cut more than 1,000 jobs from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government’s top cyber defense body protecting U.S. election systems, nearly 1,000 CISA personnel.
The cuts gutted the agency, taking out more than a third of CISA’s workforce.
“Why have they taken the voluntary programs like ERIC, where, you know, if you move from one state to another, making sure that dead people don’t vote or people who have tried to vote in two states, they’ve dismantled that,” Warner said – ERIC is the Electronic Registration Information Center, which Trump is trying to replace with a centralized database that has already been used by some states to incorrectly remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls.
“The Election Assistance Commission, not very well known, but this is the group that works with individual registrars in states, making sure their voting machines are safe. Trump recently fired the Democrats and made the Republican quit,” Warner said.
“Why is he doing all these things? I believe it’s because Donald Trump intends to interfere in this year’s elections. He knows if there is a free and fair election, his policies will be rejected at record levels,” Warner said.
The speech that CBS, among others, aired on Thursday night, to Warner, “was the opening shot, the opening shot of trying to undermine Americans’ confidence that their vote will be actually counted and mean something.”
“I fear as well that if he tries to pull something that could potentially, he’s not ruled out bringing ICE to the polls, he’s not even ruled out the idea of trying to bar certain voting machines,” Warner said.
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Chris Graham
