Mark Warner: ‘No one, including the former president, should be above the law’

Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems to be of two minds on classified documents: that there are certainly documents that need to be classified so that they don’t get into the wrong hands, and also that way, way, way too many documents are just stamped “classified.”

The indictment of former president Donald Trump on Espionage Act charges, in the context of those two divergent points of view, “does raise a bigger issue,” to Warner, who is overseeing a draft of legislation by the Intelligence Committee that would overhaul the classification process.

One point of focus in the bill is to put a better classification system in place that would be based on a public-interest test. Another would reform the system for approving security clearances to reduce the logjam that can stretch out the review process for those who need clearances to be able to do their jobs for up to two years.

“And then we did something that should have been a no-brainer,” Warner said, explaining proposed language in the bill that would require that a president or vice president, “before they leave office, and throw all these documents in a box,” first submit to a review by archivists who would “be able to go through and clear what documents are taken, and which should remain the property of the United States.”

“If something like that had been place,” Warner said, the Trump case – and the roughly similar issues that came up with classified documents found to be in the possession of Mike Pence and Joe Biden from their separate tenures as vice president – would likely have turned out very differently.

As it stands, Trump is facing 37 felony charges for his retention of classified documents, and resistance to efforts of archivists and investigators to retrieve them.

On the Trump case, Warner emphasizes that “no one, including former president, should be above the law.”

“But at the same time, in America, we start with a presumption of innocence,” Warner said. “I think this case has to play out, and I trust the Justice Department to make their case, and that Mr. Trump will have his ability to put up his defense, and I think a jury clearly of his peers being based in Florida will reach a verdict.”

That the charges against the former president have been reduced to the latest round of he said/she said in the political theater of the absurd does seem to bother Warner.

“Even long-term Trump allies, like his former attorney general, Bill Barr, said he thought that the indictment raised very, very serious issues. And I think you have heard as well a number of particularly Republican senators who have kind of said the same thing that I’ve said that, you know, everybody gets their day in court, we’ve got a presumption of innocence, but this is a serious indictment and serious issues raised, and let’s let the justice system play out,” Warner said.

“I just think about the fact that there are so few serious members who know anything about national security that are excusing this behavior,” Warner said. “Without even knowing the contents of these documents, there is, again, I can simply say there are extraordinarily serious reasons why documents are classified. People’s lives can be put at risk if those documents were to fall into the wrong hands. There are people who help our country, who are located in our adversaries’ nations, their lives could be snuffed out if that document fell under the wrong hand.

“We have penetrations from what’s called signals intelligence, NSA, that we spend billions and years putting in place. If those assets were revealed, it’s all about the so-called sources and methods. I have not heard a serious national security expert on the Republican side who hasn’t said, you know, there are reasons you have highly classified documents, and that the protection of those documents is critical to our national security.”

Warner also is bothered by rhetoric from Republicans who have raised the specter of defunding the FBI and Department of Justice as a way of undermining the ongoing investigation and prosecution of Trump.

“I mean, it’s a little wacky,” Warner said. “They are obviously people who have not been to the FBI headquarters, where that building is literally a falling in on itself. It is shows enormous disrespect to the literally thousands of FBI employees, the vast, vast majority of which are completely non-political, who put, many of them put, their lives on the line trying to protect our country from both crime inside and working with our intelligence community in terms of foreign threats. So, it’s just a strange time when you’ve got a swath of the Republican Party that seems to be on almost a jihad against our justice system and against the FBI.”