Mark Warner keeps his head down on way to the election — and a possible Intel gavel

Mark Warner is fine with flying below the radar.

In his last reelection bid six years ago, the Virginia Democratic senator survived a near-upset by his Republican challenger in a year that flipped the upper chamber to the GOP. This time he's comfortably ahead in the polls, on track to claim the Senate intelligence chair in 2021 — and, for the moment, staying out of the crossfire in Washington's Russia wars.

“I can assure you one thing: I still have nightmares about 2014,” Warner said during a recent interview on the way from the Senate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's headquarters, referring to his 0.8-percentage-point win over former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie. “I don’t want to jinx anything.”

Warner leads his current Republican challenger, Iraq War veteran and political newcomer Daniel Gade, by double digits and millions of dollars. He is also drawing little hostile fire from President Donald Trump, despite serving as vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the panel's yearslong probe of possible collusion between Kremlin operatives and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In contrast with House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), whom Trump has accused of treason and attacked with an unending supply of derogatory nicknames, Warner has suffered the commander in chief’s ire only a handful of times.

One exception occurred in 2018, when Trump seized on a joke Warner made at a fundraiser about possessing inside information on special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The president suggested that Warner had made the remarks “perhaps in a drunken state.”

Last year Trump accused Warner of “acting and talking like he is in total control” of the Intelligence committee, adding: "Their is nothing bipartisan about him. He should not be allowed to take ‘command’ of that Committee. Too important!”

Avoiding the food fight

Without much drama Warner, 65, is poised to chair the Intelligence panel should the GOP lose control of the Senate in next month’s election. If Republicans keep the Senate, he would continue serving as the committee’s top Democrat, into a Trump second term or a new Biden administration.

Either way, he will play a crucial role in vetting and confirming the next round of national security leaders and trying to ensure that the country’s intelligence community remains free of interference and politicization. Former and current clandestine officials say both trends have accelerated since Trump tapped John Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman and a longtime ally of the president, to be director of national intelligence.

Warner said he "can disagree with the president but still work with his administration," including a push on security clearance reform.

“I would say the majority of the people who work in the intelligence community also happen to be my constituents, which means that I've got a job as well to kind of have their back, to protect them from being whacked by either side,” Warner said.

Lawmakers and sources on both sides of the aisle say Warner has eluded becoming a Trump target, and therefore a target of the RNC and outside Republican groups, by going out of his way at the start of the Senate’s Russia probe to work in tandem with the GOP majority. They presented a united front that gave credibility to the panel’s findings, issued throughout 2019 and 2020 and divided into five volumes.

“Everything we presented were facts that aren’t disputed,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who until earlier this year chaired the Intelligence panel and steered the investigation into Russia's multifaceted assault on the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

“We both committed to stay where the facts sent us and at the end of the day that’s what we did," Burr said. "It’s hard to criticize when you can back it up with facts.”

That’s in stark contrast with the House Intelligence Committee’s probe, initially led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), one of Trump's most fervent allies. That investigation concluded in 2018 and faulted the intelligence community's assertion that Moscow had developed a preference for a Trump victory in 2016.

Warner said he and Burr, and now acting Chair Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have “tried to conduct ourselves, not to sound over the top, in a senatorial way.”

Yet he and Republicans differed on the subject of collusion: The GOP contended that the probe had uncovered no evidence of such activity, while Warner said in a statement that the “breathtaking level of contacts” between Trump officials and Russian operatives represent a “real counterintelligence threat to our elections.”

'Russia this, Russia that'

Warner’s time on the Intelligence committee hasn’t cropped up as a central issue on the campaign trail, though it was one of the reasons why The Washington Post endorsed his reelection.

His three debates with Gade mostly focused on aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, racial justice in policing and Obamacare. The topic of election interference received a momentary mention near the end of their first face-off last month and never came up again.

Polls conducted last month showed Gade trailing Warner by over a dozen points. But a Gade spokesperson said recent internal polling put the Republican challenger within single digits.

The spokesperson knocked Warner for spending three years on the bipartisan election interference probe.

“We have nothing to show for it. There was never any hardcore evidence that [Trump] colluded with Russia, there were never any arrests in the White House,” the spokesperson told POLITICO. He added that Warner is running television ads on lower drug prices and veterans only because it’s an election year.

“Every other day I see him on TV and he’s talking about Russia this, Russia that and election this and he’s still on the tail end of the Russia investigation when he’s voting against Covid, people need relief," the spokesperson said. "And he’s just going on MSNBC to talk about Russia still."

Mike DuHaime, a veteran GOP strategist, said the fact that Warner’s Intel work hasn’t come up more in the campaign is “a statement more about the race and the state, much more than the saliency of the issue itself.”

Warner, a former Virginia governor, is “quite popular” and the state “is becoming a more and more reliably Democratic state every year," DuHaime said. "I don’t know that the issue would have gotten traction because the press and the voters don’t seem to be giving much attention to the race at all.”

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a University of Virginia publication that tracks campaigns, predicted that while former Vice President Joe Biden will win the state by a larger margin than Clinton’s 5-point victory in 2016, Warner “shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

“It’s not going to be some sort of gigantic blowout. Warner has to take it seriously,” Kondik said, though predicting the Senate and presidential races will “probably track pretty closely.”

Warner, who stressed his bipartisanship throughout the recent debates, said he won’t speculate about what might happen after Election Day, not even with his own staff.

“What would be more ridiculous than for me to opine about what might potentially happen?” he asked. “No way.”

Is Virginia up for grabs?

While Democrats Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Ron Wyden of Oregon have more seniority on Intel, each is expected to get the gavel of their own committees — Judiciary and Finance, respectively — should Democrats regain the majority in November.

Burr said he would have “no problem” if Warner became Intelligence chair, noting that in the past leadership has been able to “move from control of one party to the other and still do our business.”

Trump tweeted this month that Virginia is “IN PLAY” in this year’s election — even though the state has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2009 — suggesting Warner might yet become the subject of a presidential tweetstorm.

But Warner’s colleague, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), brushed off the idea that Trump would launch a last-minute sally.

“I think the president may have other things he’s worried about,” Kaine said.