Sen. Mark Warner tackling tension between White House, intelligence agencies as inauguration looms

On the Senate’s first day back Tuesday, looking ahead to Joe Biden’s inauguration, Sen. Mark Warner found himself again focused on one of the most contentious areas of the past four years — tension between the White House and intelligence agencies.

And, he said, he walked out of the Intelligence Committee’s hearings in a novel frame of mind.

“I’m feeling encouraged,” he said.

“I spent five, five-and-half hours of the first day back in the Intelligence Committee ... and the message is: We’re getting the intelligence community back to the business of speaking truth to power,” he said.

He said he got that sense from what senators from both parties were saying in the open part of Tuesday’s confirmation hearing on Biden’s nomination of Avril Haines as director of national intelligence — and even more so by what they were saying in closed session.

Warner, the incoming chairman of that committee, is also hearing good things from Haines and from his fellow committee members about concerns he raised at the hearing. Those include the growth of anti-government, white supremacist groups in the United States, their ties with similar groups in Europe — and their connections with Russian intelligence operations.

He told Haines he hoped she would keep a focus on Chinese advances in technology, too.

“You know since Sputnick, we’ve made almost every tech advance, and in all of them, we’ve been the ones setting rules,” he said. “But China’s active in 5G, in artificial intelligence, in quantum computing, in facial recognition technology, and if they’re going to set the rules for those, that’s going to mean economic domination.”

In addition to the concerns Warner raised with Haines, he wants to push to boost the nation’s cybersecurity efforts.

The SolarWinds hack, a Russian malware campaign that gained access to several U.S. government agencies’ email, ought to be a wake-up call, he said.

He also wants to committee to look at better regulation of social media platforms, to rein in the misinformation and propaganda on them — false statements that feed the kind of violence he saw in the Capitol on Jan 6.

“You have a right to say stupid things, but you don’t have the right to have them amplified to 3 billion people without consequence,” he said. That’ll mean a hard look at section 230 of the chapter of the U.S. Code that deals with telecommunications. That law, dating back to the 1990s, gives internet platforms immunity from lawsuits over what they publish.

Warner said his sense that senators are more interested in working together isn’t just coming from his work in the Intelligence Committee.

“I was really proud that bipartisan group of 8, I guess later 10, that got the COVID relief package through — 92 votes. That put a lot of points on the board,” he said.

“I think we got points on the board with my big bill on lending institutions for minority businesses, a big bill on money laundering and drug money in shell companies,” he said. “I felt better about the last six months than I have for a while.”

Still, it wasn’t quite like his time as governor of Virginia, he said.

“You can get a lot of stuff done as governor, a lot of points on the board,” while in the Senate, it’s not the same kind politics — “I’m no poker player,” as Warner put it.

“But looking ahead, I think we can do some more — then it might be a bit closer between being governor and senator.”

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com