Meet the Press - March 5, 2023
Interview
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Thanks for having us.
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Well, no question it's a serious threat. We've seen the Russian military obviously come apart. The Chinese could reverse that in the same way that the Iranians are helping the Russians right now. I think the administration is doing the right thing by saying, "Don't do this." Now, it doesn't surprise me at all that there's a debate inside China about whether they should do this. Hopefully wisdom prevails. I couldn't help but note in the Chinese proposed peace plan, the 12th point said, "We need to focus on rebuilding China -- rebuilding Russia." I could imagine the Chinese see a lot of business there.Obviously if they're a part of the Russian assault on Ukraine, they will not get that business. So no, I don't think a final decision has been made, but I do think it's wise for us to say, "Don't go there."
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Well, so neither Mike nor I can get too deep into any particular intel but, you know, you don't need to get too deep into intel. Consider the fact that you see every single day on television which is the entire Russian Army cannot take a town that nobody had ever heard of a year ago, the town of Bakhmut. Now, you know, Mike and I have been doing this long enough that we remember when we literally devoted hundreds of billions of dollars and much of our national security apparatus to this beast of a Russian military. Today we see that they can't -- even with the push of the president, Vladimir Putin, they can't take a town. That doesn't mean they're not still dangerous, they have nuclear weapons, but they are not what we thought they were.
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Completely, and spontaneously.
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Well, the thing about both Putin, Lavrov and even Medvedev, although he's supposed to be the new face of a new Russia, come from an era where, you know, they controlled Eastern Europe. They could say things that were not true and people believed them because they controlled information. Today, information can't be controlled. So the laughability of what they're saying, the ridiculousness of what they're saying, is easily exposed.
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So, we have a lot more work to do. Look, I think as the leaders of the intelligence committee, our number one job is to make sure that the DNI, the F.B.I., whoever needs to do it, does everything they need to do to protect the sources and methods that might have been exposed were any of those documents to have been out in the wild. So there's a lengthy process to figure out that, and I can't speak for Mike, but I will tell you that though we have been briefed, we've got a lot more to do to make sure that the government is doing what it should be doing.
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So we have not been shown anything that would allow us to draw that conclusion, and we've got to be a little careful here, because what we were shown, we were shown in the --
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-- well, we were briefed, but let's just say that neither one of us are satisfied that we got enough information to execute our primary responsibility of making sure the sources and methods have been protected. We've got more to learn before we can be satisfied on that.
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Well, we didn't say no idea.
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We didn't say no idea.
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Again, we can't get too into the details. We got a flavor for what was there, and I won't speak for Mike, but I will tell you, having been given a flavor, this is a very serious issue. This wasn't stuff that we can say clearly does not matter, it matters.
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Well, again, we don't know.
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We don't know yet.
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Well, two things about the F.B.I.. first of all, and Mike's right, they are subject to Congressional oversight. Secondly, they do have to preserve the integrity of their investigation, and there are investigations on board right now. So we need to work with them. Because both of us, everybody, wants them to be able to do investigations in an unsloppy manner. We've got too much of a history of investigations in a somewhat sloppy manner. But of course there was consternation. Look, it's one thing to conduct a raid on average Joe citizen. To conduct a raid on a former president who, and I hope I don't insult my good chairman here who was sort of known for his aggressive retribution against people he didn't like, I'm sure that got a lot of discussion. But you, look, the lesson to be drawn here is if you don't want a raid on your home, don't take a year to cough up documents that we know are out there.
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Fair enough. Fair enough.
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Yeah, look, I mean, you need to take a step back here and just as Mike said, we have so few facts because the Chinese regime has obfuscated -- look, this is hard to figure out when you can do it in Atlanta at the CDC if something goes wrong. We have so few facts that inevitably different agencies are going to arrive at different conclusions. And when an agency slightly adjusts its interpretation as the Department of Energy may have done, that doesn't mean that all of a sudden the government has a firm view. It may be forever before we actually know exactly what happened.
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Thanks Chuck.
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