Meet the Press - March 5, 2023
Interview
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Thanks for having me.
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Sure. This truly is outrageous. You know, Ohio is really the crossroads of America, both on the road and in rail. An unbelievable amount of goods travel through Ohio, some hazardous. What we've seen, you know, recently with the risk to communities is unacceptable. Luckily it seems we may have missed a bullet in this one, that this train may have been empty, and it looks like that hazardous materials is not going to be a threat to the community. We'll have to see.
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Oh, absolutely, and the fact that we're having derailment after derailment shows really the lack of investment, the disinvestment, in our infrastructure, and that needs to change.
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Right, well and obviously you've seen with the C.I.A. director even calling out China on this issue, that they are considering it as a huge shift in policy. And what we're seeing is the administration using intelligence to try to impact the outcome of policy, right? So they're not just saying, "We happen to know this and looking to hold someone accountable," they're trying to thwart them, to stop them from doing this. You know, the problem with China entering this is because, you know, you've got the West giving weapons to Ukraine, you've got Russia depleting their stores. We obviously, the West together, have an ability to impact Ukraine greater than Russia alone does. That would be an inexhaustible source of weapons if China and its production capacity supported Russia, and that would change the dynamic.
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No, we --
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No. But there are some things that we do know, and first off, I want to --
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Right.
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Well, first off, in the things that we do know, one of the things we know is that the F.B.I. is not being forthcoming. They're not giving us the information. They're claiming that it's going to affect the outcome of their investigation, which of course it can't, because the people who are the targets of their investigation know what are in those documents. And we have the clearance and the ability to look at these documents. We also know from Avril Haines that she said that she was not consulted prior to the raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago home, that in fact it was not a national security basis. So as we go through this process, they give us the category of the documents, and their assessment is to who had access to them, who did not have access to them, we're beginning to build an understanding. But the thing that we know is that it's unbelievable that administration after administration is apparently sloppy and messy, in their use of classified documents, and that's one thing on a bipartisan basis we have to address well beyond just this. This has to change, where classified documents are under a certain amount of control.
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One thing I can tell you Chuck which is important, which is also the symbolism of the fact that Jim and I are here together.
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Right. We have shifted, and it takes two to shift to a bipartisan basis, and you see it on the senate side too with Marco Rubio.
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Senator Warner. And the approach to this issue, of the Biden docs, the Trump docs and the Pence docs, we're looking at holistically, what do we have to do to fix this? How do we address this? What were the risks involved? We have to understand also that without Congress having asked, there wasn't even a risk assessment being done. We were the ones who initiated this. That's part of the concern.
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I would say it's more of a tension between the F.B.I. and Congress than it is the intelligence community. Because we're --
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Absolutely. And I think that's going to come to head over the next couple of years. You're seeing it in a number of areas where they're just not -- you know, they are not special, they don't have greater privileges than the president does, and they're continuing to act as if they have some privilege to be able to operate without congressional oversight.
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Or six years. Because Biden took six.
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The one aspect that's important here is that Merrick Garland did an unbelievable, terrible political miscalculation. He appointed a special prosecutor against Trump not realizing he was going to end up having to appointment one against his own boss.
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And that's -- how that's going to play out is going to be amazing.
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Well, it's not actually been released yet, these are all leaks that are reporting this. So --
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Right.
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So we will neither confirm nor deny that they actually said that. But let's assume that they did. In all of this, because there's no direct evidence, we don't have China admitting it, we don't have Wuhan Lab handing these things over, all this is being assessed by looking at other aspects of the release. But I can tell you one thing that's of great concern, is that the 90 day review that was undertaken with a classified report and unclassified report that came out in the intelligence community, in my opinion, they don't match. If you read the unclassified version, and then you read the classified version, you would have thought that there would have been other things, other conclusions, in the unclassified version. And I think that's what we're seeing now is beginning to leak out, is that there are people who are saying, "Wait, I disagree with the underlying conclusion of the unclassified version."
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We need the Chinese to --
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We need the Chinese to cooperate.
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Well, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has appointed a COVID select committee that is bipartisan, and it's beginning this process. In addition, there is now a China select committee looking at really 360, the issues with respect to the national security threats of China. So those things are moving forward in Congress. Beyond just what our committee's doing, and other committees and jurisdictions, there are now committees that are solely focused on justice issues.
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Thank you.
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