[Politico] Some Democrats may be eager to use their newfound power in Washington to investigate the misdeeds of the Trump era. But Mark Warner isn’t interested in performing an autopsy of the last four years in the U.S. intelligence community.
The Virginia Democrat and newly installed chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee doesn’t believe he would best serve the country by launching probes into the political pressure spy agencies faced under former President Donald Trump, who labeled elements within the intelligence community part of the "deep state" and clashed with them over issues like Russian election interference. Instead, Warner would rather focus on depoliticizing and rebuilding the clandestine organizations.
"I’ve thought about it, obviously," Warner said when asked about the possible investigations during a nearly hour-long interview in his Senate office this week. But, he added, "I don't know if that's really the best use of the committee's time."
In particular, the government’s top spy agency — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — emerged "decimated" and "in shambles" from the last four years, he said. Trump frequently targeted the office, whose last two chiefs, Richard Grenell and John Ratcliffe, had little experience in intelligence but were close allies of the former president.
Weeks before last year’s election, Ratcliffe declassified unverified Russian intelligence over the concerns of the CIA and National Security Agency in order to boost Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the federal government’s efforts to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. |