Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the intelligence committee, responded to President Trump’s address Thursday on MSNOW:

SEN. MARK WARNER: I’m not saying this as a senator, or a Democrat, or whatever. As an American, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that the president of the United States tried to speak to the whole nation with a whole series of falsehoods and accusations, I believe, aimed at trying to undermine America’s confidence in our system-and probably as a prelude, because if we have a free and fair election in 2026, he and his allies will lose in a dramatic fashion. This is not the normal back-and-forth. Franklin said, You’ve got a republic, if you can keep it. We’re going to decide whether we can keep our republic. And if we simply blow this off as another Donald Trump rant, we do that at our own peril. For the last 10-plus years, I’ve been either chairman or vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. We have investigated all of these allegations. Virtually everything he talked about tonight, we have reviewed in a bipartisan way. And if you take a half-sentence-the notion of intelligence is that you get thousands of inputs, and then the intelligence community comes together, analyzes them and decides what is true and not true. Donald Trump ignored all of that. And the irony of this is that, for most of the accusations he’s making about 2018 and 2020, Donald Trump’s appointees were in charge of the intelligence community. Why didn’t they find any of these so-called allegations? And then there’s just the plain ignorance and factual misrepresentations. When he says, Oh, my gosh, countries get access to our voter files, you know what? You can buy these voter files. There’s no need to hack. I buy the Virginia voter files on a regular basis. If you’re going to be a statewide candidate, they are open to any entity. And the fact that you accumulate all these voter files-which, in many states, if you pay the price, are public information-and that somehow leads to manipulation is so completely false. I just implore my Republican friends, if they’ve got any sense of dignity about our system, speak up and tell the truth. Because when you make these kinds of accusations about China, and he conveniently ignores Russia-you know, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, every election cycle, try to influence our elections. They put out false information. They promote stories. Russia did it on behalf of Trump in 2020. Iran did it against Trump. North Korea just wanted to screw with the whole system. China-we have various accounts of what they wanted to do. They have plenty of potential to try to amplify false narratives. But these documents he’s claiming-we’ve seen them. And the conclusion of the intelligence community, the conclusion of the Trump intelligence community, was no influence that changed any votes, no interference, no attempt to successfully change votes or hack systems. He was also briefed on this at the time. As a matter of fact, he was briefed on January 7. And the irony here-I don’t mean to be disrespectful-but John Ratcliffe, his current CIA director, was the director of national intelligence. So this bipartisan conclusion, most of which has been public, was signed off on by his current CIA director. So is he going to be on this hit list of victims? We’ll see. And then there’s the idea he put forward about the ability to hack. Every system has some ability to be hacked, and that’s why our system was so smart. The founders were so smart to say, Keep it at the state level, the local level. So there is no national system. Since he’s been reelected, he has single-handedly dismantled much of the election-protection security system that, candidly, was set up during the first Trump administration. I gave some of his people credit for that. He’s dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, gotten rid of the FBI efforts and the NSA efforts. There was even an obscure group called the Election Assistance Commission, where you train people on how to upgrade your systems. We actually have an annual hackathon where white-hat and black-hat hackers go in to see if they can hack a voting machine, so they can then learn. He recently fired the Democratic members and forced the Republican member to resign. He’s cut back on all the cybersecurity agency protections. One of the guys, after the 2020 election, said it was the safest election in American history. He got fired for telling the truth. We are on such unprecedented, dangerous ground that this has nothing to do with Democrat and Republican. This has to do with whether we want to maintain free and fair elections in our country. JEN PSAKI: I wanted to ask you-and our team is going to let me know if we have this shot ready to play. Okay, let’s play this for you, because I think the big question here, Senator, is what happens from here and what he does from here. Near the end of the speech, he said something that I found to be probably one of the most alarming things he said. But I want to play it for you and talk about it. DONALD TRUMP: My administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others. We will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we are taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected, so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again. Tomorrow, the secretary of homeland security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems. JEN PSAKI: Senator, when I hear mitigate any harm, I think of him going to Fulton County or sending the DNI to Fulton County-not their role. SEN. MARK WARNER: Amen. JEN PSAKI: When I hear, Ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected, I hear, Seize it. We don’t know what he’s going to do, but what are you hearing through that, and what can be done about it? SEN. MARK WARNER: What I’m hearing is a president who is flailing and failing. His policies are roundly rejected by Americans, frankly, of all political stripes. And if we as Americans don’t push back and say, No, we’re going to have a free and fair election-we’re not going to turn- The safety of our system, uniquely, has been the fact that we have a distributed system. I don’t want to nerd out here, but it cannot be compromised at a national level. And we have so much documented evidence of this administration’s efforts to dismantle all the assistance to increase protections at an unprecedented level. And we have states like Idaho and others pushing back-Republican states saying, Don’t try to nationalize these elections, which could then be compromised at a national level. And I fear-and, Jen, I’ve been on your program many times talking about this for the last nine or 10 months-this guy will not win a free and fair election, so he will do anything to intervene, to corrupt our elections. For example, with the so-called SAVE Act, which is a voter-disenfranchisement law that would make Jim Crow look pale in comparison. You bring all these things together, and then you’re going to have the Department of Homeland Security check the voter files. Do you trust the same Department of Homeland Security that allows ICE to kill Americans, documented or not? Now is the time when we’ve got to stand up and step up. This is not the normal back-and-forth. I’m not only embarrassed, but if he is able to execute this without legal pushback, without the ability of fact-checkers-then, please, I welcome everything I’ve said tonight to be fact-checked. And I would also put forward that virtually every document he’s talked about that I’m aware of, we have seen in a bipartisan fashion. JEN PSAKI: And we’re going to- SEN. MARK WARNER: There is not-just the final thing. The conclusion was there was no vote-changing. There was no manipulation. That was the case. And if this was so bad and awful, and China was against him, then why did Donald Trump win in 2024? And why did he go there a couple of months ago and be so soft on them? JEN PSAKI: There’s that question, Senator. I know you’re going to look at these documents. We’re going to take a quick break. We’re going to talk with somebody who’s been poring through them as well. SEN. MARK WARNER: Jen, we’ve seen them. JEN PSAKI: Yes, you’ve seen them. That’s important for people out there to know. SEN. MARK WARNER: We have seen them. There may have been an internal memo from one analyst to another, and that’s their job-to disagree. But we have seen the conclusions. They have been made. They’ve been briefed to this president when he was still president, on January 7, 2021. And the amount of disgraceful presentation he made tonight-this is a man who has lost the faith of the American people, even among some of his hardest-core supporters. And I fear he will do virtually anything to retain power. JEN PSAKI: Senator Mark Warner, a pleasure as always. Thanks for talking to us and breaking it down.

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