>> My feeling is, not only have we got a low morale in the intelligence committee, but on top of that, you've got, I believe, a sense from many of our partner countries that they may or not share intelligence with it.

[MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and it's the dog days of summer in Washington, DC.

Congress is out, temperatures are grotesque, and Donald Trump is riding high.

In June, he netted the biggest foreign policy win of a second term so far when he joined Israel in targeting key Iranian nuclear sites and faced virtually no blowback from Tehran.

And then just weeks later, Congress got Trump's massive tax and spending bill over the finish line by the President's self-imposed July 4th deadline.

[SOUND] True, there is one prize that still eludes President Trump.

During a recent White House visit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu joined a handful of foreign leaders who are trying to change that.

>> So I wanna present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee.

It's nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved, and you should get it.

>> Thank you very much, this I didn't know.

>> Not everyone in Washington is feeling the MAGA-mentum.

Democrats, that endangered species, may be in the minority, but they're sounding the alarm about President Trump's domestic and foreign agendas.

And few have been quite as vocal as my guest today, the senior US Senator from Virginia, Mark Warner, who also chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

When I recently sat down with Senator Warner in his Capitol Hill office, we talked about the, quote, "Big Beautiful Bill," as well as Warner's concern about a politicized US intelligence community and some key foreign policy flashpoints, including a crisis quite close to the Senator's heart, civil war in Sudan.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

After a thorough investigation, there is no list.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

>> Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

>> And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And.

[MUSIC] >> Senator Mark Warner, good to be with you.

>> Ian, it's always good to be with you.

>> News of the day right now, Big Beautiful Bill.

And it seems to me something this large, usually it's because the people want it.

In this case, it seems to be a little less popular than that.

What's your theory of the case?

>> A little less popular?

>> What's your theory of the case?

>> A little less popular?

>> Yeah.

>> I think it was misguided.

I think it was painful.

I think the notion, original notion of well, let's extend most of the Trump tax cuts.

You could potentially even had bipartisan there.

But this kept getting bigger, uglier every day it went along.

And I think the ramifications that the kind of baseline argument Democrats have made, we really want to throw 17 million people off of healthcare.

11 million from Medicaid and 5 or 6 million literally from the collapse of the Obamacare marketplace where you get the subsidies and that will ripple through the whole healthcare system.

For what in effect is a tax cut for the richest Americans?

That baseline, I just don't think flies with America.

Then you add on top of that, the cuts to food stamps.

You add literally they're cutting food banks.

One of the things that has not gotten a lot of attention yet is cutbacks on student loan assistance.

And for what?

For frankly, mostly just continuation of tax cuts, not something that people are going to feel in their pocket.

And it was wild to see the yin and the yang.

The folks wanted even more cuts versus those few moderates who said, hey, slow down here.

But this rush to meet Trump's artificial July 4th deadline, he got the photo op.

I think that photo op is going to come back to haunt him.

So it's not like there's a structural theory of the case here.

It's really a collective action problem to get something done.

And that means you had to make all sorts of compromises that were deeply suboptimal?

Well, yes, it was like what started as an extension of the tax cut, then got cobbled on with some of the Trump kind of ideas he pulled out of the air the last campaign, like no tax on tips, which I think there would have been, again, support for.

But the notion on top of that, that being forced to get something done, and at the same time Republicans surrendering any claim at all for fiscal sanity, that's going to add three and a half trillion dollars to the debt.

So you've got the worst of both worlds.

You've got millions losing health care, Americans for the most part not feeling any kind of direct benefit from this, and three and a half trillion to the debt that will actually drive up, as you know already, interest payments already exceed our defense budget.

That's going to just drive interest rates continuing up.

That translates as well onto overall credit card rates going up.

So this is a, I think this bill was probably the worst piece of legislation I've seen in my time in the Senate.

Well, that's a decent bar.

It's not like Democrats can run on fiscal sanity, to be fair.

No, absolutely.

Neither team has much responsibility.

So let's move on to something much closer to your heart and also your leadership in the Senate, which is intelligence and the Intelligence Committee.

And we've seen a lot of concerns about politicization of intelligence process.

We've seen Tulsi Gabbard saying one thing during her confirmation, walking back more recently on Iran specifically.

We've also seen individuals that have been disciplined for putting forward their views in intelligence.

Discipline is not fired.

Yes, fired.

Yes.

I mean, this was the area, frankly, in all the frustration.

This happened before, by the way.

Not at this level.

So explain explain to the audience what you see.

What I'm seeing is ever since the Iraq war, when clearly intelligence was manipulated, there's been a sense that we need to build up the intelligence community.

They need to be independent.

They need to be able to speak truth to power.

And that has not had political interference going on.

Sometimes people don't listen to the IC, but they've at least been able to do their job.

Now you've got a crowd led by Tulsi Gabbard, who I think is way above her skill level and should resign or be fired, who is basically trying to remake the intelligence community.

Just recently showing that we're trying to collect at the Director of National Intelligence Level literally the chats of all the intelligence community across the 17 different agencies to create some kind of master file to make sure that people are all loyal to the Trump administration.

More specifically, there was a intelligence report about whether this bad gang in Venezuela was actually controlled by the Maduro government.

The intelligence community said bad guys, Maduro government in Venezuela, bad guys, but not involved, but not directly directly connected.

And then the intelligence professionals that came to that conclusion were told to change.

And when they wouldn't bend the knee, they got fired.

I've had members of the Five Eyes Intelligence Community, those are the the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians, >> America's closest partners internationally on intelligence.

>> Come to me and say, "Mark, we've never seen."

They knew these intelligence professionals, them getting fired, coming on top of the carelessness that was exemplified by the Signalgate fiasco where classified information was used on a non-secure channel.

My feeling is not only are we've got a low morale in the intelligence community, not only will people be threatened if they don't adhere to the Trump philosophy, but on top of that you've got, I believe, a sense from many of our partner countries that they may or not share intelligence with us.

And we won't know that.

You don't know what you didn't get.

But all of this makes America less safe.

And frankly, the thing that has disappointed me the most, I've had a lot of my Republican friends on the intelligence community and otherwise say, "Mark," you know, because I chastised them inside the SCIF, in the classified area, and they say, "Mark, keep talking about it."

I've even had one say, "Mark, it's like you're our conscience."

I don't want to be your damn conscience.

I want you to vote your conscience.

And the fact that they have not decided to push back in any major way has been a huge disappointment to me.

Now, when you talk about individual analysts in the intelligence community, they've had their entire careers in the intelligence community.

They are committed to doing their best job to get that information up the chain of command so the president can eventually see it.

And they're told you have to change what your honest analysis is for political reasons.

My assumption is that has a hugely chilling effect across the community.

- That may be an understatement.

- So what I want to know is, in your position, are you getting inbound directly from disgruntled analysts, from people that want to quit, or they're whistleblowers?

I mean, how is that process working?

>> We hear at the committee, because we've always been - that's, again, been a bit of a challenge.

We've always been extraordinarily bipartisan, and a little bit of that is more difficult now.

But we hear on an individual basis.

And, you know, how - what I'm concerned about are these actions where the estimate of the Venezuelan gang and senior people got fired.

You know, that has a chilling effect on people doing their job the right way.

We try to make sure, and I can't go into any specifics, obviously, about people who are coming to us, but there is, we are in such uncharted, dangerous territory.

And it's not only dangerous in terms of what we may not be hearing as policymakers, because the IC has a product, their customers are the president, but it's also the Congress, it's also our military.

And if the military's not getting the straight scoop as well, that makes our service members in harm's way.

And the part that I think most people, we have the world's best intelligence services, but about, of our product, about 50 percent of it comes from our services.

But roughly 40 to 50 percent, depending on the issue, comes from partner nations, not just Five Eyes, but our allies around the world.

>> Yeah, Israel on the Middle East, for example.

>> And when we start to see - when we start to see those folks be concerned, that concerns me as well.

Because you imagine if you were a senior spy at the CIA and you've spent your whole career there, and you've got this new administration suddenly coming in and saying here's the new foreign policy, Russia's our friend and Canada's our enemy, people are kind of going for a loop at that policy level beyond this threat to the integrity of the independence of the product.

>> Yeah.

I mean, certainly on the - how much the Americans can work with the Russians, Trump has had a very different perspective over the course of the last - let's just say that's an evolving perspective over the past weeks.

But I take your point.

I am interested in the 12-day war that the Israelis launched with American support and then the Americans got involved with.

You, of course, received briefings on that.

Publicly, there's been a lot of politics around did we accomplish anything, was it only set back by weeks, by months, by years.

Do you feel comfortable on the basis of your intelligence briefings that that process was handled in a clear, fair, analytic, bipartisan way?

>> I want us to be successful.

>> Right, of course.

>> And I wish the president's assessment of total obliteration was accurate.

And the idea that he made that assessment within two hours of the bombing - and by the way, as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, I received no notice of that ahead of time, which is at least a major process foul.

If this had happened under a different administration, people would have gone, you know, crazy about it.

>> They wouldn't have asked permission, but they would have let you know.

>> Of course, let us know.

That's all their obligation is.

But the idea that he set this impossible bar, and then as the intelligence started to come through showing not total obliteration - because, candidly, some of the enriched uranium was not even at a site that was hit with the bunker buster bombs because it was so deeply [inaudible].

And so he set a standard that was too high.

I do think our military performed incredibly well.

I think we have set Iran back some period of time.

I don't think we've got a final consensus yet.

And remember, we've also got foreign intelligence services, again, allies, coming back again with the months' assessment, not years' assessment.

But they have been set back.

And, you know, I'll grant them the couple years if you're talking about the total program where they had the ability to create a number of bombs with a missile delivery system, but the notional idea that if you had a few centrifuges left and a lot of enriched uranium, the idea that you could potentially race to a bomb that could potentially fit in the backseat of a - or trunk of a car, that is of concern.

Now, I would - again, I come back to where I started.

I wish the president was fully accurate in this.

But by, again, setting an unreasonable expectation, what I'm fearful of is because we've seen Iran back off.

But Iran has opportunities through the cyber domain, through third-party groups to still strike at us.

And the only reason we'll be able to get full information is if we get back to negotiations and we get those inspectors back on the ground.

>> But a question - a quick question, but I just want to understand.

Do you believe that the American people have been well served by the intelligence process that you've been a part of on Iran?

Again, I'm asking that specifically because of the concerns you've raised on Venezuela, for example, other issues.

This is the most important so far foreign policy decision that the Americans have made in this Trump administration.

Has that worked?

>> Well, Tulsi Gabbard said in March of this year that the supreme leader in Iran had not made a determination to move towards weaponization.

In the very week that these actions were started, when the war started, the intelligence community came back and said at that point they would not change their conclusion.

Now, having full visibility into the Iranian decision-making process on when they were so close to the edge, but actually taking the decision to move towards weaponization, I think that is - was still an unanswered question.

And my concern for the American people here is if we set the expectation that Iran is so set back that we take our eyes off the regime and don't have to worry about it anymore, that does not make us safer because clearly they still have some capacity.

>> Now, another big place where we've seen a lot of movement recently on the Middle East, Israel, Gaza.

As you and I are speaking right now, Prime Minister Netanyahu has had a couple of meetings now with President Trump.

The Qataris are getting involved, delegation coming to the United States.

It feels like we are getting closer to at least a 60-day ceasefire on Gaza.

How fruitful is this process right now?

Having lived through this for the whole last year-plus of the Biden administration, when - I will believe it when we get it in terms of the 60-day ceasefire.

We need to get the hostages back.

We need to stop the, you know, the brutalization of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

And again, at the - literally the final detail level, I'm still unsure, you know, who has been pulling the rug out and not getting the full yes.

I think for a while it was clearly Hamas.

I think for a while it was Netanyahu.

I think Netanyahu is probably moving more proactively forward from pressure from Trump.

I'll give President Trump credit for that.

>> And from his own popularity and a win in Iran.

>> And from, yes, having the fact that Israel's in a stronger position than ever, with Lebanon, Syria, and the whole chessboard disrupted in the Middle East, towards Israel's favor.

That's, again, net good.

I hope and pray that we get to that ceasefire, because what is preventing any kind of actual move towards permanent peace, towards, for example, Saudi Arabia recognition of Israel, is the conflict in Gaza.

And the price that Israel has paid, at least in terms of its reputation around the world, has been pretty dramatic.

>> A lot of people have died, of course.

A lot of civilians have died in Gaza.

A lot of people have died - a lot of civilians have died in Ukraine.

We cover that a lot.

We talk about that a lot.

A lot of civilians have died in Sudan.

And you individually have taken that as a leadership role that we need to be paying a lot more attention, and playing a peacemaking role in this brutal, brutal civil war in Sudan.

Talk about why you decided to play that role.

>> Well, it was a couple of reasons.

I've got a wonderful Sudanese-American woman who works for my - works for me and helped educate me.

And the Sudan tragedy, where more people die every day than Gaza and Ukraine combined, is really heartbreaking.

In 2019, the Sudanese people threw out a dictator, the longest-serving dictator in the world.

They had the beginnings of a democracy.

Two warlords started a civil war a couple years ago.

People are dying.

>> And they're not good guys, between the two of them, right?

>> One thing is, you know, we don't have to pick a team because both teams are bad.

One team, the remnants of the military, is being supported by Saudi Arabia, by Iran, a bit by Russia.

The other team, the RSF it's called, has been supported dramatically by UAE.

And I just thought this was such low-hanging opportunity for either Biden or Trump.

But if Trump, with his influence with Saudis and UAE, could get them to cut off funding these insurgents on both teams, we could bring about a level of peace to Sudan and also show the continent of Africa that we actually care about Africans killing.

I think it would be a huge policy win.

It would be a great signal to the rest of the world.

Trump would have undue influence with his ties to both Saudis and UAE.

And it would push back the other outside forces in the region.

It hasn't happened to date.

A lot of this - I'm still trying to press, you know, Marco Rubio to make sure they put a Sudanese point person.

But this is a conflict that should come to an end.

The world needs to pay more attention.

And, you know, I'm going to hang in on it.

As you said, it doesn't get a lot of attention.

There are Republican senators working with me on this.

And we've got to get it done.

>> I mean, Trump does want to be a peacemaker.

He does want to say "I have personally ended wars," even when he's in a marginal role like India-Pakistan, for example.

He has played a role between Rwanda and the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, where America's actually getting some economic interest out of that too.

And I've seen that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, your former colleague in the Senate, has, like, leaned into that, has said that that in Africa is a significant win.

So are we seeing - are you seeing any signs that he's prepared?

>> No, we have - I have not seen signs yet that there's been any significant focus on Sudan.

In the meantime, the killing goes on, the starvation goes on.

When we talk about this crazy rescissions package, where basically Trump is saying regardless of what Congress said we're going to do what we want in terms of cutting funds, a lot of those funds were in the foreign aid category, our cutoff of aid to Sudan, along with many countries, but Sudan in particular, people are dying every day because America didn't keep its word on funds that had been appropriated and approved and now are being clawed back, I think, in an inhumane way, but also in a way that weakens America because when we don't do this other countries, a la China, can step in for pennies on the dollar and try to provide the kind of consistent support that we used to provide.

I mean, the fact is, you know, I've talked about this many times, this administration destroyed 75 years of soft power.

Our strength comes not only from our military and our economy, but the fact that we had soft power helping, you know, particularly Third World nations rise up.

Our cutting off of that was one of the most inane, stupid decisions the administration has made that has been full of stupid decisions.

>> But Elon is gone now.

That was the guy that was pushing so hard to remove USAID and DOGE.

>> I think the president - you know, his deep views, unfortunately, about Africa were expressed in his first term when he described many of these countries in a disparaging way.

So anything we can move to get focus on Sudan, or for that matter, opportunities in Africa - and again, where are most of the rare earth minerals at least harvested from?

It's Africa.

So there are national security reasons as well.

>> So Mark, when we come back from summer, you and I sit down and talk in the fall, are we going to have a better conversation about this?

You think there's going to be movement?

>> I pray so, because this - I think if Americans, and for that matter the rest of the world, could see the tragedy unfolding, part of the problem is these forces have basically restricted any foreign journalists from getting in.

So you don't see the kind of suffering that created, you know, the We Are the World Movement a number of years back, or then the situation around Darfur 20-plus years ago, where the focus of the world came.

I mean, I pray that come Labor Day that we can see some progress.

But it's proven harder and thornier than I expected.

We've got a big Sudanese-American community in Virginia as well.

To hear the stories from these families, I don't know how anyone of goodwill could hear these stories and not say we need to help.

Well, thank you for that, Mark Warner.

I appreciate you being on the show.

Thank you, Ian.

[MUSIC] Now it's that time, your favorite time of the week, or at least one of the strangest.

I've got your Puppet Regime.

>> Look, you might not believe me and Pam Bondi, OK, but take it from a big, beautiful guy who knows a thing or two about lists.

>> What?

This is what I look like in July.

>> Can you say the thing?

>> That's right.

After a thorough investigation, there is no list.

>> What the heck?

You told us for years there was a list.

>> Well, I checked.

And as usual, I even checked it twice.

No list.

>> Look, Nick here, he knows a lot.

OK, he knows if you're sleeping, if you're awake.

He probably knows which radical communist killed JFK at Forge Theater.

OK, so when he says there's no list... >> Wait, there's not even a good list?

>> Well, nobody on the list is good.

That I can tell you.

>> Wait, so there is a list?

>> Perpetuating unfounded theories about lists is not helpful.

>> I mean, that is your whole business model, to be honest.

>> Oh, look who's talking.

>> Sir, point blank question.

Is President Trump on any of these lists?

>> No.

Nobody's on a list which does not exist.

>> I can't believe this.

Even Elmo said it exists.

Elmo!

>> I know it's hard, but you must find it within yourself to believe... >> In magic.

>> In the magic of a list...

Which does not exist.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you think you could lead a major American political party out of the wilderness, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint... and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care, and more.

Cox.

A family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by... Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Koo and Patricia Yuen.

Committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... [music]