Pod Save the World - The Russian Investigation with Senator Mark Warner

Episode Date: April 12, 2017

Senator Mark Warner talks with Tommy about why the Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference in our election is the most important thing he’s done in public life. He also takes us behind the scenes of the Committee’s TOP SECRET work.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. My guest today is Senator Mark Warner, the senior senator from the great state of Virginia, and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the unfortunate acronym Sissy to nerds like me who worked in government. Senator, thank you so much for being here today. Well, Tommy, thank you. Although you've already got it part of my title wrong. It's actually the great Commonwealth of Virginia.

I'm not from Massachusetts, too. I should know these things. Well, thank you, Senator. I worked in national security, and I spent most of my adult life in politics, and I find it almost impossible to keep up. with the news in the Trump era. So I really appreciate you helping us all make sense of what the hell is going on out there. So I was hoping we could start at the beginning with just sort of a quick overview of the Church Committee and the origins of congressional oversight of intelligence

activities. Because I think a lot of people listening would be shocked to learn about some of the abuses of power that happened in the 50s and 60s and 70s. There was surveillance and worse of American political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. plots to kill foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, covert efforts to topple foreign governments. Can you talk about? talk a bit about why the church committee was so necessary and what reforms Congress put in place and the role that was created for Congress? Well, I think you had an intelligence community that was started in many ways after World War II. That's when the former OSS, which was kind of the intelligence service during the war,

got switched over and it became the CIA. And the CIA, as you mentioned, there were wild things. It was kind of cowboys and there was challenges in Iran and there was challenges. In Cuba, obviously, there are challenges in Central America and elsewhere. We then, the intelligence community got bigger and bigger. It started to move from CIA to also include, you know, spy satellites and other kind of overhead. There was a, the military wanted to set up their own kind of intelligence services. So there was something called created DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency.

And then there was the whole question of, can you listen in? and that was and tap people's phones, and there was a creation of around signals intelligence. It's called the NSA, National Security Agency. And throughout the 60s and 70s, there were basically no rules on who could spy on who. Unlike the British, who've been doing this a lot longer than we have, and they've got one thing called MI6,

which kind of looks at people abroad, and MI5, which is their equivalent of the FBI, and they kind of had worked out a lot of, of these things, but we hadn't. So there were abuses. There was a senator from Idaho, back when Idaho used to have Democratic senators, Frank Church, and he had a commission that said, hey, we need to put some rules in place, and we need to create standing committees that would oversee the Intelligence Committee. So there was this group, as you called, Sissy set up a select committee on intelligence in the Senate, and Hipsy, almost as bad a name, that's on the House side. And it's not

like that we've always done a great job with these committees. The intelligence community now involves 17 different agencies, if you even include places like the FBI. And yet we still have had, even since then, things like the Iran-Contra scandal. We've got obviously the concerns around 2001, the 9-11 commission, and others where, and even up to the challenges around what's called enhanced interrogation or torture through the beginnings of the. the Iraq war. So I think these committees are there to do oversight, but you really need a trust relationship because the normal position of most folks in the intelligence community, I get this better now having been on the committee for a few years than I did before, was that if you go

out and don't respect some of their sources and methods, people can actually die. I mean, there are people that are working for our government around the world that could be compromised, or we might have certain ways that we can listen or hear or see things that if we reveal them, the bad guys, whoever our adversaries were, would take them down. So there's this constant tension between, you know, how do we have oversight, how do we let the public know what's going on, but at the same time not, in effect, disarm in a world that's getting more and more complicated as we think about the whole realm of cyber and cybersecurity and hacking and false information.

and I'm sure we'll get into that and some of the stuff the Russians did, but it's pretty wild. Yeah, it is wild. And so just sort of on the day-to-day, I mean, so the intelligence community spends all day collecting and analyzing information. The White House and other policymakers use that information to make policy decisions that are better or more informed. What is the congressional committees sort of day-to-day like? Are you overseeing the covert action programs? Are you sort of looking at the way collection happens? Like, what sort of things are you guys working on on a day-to-day basis? Well, we do look at covert action where the president would have the intelligence community would do a finding, and then they're saying, hey, we're going to do this in a covert way. We're supposed to, where we also do the budgets for all the intelligence community, which is, again, not fully public, but we go through the authorization process. We also try to make sure there's not mistakes made. and one of the areas long before the Russia stuff got started,

and I talked about this, it's like for a long time America thought that we were going to control space, and so we have built these giant, you know, very, very powerful satellites, but many of them are large and bulky, and it's kind of like nobody in the spy business or in the defense business ever saw a James Bond movie, because we all remember back from like, I'm an old guy, but from like the 60s and 70s James Bond movies,

the bad guys were always shooting a laser beam that could blow up a satellite. Well, now we're in 2016, and we've got 2017, and we've got the possibility of some of our potential adversaries, China, Russia, what have you, could actually use those kind of tools to disable some of our satellites. And since we're so technology-dependent, and this is all public domain, there was actually a 60-minute special about it a couple years back,

really means we've got to rethink some of the way that the intelligence community writ large actually goes about its business. So it's an exciting committee. It's one you don't get to talk about a lot. It's not normally one unlike right now where you get a lot of attention. But it really is very important

to kind of get these things right. And as we get into a world that is more and more going to be cyberdependent and information dependent, we've got to do it right. Yeah. Well, it's fascinating work and thank you for doing it. Before we get to the Russian investigation,

I just want to quickly ask you about some comments, and Trump made accusing former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of committing a crime by seeking to unmask identities of individuals named in intelligence reports. I am biased here. I, you know, lived every minute of the bullshit they tried to pull on Susan during the Benghazi quote-unquote scandal. My emotion will come through on this as we talk. But I'm wondering if you had thoughts on President Trump's accusations here and, you know, what may or may not be normal or what unmasking is in the course of a national security advisor's day-to-day work.

Well, first of all, it is a little unusual for the president to kind of weigh in. And this president in particular, he weighs in out a whole lot of stuff. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised he weighed in on Susan. You know, what happens is there is a whole set of rules in place to make sure that if one of our agencies, particularly one of the ones that might be mostly looking at foreigners, you know, inadvertently comes across an American contact. And an American citizen is named. and they will basically, if you get a report, that name will be blacked out. You wouldn't be able to see who it is.

However, if you're an intelligence professional, as Susan was, and National Security Advisor, you have the right to say, hey, I got to really have context and know who this person is. And then you go through a procedure where the intel community decides. And if you get that information, it's not leaking the information. It's in the normal course you could ask for. I need this person's name unmask, and if the intel community decides it's okay, you get it unmasked. Part of this all came about, I think, because the head of the House committee, or former head of the House committee, he's had to step back. Now, Darren Nunes went, and it almost seemed like kind of a Keystone Cops thing, went to the White House, got some documents, looked at him, you know, didn't tell the rest of his committee, went back to the next day and briefed the president now.

Why, you couldn't have been briefed if they were actually at the White House? I don't know. But, and so some of those documents I've not seen yet, and neither have the Republicans on my committee seen yet. So we had to look at him. And if, you know, what I've said is we're going to follow the intelligence wherever it leads. If it appears that Susan has done something inappropriate, we're going to follow that. I have not seen any evidence of that.

But just as I've asked my Republican colleagues, hey, you've got to like, you know, as we see all these stories about possible contact between people affiliated with Mr. Trump while he was a candidate in Russia. we've got to follow that as well. But I believe that I'll just leave it. I've seen no evidence that there was any inappropriate action yet on behalf of Susan Rice. You're geeking out with me on POTSA of the World. More on the way. So with respect to the investigation into Russia's role in our election, I've read reports that you've been studying Russian interference into elections in countries around the globe. You've been looking at obscure Russian military doctrines. What have you

learned about what they've done in the past, interfering elections, and how they view cyber warfare? They view misinformation, disinformation. Remember, most of your listeners probably don't remember the Soviet Union and communism. One of their best tools was propaganda.

They are, frankly, much better at propaganda than Americans have been. And what they've been able to do in countries like Bulgaria, like Romania, like some of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, they have been for years practicing some of these techniques.

So how do you put out false information? How do you smear someone? So what they can do is not only hack into your Internet file or hack into your device, but they've been shown to actually where they can, if, you know, because I know none of your listeners would ever have anything on any of their devices that was inappropriate. No. Never, ever. So, you know, if we're checking you out and it's not inappropriate, what they could then do is say, okay, we're going to place a child pornography file on your phone.

And then they call the cops and say, hey, you ought to check out person X, Y, Z, and look at his phone because he's got a bunch of child porn on it, which is kind of why, which is obviously a wild technique. And now what we do know is what we do know in terms of what happened in basically most of 2016 was these tools, Tommy, that they've used in other countries, and this gets into their whole use of cyber, they believe that cyber is a domain where countries are already fighting each other, even though there's no formal aggression. So, you know, normally we think about war as, you know, you fight on the land, you fight on the sea, you fight on the air. Well, cyber is a whole new domain. And, again, we've got to think about all of our activities. This is not just in terms of Russian aggression, but, you know, the amount of the number of our companies that have been hacked into for intellectual property, the number of individuals that have been hacked into for nefarious means. What we, it's pretty wild. So what we do know is that Russia decided that they were going to try to mess up.

with our election. And they hacked into both political parties. They decided midsummer that they would like to not just so chaos, but they would like to see Trump win and Clinton lose. So on one level, they hacked, and that's where you got suddenly the use of the DNC emails, and then John Podesta, who was the chairman of the Clinton campaign. You know, they would dribble these emails out at, you know, in times to embarrass Clinton. And some of this is pretty wild because one of the things that happened during the Republican Convention, the only thing that majoredly changed in their platform is suddenly the Republican platform got much more pro-Russia and much more anti-Ukraine.

And nobody's really run that story to ground yet. But it is pretty weird because, again, I grew up in the time when, you know, the Republicans were much more kind of anti-communists and the Democrats reviewed as more kind of softer on this. So here you've got this case where suddenly the Republican platform is, much more pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine than what I would agree with, or frankly, most Republicans, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, you know, and then three days after that change, you had the first of the DNC emails started to leak out. Then a few, a week or so later,

you actually had then-candidate Trump say, publicly, say, you know, I wish the Russians would go, continue to hack Hillary Clinton and show where all her lost emails are. You know, that's pretty wild when you've got a country that has been historically one of our adversaries and you've got a candidate for president encouraging an adversary to actually hack into a different his opposition. What also happened that is actually, in many ways, wilder is, and your audience is younger and they probably get this better than I, but they had like a thousand paid internet trolls, not just in Russia, but across Eastern Europe that would work. And they would create both bots and botnets. Bots are basically where you go out and create a whole lot of fake

identities, you know, fake Twitter addresses, fake Facebook addresses. Botnets are where you can actually take over a bunch of dormant computers that might not be being used and have those computers actually send messages. So what they were able to do was kind of flood the zone with this fake news to the point that if you Googled, for example, election hacking, you would get four out of five of the stories would not be NBC or even Fox. They'd be Russian propaganda because they were able to game the algorithm so they appeared highest, you know, the highest red. There's even been charges, and we're looking into the truth of this or not,

that they were able to make sure that in certain areas in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, strangely enough, those three states, that there was information in the last week or 10 days where there was a dramatic upsurge of fake news, particularly geared towards like women who might have voted for Hillary, where they wouldn't get information about Trump and Clinton fighting each other, but they get all these kind of stuff, well, Hillary's sick, or Hillary's stealing money from the State Department. So this is a level of misinformation and disinformation

that we've just never seen. It's unprecedented. And before people say, well, gosh, you know, to Tommy, this is just some Democrat complaining. I'm not trying to relitigate the election. But I'm saying this happened. Everybody in the intelligence community agreed it happened. And now we're seeing it happen real time right now in France,

because France is having its presidential election. And again, you've got the Russian interference coming in to help the far-right candidate. You'd think they'd help the far-left candidate, because they used to be communist, but they're helping the far-right candidate, a lady named Marie Le Pen. and they've suddenly

her opponent, a guy named Marcon, Emmanuel Marcon, has had a whole bunch of bad, I think, misinformation come out about him. And again, I think this is the tools the Russians are using. Not just in America. They're using it in France.

I just met with the head of German intelligence the other day. They've had the whole German parliament has been hacked. So, you know, in each of these cases, what Putin is doing is he's not trying to do something for one party of the over. He's doing whatever he can

to either we can America, we can France, weak in Germany, we can any kind of democratic society, because he wants to be able to say, hey, look how messed up these guys are. In the case of what happened in America, though, was he not only wanted to sow that discontent, but he clearly favored, and this is not my words, this is the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, head of the NSA, the overall director of national intelligence. He in this past election was trying to help Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton. Yeah. I mean, when I hear you talk about this, I don't think you sound at all.

all-partisan, but you do sound like someone who's obviously privy to a lot of information and is taking this deadly seriously, especially when I hear you say things like this is the most important thing you've done in public life. So I was wondering, given that fact, do you feel like the congressional leadership has given the committee the support and jurisdictional space to cover the scope of this investigation? Because what you're describing sounds vast. Well, it is vast. And there are nights, I go, you know, holy heck, how am we ever going to sort through all this? And then we've got this other, a lot of stories that everybody's read in the newspaper about people who were affiliated with Mr. Trump who had ongoing contacts with Russia. We've already seen a national security advisor, General Flynn, have to resign because he didn't tell the whole story about some of his contacts with Russians.

We've seen the Attorney General, Attorney General Sessions have to recuse himself because he didn't tell the whole story as well. So there's a lot we have to get at here. I think the leadership in both sides have given us some space. but I got a, you know, I'm pretty bipartisan in everything I've done when I was governor or senator. You know, when your listeners hear about a Senate gang, I'm usually part of every gang. I work in the only place in America where being a gang member is a good thing. That means it's bipartisan. You've got a group of Democrats, Republicans work together.

And I believe more than ever, this investigation with the way people are so split in our country, if we don't do this bipartisan, no matter almost what facts we come up with, half the country is going to say, oh, that's just politics. And this is so much more important than any individual. This is that goes at the heart of our democracy. And if there were some of the kind of connections between Trump type associates and the Russians, you know, the American public needs to know that. Yeah. I mean, there appear to be significant law enforcement equities associated with this investigation as well. And, you know, when you read about Iran-Contra, Oliver North ultimately was not imprisoned because he received certain immunities from Congress as part of their investigation. So I was wondering if FBI or DOJ has asked

the committee to hold off on interviewing any witnesses because, you know, they have law enforcement equities that they believe supersede the committee's work. No, we haven't had that yet. And again, publicly, Director Comey of the FBI indicated there were investigations going on started as early as last July. There may come a time where there's some of this conflict. We'll have to try to work it out. but you know what I believe is in the day the American public have got a right to know what happened how did it happen who was involved and if there were involvements on either side we got to follow the intel and you know I've not reached any conclusion by any means but there's boy oh boy there's a lot of smoke and it seems like every week you know the White House who denies all of this even denies the Russians really had any involvements in many ways which is totally counter to everything the intelligence community has said. If they're right and there's not anything here, you'd think they would want to help us

rather than it seems like every, because that would clear up this cloud that clearly hangs over the administration. But instead they seemed like every week there's another distraction coming up. So, you know, it's a big job and you're right there will be the possibility of, you know, the law enforcement agencies because ultimately we can have a report. We don't prosecute anybody. That has to be done by the Justice Department. But we don't want to mess up any of their prosecutions, but we also got to get all the facts. Right.

I appreciate your goal of a full of public accounting here. Does that mean you guys hope to release an unclassified report at the end of this process? So there's some of a definitive record of what happened. And do we think we can get President Trump to release it in a series of tweets? I'd tell you this, but there will be an unclassified section of the report that I hope will be able to lay. out in as much detail as possible what happened and who was involved and who wasn't involved. There will be some parts that will be classified because it will go to the very sources and methods is the term that people in the kind of intel or spy business use because I don't want to,

I want somebody that is trying to work with our nation be killed because we have seen, you know, and particularly in Russia, we've seen arrest of protesters, we've seen the killing of journalists. and we don't want to disclose to our potential adversaries some of the tools we use. I do know this. I mean, that there are probably a lot of your listeners that maybe a couple years ago thought Wikileaks was some great exposure of information that folks should know. I think WikiLeaks, at least in this case, was 100% kind of almost a pawn or tool of the Russians. and it sure has seemed like over the last few years, if you look at who Julian Assange and WikiLeaks has leaked on, it's almost always been Western democracies and not any of the authoritarian regimes

like Russia. More nerdy foreign policy coming up on Pod Save the World. You mentioned Congressman Nunes earlier. I was going to ask you what the hell is wrong with that guy. I mean, I wonder if you have thoughts on, you and Senator Burr are approaching this in a very serious way. I saw the press conference you gave. It was bipartisan. It was thoughtful. It is in stark contrast with his behavior. Congressman Schiff, obviously, is, he's a friend of the pod, first of all, but he's a very serious individual. I'm wondering what you think needs to happen to give people confidence in this

process and what the Senate can do to sort of fix what they've screwed up on the House side. Your word's not mine. I think that, you know, we're trying to do our thing. We don't have a lot of say about what happens in the House. I think, you know, we believe that we got to do this bipartisan. We've got to do it right. There was information that came out today that Devin Nunes, who's a congressman from California, has, in a sense, kind of recused himself from this investigation and somebody else, one of the other Republican members are stepping in to run it. And, you know, listen, I wish them luck. I think there's plenty of information here that we have to get to the bottom of. And if they can have a, a bipartisan, thoughtful approach as well,

I think that's better for the American people. But I think we all got to kind of prove our worth and what we're trying to do. And I've been really lucky on the Senate side because not only Richard Burr, who I've known for a long time, you know, people that some of your listeners not normally think about as being helpful. Roy Blunt from Missouri and Susan Collins from Maine

and Marco Rubio's been great on all these issues from Florida. And James Langford, he's very conservative. in a traditional sense, but on these issues. He's been great, all saying, hey, we've got to check our D and our hats for a while and actually figure out what happened here, because this time it may have helped one team, but next time, 2018, 2020, if we don't expose and find better defenses, the Russians could very well flip and try to help another candidate. Yeah, well, I'm glad you guys are providing the adult supervision that's required

because he, Congressman Nunes is apparently under investigation because he may have disclosed classified information. So that feels like not quite the role of the committee on the House side. Some of the stuff, Tommy, I tell you, as each week goes along, in the most days, I kind of go, wow, you can't make this stuff up. You know, you wouldn't, it's almost like you wouldn't think if it was a movie that it would be this many dots, but it's, it's pretty wild. It is wild. And, you know, it's wild the amount of sensitive and classified information that's, like, routinely in the newspaper every day. the fact that we're openly talking about FISA information. I mean, as a person who had this drilled into me at the NSC

that this stuff was as sensitive as it gets, it is mind-boggling. Yeah, it really is. And again, that's why this trust, because a lot of the members of the committee have rightfully said, hey, if we don't see all the intel and the information, we can't sign our names to a report. And we've had to talk to the intelligence community

and say, hey, we're going to be good stewards of this. We're going to only look at the stuff we need to look at. We'll do it in secure areas. And we're not going to leak a lot of it. And every day the press will ask me, what about this guy? What about that guy? And I just say, hey, you know, we're going to do this in an orderly fashion. I'm a pretty impatient guy.

But in this case, we've got to do it right. We've got to look at the intelligence first. Before you start bringing in witnesses, because, you know, if you don't have the information asked to the right questions, if you brought in folks too early, they might say, hey, I've already come and testified you, I don't need to come and testify again. So doing this in an orderly fashion really makes sense. Yeah. Slightly switching gears, Steve Bannon got booted from the NSC this week, which in my mind is a great development. I think I sat in hundreds of hours of National Security Council meetings. And not only did politics not come up, but, you know, the idea that someone

whose primary job is to get the boss reelected would even be sitting in a meeting about North Korea's nuclear program or Syria is just insane to me. But, you know, I know, I know you, you've put forward legislation on this issue, but you still have Jared Kushner acting as sort of a de facto secretary of state despite having no foreign policy experience. I'm just wondering what what message you think it sends to have these political staffers involved on these issues. And if, you know, you would course correct somehow if you could, you know, Ben Trump's year on this issue. Yeah, I think what President Trump did was unprecedented. I mean, I know the Obama folks never had David Axelrod regularly sit in these meetings. And George Bush never had Karl Rove. So the idea that the next

National Security Council, which is the military and the intel community and professional staffers who know their substance that you put your top political guy, I think I was really glad to see the president move him off. And it feels like the new National Security Advisor McMasters, who I don't really know, but he really seems to be trying to tighten up some of the operations. I actually, and most of your listeners would probably be upset at me on this one, I voted for, for Rex Tillerson, not because he would have been the guy I would have chosen, but I thought that he was an adult. He understood the world. I disagree with him on things like climate and everything else, but I really felt this president who kind of shoots from the hip that he would have someone

that would be kind of a steadying force. I kept thinking, you know, Tillerson and Mattis and Mattis being the Secretary of Defense are, you know, again, might not agree with everything they do, but they're kind of stable forces. And I hope, again, Secretary Tillerson gets out more often. Because Jared Kushner is one of the people that we're going to interview, I'd rather not make any comments about him directly. But, you know, it's one of the things I think people, I'm not sure everybody fully appreciates, is that, you know, the words of the president, no matter who he or she is, really matters. Sometimes I think as Americans, you know, with 24-hour news and we hear our presidents say a lot of different things and, you know, people kind of tune out at times.

But if you're a president and you're talking about Japan or you're talking about Korea, or you're talking about NATO, or you're talking about Mexico, you know, the words of the president of the United States, when you talk about another country specifically, boy, oh, boy, that is always front page news and has really huge effects. You know, the words of a president can shape how the world goes. And, you know, sometimes I believe, and this is not exactly a newsflash, but sometimes I think that, you know, President Trump has been less than, less than diplomatic on some of his words, tweets, and otherwise, which just doesn't make America stronger. Yeah, very harsh, Senator. No, I mean, I agree with you on Tillerson. I think when I saw his name

floated, it was not a obvious choice. But, you know, you see someone who's run a big organization as relationships globally. I thought maybe he, you know, he's. he could be a reasonable force for good in this White House and this administration. It's been surprising to me the degree to which he's just been completely absent. I wonder if you've heard any rationale for why. I actually have spent some time with him. And I think my hope is that he's taken the time to kind of get his arms around the job. You know, I was a business guy before I became governor.

You know, no matter what you think you know, you don't really know until you're in these jobs. And I'm going to try to give him the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer that, you know, he's just trying to make sure he understands, you know, how the State Department operates. But I do, I did urge him that, you know, we need to hear his voice more often because it's, you know, when he had, what I know when he went to the State Department on his first day, everything I heard was he gave a really great speech that really reinforced the, you know, a lot of good feeling in the State Department. So, you know, I'd like to see more of that on a going forward basis. That's good advice. My last question for you, Senator, and thank you so much again for your time is, you know, you see. Massive challenges globally. We've got Syria using chemical weapons reportedly against innocent kids.

You've got the North Koreans testing ballistic missiles that could hit the United States, working on a miniaturization program for their nuclear weapons. What challenge do you see out there that worries you the most that you think this administration needs to solve fastest or else we might be in some trouble? Well, I think you mentioned two, but I would also put in there, you know, China's expansion in the South China seas. I would put in there as well, Iran and its destabilizing effect throughout the Middle East. I'd put in there, obviously, ISIL, and as a both in region and also in terms of its ability to radicalize people in the West. And I'd put Russia in there as well. I'm not sure, and there's a, what order? I think you almost have to you take on all of these problems.

You've got to have a strategy on each of them. I think North Korea now, we've, you know, this administration and the past administration always say, you know, hey, no more, but they keep being more outrageous. I hope the president's summit with President Xi of China that we can really leverage China's, because China economically really props up North Korea. I think that it is outrageous in Syria what has happened with the use of chemical weapons. you know, problem at this point in Syria, as this has become so sectarian between Kurds and Sunnis and al-a-whites who are a branch in the Shia, and then you've got Turkey next door, and then you've got Iranian Kurds forces in there. And there's a lot of, I've seen a lot of bad Syria plans. I've not seen a good one yet. So that one is, you know, that one is a real challenge. But I would actually,

almost back to the Russia issue in a way, I think, One of the places that can lead to the most disruption back in our country really is our cyber vulnerabilities because that could lead to radicalization of homegrown terrorists. It could lead to the kind of disruption of our system. The fact that we are so technologically adept is great. The fact that we may not have all that technology protected is a real challenge if you suddenly start to shut down our power systems and other things. and we've got one area not to kind of go off nerdy techie but there's this thing

called the Internet of Things 10 billion devices from your car and your refrigerator are all going to be connected to the internet it's going to go to 34 billion devices in the next three years and almost none of these devices got any kind of security built into them

so you know the ability to have things hacked or turned into botnets it's you know you could get pretty it is one of our most asymmetrical threats because you think about all the stuff that the Russians have done that is all the money they've spent against us or against some of the Germans or French is less than, you know, 1% or 2% of the cost of an aircraft carrier. So we're going to really need to rethink kind of our whole strategic approach in a 21st century world.

That is a very sobering assessment, but an extremely invaluable one for us to hear. Senator, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the leadership you're providing on the committee. We all feel better having, you know, heard you describe the work you're doing and knowing that you're part of the team that's leading this charge here. Tommy, thank you and thanks for the chance to be on the pod. And I just tell you, you know, I know people want to throw a shoe with the TV or turn off the TV when they see politics. You can't do that because at all that does is empower folks on the extremes. So, you know, stay in this. Don't ever be that against America. And at least on this issue that I'm on,

you know, we're going to get to the bottom of it one way or the other. That is great advice. Thank you, Senator. Thanks. Take care.