Sen. Marco Rubio will fill in as the interim chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rubio, 48, accepted the position as the acting chairman Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced. McConnell in his statement called the senator “a talented and experienced Senate leader with expertise in foreign affairs and national security matters.”
“Senator Rubio has spent a decade as a leading member on the Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committee,” he said. “His care for our nation’s security, advocacy for our values and interests, and vigilance toward threats have earned a national reputation. On subjects ranging from China and Russia to Iran and North Korea to tyranny and unrest in our own hemisphere, Senator Rubio has been on the case for years.”
The Florida Republican released a statement shortly thereafter expressing his gratitude for the opportunity.
“I am grateful to Leader McConnell for his confidence in me to lead the Senate Intelligence Committee during Sen. Burr’s absence from the chairmanship,” he said. “The committee has long been one that conducts its work seriously, and I look forward to continuing that tradition.”
Rubio’s first big task with the gavel will be presiding over Tuesday’s committee vote on President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Rep. John Ratcliffe. The president picked the Texas Republican to serve as his spy chief earlier this year and, if confirmed, he will replace acting spy chief Richard Grenell.
“Rep. Ratcliffe understands his top responsibility is to make sure the wide array of intelligence agencies are sharing information across lines, coordinating capabilities, and are all working in the furtherance of the same strategic aim of the 21st century,” Rubio said following Ratcliffe’s confirmation hearing in early May. “I think he would be an excellent Director of National Intelligence.”
Last week, Sen. Richard Burr stepped down from his chairmanship of the committee amid an investigation over allegations of insider trading.
The Justice Department is looking into whether Burr, 64, improperly used information he learned through daily briefings in his role leading the committee to inform his trading decisions earlier this year. The North Carolina Republican offloaded up to $1.7 million in stocks right before the coronavirus pandemic led to a stock market plummet.
Burr has maintained that he did nothing wrong and asked for the Senate Ethics Committee to conduct a full investigation into the allegations in March. Burr said in a statement after the controversy began that he “relied solely on public news reports” in his decision to sell a large percentage of his portfolio in 33 separate transactions.
Rubio has long been outspoken on issues related to foreign policy and national security since winning his first Senate election back in 2010, proving himself to be a hawk, especially against Vladimir Putin’s Russia and dictators in Latin America, such as the Castros of Cuba and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.
The Florida Republican has also pushed for the United States to get tough on China, especially in the wake of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which originated there.
He contributed to a 52-page Henry Jackson Society report earlier this month titled “Breaking The China Supply Chain: How The ‘Five Eyes’ Can Decouple From Strategic Dependency.” He argued that the “Five Eyes” intelligence partners — the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — needed to do more to combat China’s malfeasance on the global stage.
“The Chinese Communist Party … is aggressively working to supplant democratic order and governance, as well as the alliances and systems that uphold it — including our Five Eyes partnership,” he said. “Strategic competition with China is about the fight for democracy against authoritarianism. The CCP’s goal is not just to materially enrich its country, but to re-centre the global order around Beijing.”
Rubio said: “In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, I have introduced legislation to help return essential medical supply chains to America from China, offering tax breaks to firms that produce pharmaceuticals in the U.S. In the same vein, I have proposed a cooperative model to spur the creation of supply chains for rare-earth mining, which could be replicated for other industries.”
The senator could run into criticism from some of Trump’s biggest loyalists, who have criticized his past comments related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
“Carter Page — I’m not claiming that he’s James Bond, he’s not 007 — but, he’s a guy that, even before the campaign, so this isn’t Trump-related, even before the campaign, he’s a guy who went around bragging about his connections in Russia,” Rubio said on CNN in 2018. “So, they knew he was before the campaign. Then you see the guy kind of gravitating around a leading campaign, and then other things came up on their screen, and they said we’ve gotta look at this guy, and that’s what the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] application sort of lays out.”
He added: “I don’t believe that them looking into Carter Page means they were spying on the campaign, and I also don’t believe it proves anything about collusion or anything like that.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s lengthy December 2019 report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and the bureau’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s salacious and flawed dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
The Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio contributed to this report.
