The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday he doesn’t believe the senior Trump administration official who wrote a blistering anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times is a threat to national security.
“No, I don’t,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said during an interview on CNN when asked about the nature of the threat the unnamed Trump appointee posed.
Warner chastised President Trump for calling on the Times to turn the mystery author “over to the government at once” for “national security purposes.” The writer detailed how “there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president.”
Warner added Sunday that Trump was acting recklessly following the op-ed’s publication and the release of explosive excerpts from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, which presents the White House as an institution on the brink of a “nervous breakdown.”
“Clearly you’ve got a president who is lashing out,” Warner said. “He is lashing out in terms of whoever wrote the op-ed, and I wish the person would have revealed their identity. But you’ve also got the president attacking his Justice Department.
“And that is one of the reasons I think you’re seeing not only Republican members [of Congress], but what appears to be a lot of folks in the White House, having real concerns about this president’s stability,” Warner continued.
