Interview with U.S. Senator Mark Warner

U.S. Senator Mark Warner passed through the area August 29th, 2026 to officiate at a friends wedding and talk with local people in the area. I got the chance to sit down with the senator to discuss issues in Washington that are impacting many rural Virginians including the conflict with Iran, concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers, US standing in the world regarding foreign diplomacy and trade, as well as the future of funding for public media.

Nick Mullins:
This is Nick Mullins with Allegheny Mountain Radio. Today we have in the studio Senator Mark Warner.

Senator Mark Warner:
I should quickly say that I’m glad to be back in Highland County, back in Monterey. I’ve over the years, both as governor and senator, even before governor, spent time here, and I know I’m not supposed to be biased about it, any special part of Virginia, but the comparisons of Highland County to Switzerland, I think, are well made. Well, I remember years ago, and I know we got to get to the interview with, you know, Highland County, smallest population of any county in Virginia, 2600 roughly. And I think we back when I was governor, we had, at one point, a crowd of almost 300 people. So I always say to, you know, no matter what kind of big crowd I get in Norfolk or Richmond or Northern Virginia. I said, I had more per capita people in Highland County than I’ve ever had anywhere in my time as governor or senator.

Nick Mullins:
Oh, man. Yup, that’s definitely one of the advantages of having a very small population in isn’t it? (Mutual Laughing)
All right. Well, let’s get into the nitty gritty of things, if we shall.

As vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, what’s your knowledge on the potential resolution for the war with our and and what if any role is congress going to play in the continuing conflict?

Senator Mark Warner:
This, this is a war of choice you know was I’ve been chair vice chair the intelligence committee for the last ten years and there was no imminent threat to our country from Iran. Now let me be the first to acknowledge that, you know, the Iranian leadership back since the seventies, early eighties has been awful, but there was a reason why for forty-seven years American presidents of both political stripes didn’t didn’t go to war here because you got to have a plan. So here you have no imminent threat. So the president chose to go to war and it’s I think you all your listeners know you’ve got to choose to go to war you’re supposed to one make the case to the American people. And two come to congress. He didn’t come to congress. As one of the leaders on the Intel Committee I think we got one briefing ahead of time. Yesterday was the six month anniversary of that war and let me just quickly go through, the president said he had four goals. How we doing?

Well first was regime change. Unfortunately the regime now, we killed the prior leaders but the regime now, is more radical than before.

Second was to try to make sure, and I agree with this, that Iran should get a nuclear weapon, but we’d have to take out you know hundreds of canisters six, or five to six feet tall of enriched uranium. The Iranians are not going to give that up. So the only way we could do that is if we put fifteen thousand troops on the ground, go into these bunkers and if we were doing that trying to get this enriched uranium out, the Iranians would be shooting at our troops. So we didn’t get that.

Third goal was to make sure on got rid of their you know ballistic missiles and their drones. Well, clearly they still got some of those and the thing that probably makes me the maddest of all is Iran’s got literally thousands of these little drones and they cost about forty grand a piece they’ve been shipping him to Russia, and very active in the war against Ukraine well one country is figured out how to shoot down Iranian drones is Ukraine, and they figured out how to do it pretty cheaply for counter drone strategy…about five thousand dollars. President Zalinsky from Ukraine, offered America all his technology in December couple months before the war started, and the White House that we don’t want it. So we’ve been shooting missiles that cost two and a half million dollars a piece to shoot down these forty thousand dollar drones and we’ve run…almost run out of all of our stock of these interceptor missiles which makes not just us but our allies. So we have not accomplished that goal of getting rid of Iran’s capacity strike back and obviously the final issue was the Strait of Hormuz, and you know that’s where twenty-percent of the world’s oil and natural gas and aluminum.

Well we know the answer on that is Iran’s still got partial control and the best example is that is you know before this war started average price of gasoline in Virginia was $2.81 a gallon, depends on where you buy it now, but it’s you know, three ninety ($3.90) or four bucks ($4.00) or more critical that hasn’t got as much attention but in a place like highland where you’ve still got a lot of farmers you know price of diesel is close to six bucks ($6.00) a gallon so I think the wars been a disaster.

I don’t know how the president gets us out of this. We have not taken out the Iranians. We frankly have gone through a lot of our military stocks. It’s a blessing that we’ve only lost eighteen soldiers although hundreds have been wounded very seriously, and kind of our strength in the region from our allies that are enemies has gone down. So I think congress ought to be doing more oversight, but the only way we can do oversight is with bipartisanship and so far at least my republican friends have not been willing to hold this administration accountable.

Last point on this one that just that again makes me scratch my head, you know I’m not a military expert, but as an intel leader I talk to a lot of military folks. If we’ve gone into this war at the beginning and said we’re going to go after, on say on a daily basis three hundred four hundred targets each day in Iran, I think we could’ve gotten just as much damage, but Hegseth the defense secretary said no no we want to blow them to smithereens and we’ve been going in at the beginning with four thousand five thousand strikes… that didn’t do much of the Iranians but it drew down all of our our supplies. So, I think it’s time to get out of this war. I mean the president promised he wasn’t going to get us into another endless war in the middle east but other than president just declaring victory in getting out, I’m not sure how he gets out and if you know we got a change of control in congress we’ll hold more oversight. But unfortunately in many ways the damage has been done.

Nick Mullins:
I guess after all the military stores have been drawn down those have to be you know brought back up so who’s that going to ultimately impact.

Senator Mark Warner:
Yeah and it’s not like uh… you can flick a switch and suddenly make these Patriot missiles or,.. We’re finally starting… I was at Virginia Tech the other day and we’re finally looking at developing American counter drone technology hopefully on a cheaper basis. I’ve I’ve said I’d like to bring the Ukrainians the Blacksburg so we can learn together and and there is a problem this is beyond just the current administration what we… you know, we don’t make long-term commitments on our military supply chain and I think for a long time you know, we didn’t think we were going to need all of these Patriots and other missiles but I do think we need to invest in our military supply chain so we’ve got an ability to you know frankly to build more of these missiles quicker. You know the thing I believe I’ll put my money there, I’ll put my money in drones. I sometimes get people mad at me I I but I ask me why should America keep building tanks because unfortunately tanks which was definitely a World War II and even Vietnam war tool we see in the Russia-Ukraine War you send any tank within twenty miles of the front line it gets blown up by a drone. So as we think about more missiles or more counter drones we have to make some trade-offs and some of our legacy military systems I think we need to think through.

Nick Mullins:
There’s been some concerning developments regarding artificial intelligence escaping recent security, you know, environments in recent months. What work is being done at the federal level to regulate artificial intelligence and sure safety protocols are being adhered to. Should Americans have concerns about the use of artificial intelligence within the government entities given the recent security issues?

Senator Mark Warner:
Nick, my background before I was in politics was in technology. I was lucky enough in the early 80s to get into the cell phone industry, started a company called Nextel. Then I was a venture capitalist invested in a lot of technology companies. So I’m a big believer in the power of technology and there’s an upside. But I have to tell you I have never seen anything as powerful, transformative, exciting, but also scary as AI. Artificial Intelligence. And AI is going to be bigger than the internet. It’s bigger than cell phones. You name it. And it is coming at us at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented. Some of these AI big names like Sam Altman from OpenAI or Daniela Amodei from Anthropic, I know these guys and they are concerned that it’s coming faster than even they think. You know Bill Gates former head a Microsoft even just said this past week “Hey, we may need to you know slow this down.” The unfortunate thing is, I don’t think we can slow it down.

This…the genie is out of the bottle on this and and there will be good things. Let me just, let me give you an example. I’ve got one of the big companies, Anthropic working with us to help our veterans down in Hampton Roads you know. The example being you know if you’re a veteran you got PTSD and the VA gives you a list of say here’s fifty providers, you figure out how to get scheduled chance of that person’s got some mental health challenges they’re not going to get scheduled. Well you I’ve got Anthropic, one of the big companies saying we can create an AI agent that would work for the veteran, get them scheduled, get him an Uber to get him to the appointment, and get him back. I mean there’s an upside on this but there is also a downside.

So I think the federal government’s got to play a role and and I would feel… If you’ll let me, I’ll go through four areas that I think we ought to do.

First and this is kind of where everybody’s complaining about… data centers. I think we need some federal guidelines on data centers, I think before data center comes to a community you got to show you can provide they can provide their own power and it ought to be clean power. They oughtta not overuse water although on water the centers are getting better they’re not using as much water as they do they’re more circular water systems that keep getting reused. The data centers got to be set back from communities so you’re not, because they’ve got some noise to them too, you got to get them back. You got to have clean backup power. And also you know, no local county board should be willing able to sign a nondisclosure agreement so that, you know, if you’re going to come to the community you ought to know what the upside and the downside is. And the hook I would use to make sure that the data centers adhered to these rules is, I don’t think they ought to get the federal tax break they get right now called “bonus depreciation” where they can get to write off the whole data center at first. You know my feeling is, you want to get that tax break you got to meet these federal criteria. If a local county then wants to add more—have at it. But if we set a federal baseline.. But they’re not going to go away. We can’t put that genie back. Even if they have a moratorium you know, they’d just move to another state, another county. But we got to put some ground rules.

Second thing is we got to protect our kids. You know I think most of us would agree that a lot of young people frankly got harmed by social media because we had no rules on it. And as challenging as social media was, you think about these AI agents or these AI tools that your kid thinks they can talk to or even former romantic relationship with? That scares the dickens of me. And you know and and you know other countries amazing thing is China has actually said they will not let their AI tools kinda form these relationships with their kids. Now there is good news here. Just this week Facebook agreed to pay… Meta, the big company..agreed which Facebook is part of, agreed to pay eighteen billion dollars to help get rid of some of these harms. I think TicTok needs to pay. YouTube needs to pay. All of these AI companies need to help us. We had have basic childhood protections and young people protection.

Third thing is, and I mentioned this about these AI agents that, that you you can kind of create on your own to go off and do some task. We got to have rules of liability. If some agent goes off and spends fifty thousand dollars buying you something you don’t want, who’s responsible? At the end of the day we got to make sure these agents are actually responsible to a human being and not to the big tech company.

Two last things. Because these things are happening so quickly and again, I’m saying now from national defense and national security uh… one of these tools called Mythos from that, again the company Anthropic, they released this in March in this and we saw that it well, it didn’t break into all our classified systems, it found vulnerabilities in all of them. And the head of the NSA said and Mark, this is going to change warfare as much as drones. We got to…we can’t figure it all out. The banks are freaking out because they think all of their protections could be penetrated. So I really think before these, what they call frontier models get released, you gotta have pre-testing.

And then the final thing which is I think the thing that probably concerns folks the most is what’s gonna happen to the jobs? I’ll even buy that you know five or six years from now there may be AI jobs created. But I think over the next five years if you’re fresh out of college, I think it’s gonna be really hard. Because I think companies have learned from globalization they’re not going to fire tens of thousands of people and get all the grief they get from that. They’re just not gonna hire folks and we’ve got a figure out what to train for. The one thing we do know is we need more healthcare workers. So if we can convince maybe less people to major in political science or or business, and go into healthcare. But this is going to take, you know, the kinda of whole country and the technology industry, and these guys got to help pay for it. These companies, I’m a business guy, I built businesses I’m proud of that, but these companies are getting so much money and power. It makes like…you go back to the beginning of the 20th century the robber barons the Rockefeller’s, the Carnegie’s…. that’s tiny compared to what some of these companies. These companies have to pay the freight to get through this next five years because if not, on jobs, if not, I think you’re gonna have not one political party but people across the political spectrum say we don’t want it. And again we’re not going to put the genie back I don’t want China to win, but we got to have guardrails.

Nick Mullins:
So the current administration has had many decisions with international repercussions. Was the United States standing among the rest of the world, and how long will those repercussions continue to affect our standing in foreign diplomacy and international trade?

Senator Mark Warner:
Well, Nick, you asked that question about as politically correctly as possible. I gotta tell you, my head explodes. I mean, America’s strength has been our military, it’s been our economy, it’s been our sense that we’re a rule of law, and some of the level of graft and corruption in D.C. right now is jaw-dropping. But it’s also because we got allies and friends around the world. You know, Russia and China never had willing allies, I mean, they had Russia had, you know, the communist bloc, but all those countries, once the Berlin Wall fell, they didn’t want to be controlled by Russia. And China’s got no friends, but what unfortunately Mr. Trump has done is he has pissed off virtually all of our allies! I mean, the idea that we’re going to go grab Greenland totally undermines NATO. The fact that he started the war against Iran on his own without talking to our allies in the Middle East, and they’re all now thinking, well, can we count on America? And we’ve seen that these tariffs. They add to all of our costs. Tariffs are tax.

And you know, whether it’s the fact that lumber costs are going up because some of the tariffs on Canada or whether we’ve seen costs at grocery stores go up because some of the tariffs on other countries where we import food. I mean, it’s, I fear that, you know, it’s going to take a long time. I mean, you know, this recent effort to try to start a trade war with Canada. To me, that’s crazy. I mean, Virginia’s biggest trading partner is Canada, and it’s kind of hard to make Canadians mad. They’re pretty nice people. But we’ve pissed them off! And it’s going to be a long time before Canadians start buying Kentucky of Virginia bourbon again because we’ve been so insulting, you know, calling them 51st state and making fun of them. And then starting this trade war that I think is, again, just going to drive up cost. I mean, I wish the president would spend more time on you lowering the rhetoric and driving down cost as opposed to spending all this time on the ballroom in some of his other vanity projects.

Nick Mullins:
Yeah. Yeah. And whenever it comes to tariffs and things, is there much work being done in Congress to try to bolster at least, you know, food production within the country and try to back, like, you know, cattleman’s associations and groups?

Senator Mark Warner:
You look about the cattlemen. You know, we, the president just says he’s, I can’t remember that number, 300 million, I think of he’s going to bring meat in. Well, is that meat going to be inspected? You know, when, when the president started his DOGE effort and fired all these folks kind of willy-nilly, you know, some of the people got fired were food inspectors. You know, I want to make sure something I eat on my plate has been inspected. And I have real safety concerns on this and I’m not even sure where this beef is going to come from. I mean, you know, Argentina’s got good beef, Canada’s got good beef, but I mean, my sense is probably not coming from those countries, but I sure as heck would want to know before it ends up, especially if it, you know, if it’s sold just into kind of hamburger or where you don’t know where it’s coming from. But I think it’s a real mistake and I think again, I’ve heard from a lot of Virginia cattlemen who are saying, hey, you know, Senator, come on, it’s hard enough for us to make a living now and no w, we’ve got this new barrier.

Nick Mullins:
Many community radio stations are continuing to grapple with the loss of federal funding for public media, including Allegheny Mountain Radio. Are you aware of any efforts to restore that funding?

Senator Mark Warner:
Yes. I think it will require change of control in Congress. And, you know what was interesting when the president cut off all that public funding…many even in my Republican friends, you know, thought it was crazy to cut it off. I mean, you think about in Virginia, we got a lot of large metro areas, but Appalachian Radio, you guys serve a distinct part of the market. But you go to a state like Kansas. You don’t have many big markets—you only survive on small radio stations. So I think there will be a chance to restore that funding. I do think the public came through in a major way over this last year. But that only gets you one year. You got to have sustainable funding. I was over in Bath County because I’m performing a wedding ceremony later. I got a much better record as a wedding officiant than I do as a politician. Tonight will be in my 29th wedding that I’ve officiated at and so far all 28 of them that I’ve already done, nobody’s gotten divorced. So I may have some major or hardcore Republicans say, well, maybe all don’t like Warner’s politics, but he sounds like he could be a good wedding officiant, but you know, kind of up from Bath, listening to your station, you just don’t get that with the level of local touch. And I just think whether it’s radio, whether it’s weekly newspapers, those things that hold you together…if the only thing we can listen to is national and international news, we lose the heart of community.

Nick Mullins:
Yeah, definitely agree with that. All right, thank you very much, Senator Warner. It’s been a pleasure to have you here. I know you’ve got a very tight schedule.

Senator Mark Warner:
Well, got to go talk to folks here in Highland, and I’m looking forward to it. But again, I really appreciate, Nick, the chance to come by and visit.

Nick Mullins:
All right, and thank you for coming.

Senator Mark Warner:
Thank you, sir.