Face The Nation: Turner, Warner, Penn

Welcome back to Face the Nation, we are joined now by the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner. Good to have you here. Good morning. Thanks for having me. A lot to get to with you, but I want to start on what's happening within the next eight days. We may be facing a government shutdown. Back in June, it took Democratic votes to push through that debt ceiling deal. The Speaker announced an impeachment inquiry. Isn't this going to make it harder for you to work across the aisle and to do something like avoid a government shutdown? Not really. There are a number of things, obviously, where there's bipartisan consensus, one of which, as you indicated, was the budget debt deal. Kevin led in that. The American public wanted a change from the Biden policies of spending, working on closing the border, addressing the issues of China, and he delivered. And the American public have given the House, with a small margin of Republicans in control, the Senate, Democrats in control, small margin. They expect bipartisan solutions. Kevin has led in delivering those. This is certainly one where everyone wants the government to be functioning. We want to adhere to the deal. You've got eight days. Move the country. Yes. So, what do we do here? I mean, is this a continuing resolution situation? Because it doesn't seem like House Republicans are on the same page. Well, as you just said, it's probably going to result, in the end, in a bipartisan solution. We're going to pass a spending bill. That's what is going to be required, and we're going to do it. But it will require Democrats. You don't think the impeachment inquiry will cost you? Well, again, there are things that are important to the country and for which people come together. And I think this is one of those, that the country came together on the debt budget deal. And at that time, investigations were already ongoing into the Biden family businesses. And I think that's certainly something that's expected that will continue. One of the issues for some members of your caucus is the continued support for Ukraine. And we know President Zelensky is going to be here this week. Can you meet with him and tell him he's going to get the $13 billion that the White House is asking for? Can you get your caucus to support it? Well, the House certainly, and certainly the Republican caucus, overwhelmingly supports aid for Ukraine. There will be issues over what the administration has asked for and what Congress ultimately gives. Senator McCarthy has made it clear that the White House should have come to us and worked on what the package was and not just sent it to Capitol Hill for dispensation. But at the same time, you know, Zelensky is a great spokesperson. He really makes the case better than anyone that this is a fight for democracy and that Putin's goals are well beyond Ukraine, into Eastern Europe and into the Baltics. Having him here is going to be very, very persuasive. The last time we had votes on the House floor on the issue of aid for Ukraine, nearly 300 members voted in an affirmative out of 435. A majority of the Republicans voted in the affirmative. And I think that will continue. But this is not going to complicate the vote to keep the government funded and open. Again, this is another essential item that we have to do. And this was not included in the budget debt limit deal, with an understanding, though, because everyone knew. I mean, this is on your TV sets every day. Everyone knows this is ongoing and this is going to require U.S. support. You know, Zelensky has a higher approval rating in the United States than any nationally elected official. Him coming here, I think, will be very persuasive. Even to the more conservative members of your caucus? Well, not everyone has to vote yes. If you get 300 out of 435, that's certainly overwhelming. I think we're going to be back there again. So do I hear you saying no government shutdown? I didn't say that. I said we're going to pass a spending bill. We'll just have to see when. So we'll be—OK. Well, stay tuned. The White House is going to announce additional capabilities. They've said that. Do they get the long-range missiles to Ukraine that they're asking for, the ATACMs? I hope they do. I mean, the administration has consistently said no to everything Ukraine has said multiple times publicly and then ultimately recanted and provided them. What we know from this era of the conflict, Ukraine is still on the offensive, which was the goal of the offensive. Russia is on the defensive. There are a number of impediments that are making it difficult for that offensive to push Russia out. And at the same time, Ukraine has to get additional ground and or longer-range weapons to put Crimea at risk, which is where some of the assaults are coming from that are killing Ukrainians. So it's incredibly important that we provide them this capability. Your committee was briefed by the White House within the past week about this expected prisoner swap with Iran. Their diplomatic mission shared with us the list of Iranians they expect President Biden to pardon. Are you comfortable with this swap? Well, I mean, when we received our briefing at the committee, obviously we made known our concerns. I mean, whenever you put a price on American heads, you get an incentive for people to take more hostages. These are billions and billions of dollars. And so that's a concern. The administration says we're really only giving them their own money, but it's still money that they didn't have. The other aspect is, is that these monies can be used to support terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and, you know, avengers some actions of Iran. The administration says this is limited to humanitarian aid, but they also acknowledge that funds are fungible, which means they can move them around and will aid them in being able to do other things. So people are very concerned as to what this is as a pattern. The administration's answer is people shouldn't go to Iran. I certainly want to echo that also. People should not be going to Iran. You're not moving on a ban, a travel ban, though. No, not at this time. But I think that people seeing this should know that they're at risk and they shouldn't go to Iran. I want to ask you, because you've made clear in the past you've been disappointed by the level to which the intelligence community has shared with you their assessment of the classified documents investigations into both the current and former presidents. Do you have any updates on that? Are you any more satisfied now? What they have done, they've shown us probably an equal amount of both Biden classified documents and Trump classified documents. And what you can see from looking at those is both have egregious items in them. None of these documents should have been out of a controlled environment, both the Biden documents and the Trump documents. We don't know the status of the Biden special counsel, although, as you know, the Trump matter is currently moving in court. It's certainly curious that we don't know what's going on in the Biden matter. They have limited the amount of documents that we have seen to those that they would suggest are not subject to executive privilege or the type of documents that we would normally see. But overall, there are already documents that are listed in the Trump court pleadings that are described in detail that we have not yet seen. And we are pushing to make certain that they provide those to Congress. But you have no reason to believe that they are in any way on equal footing in terms of the level of classification of documents? Or do you have any indication? I can tell you from the ones I've seen, they are equally egregious and equal classification issues that both Biden documents and Trump documents have the equal concern and threat and equal classification. I have so much more to ask you about, but I have to leave it there right now to go to this commercial break. Thank you, Congressman. We'll be right back. We turn now to Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. He is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Great to have you here. I have to pick up where your Republican colleague just left off. Are the Trump and Biden classified documents that were in their personal possession and not in controlled areas equally egregious? Margaret, three things quickly. One, the administration took way too long to get us these documents. Two, Mike and I have a great working relationship. I believe based on the documents I've seen that there is a difference in terms of the potential abuse that came from the Trump documents. And third, it's one of the reasons why I've got bipartisan legislation that would reform the whole classification process. We way over classify. We frankly should have a process in place so that no president or vice president ever takes documents after they leave office. That is kind of lowest common fruit. We got to get that passed. We've got part of that in the Intel Authorization Bill and I hope it becomes law of the land so we can prevent this from happening going forward. You said based on documents you've seen, but you want to see more documents. We have actually, I'm about at 98% satisfaction at this point. 98% satisfaction. There's a lot more on the national security front that we're tracking right now, including this potential prisoner swap with Iran to bring five Americans home. Are you comfortable with the trade? I've not gotten the brief. The Senate Intel Committee has not gotten the brief. We will be getting it shortly. Wasn't the staff briefed? Well, I can say I have not been personally briefed. I think we need to start with the premise. It's always the policy of our country to try to bring back Americans who held hostage. That was not only under Biden, it was Trump, it was Obama, Bush. I want to hear what kind of constraints are being put on in this exchange in terms of what has been reported, the $6 billion that was South Korean payments to Iran that would be released. I want to hear that and get those details before I weigh in further. Because you have concern that money is fungible and it could be released. Obviously. Money is fungible. The administration has said there are guardrails. I want to get a better description of those guardrails first. You have been very active on artificial intelligence and we talked about this back in January. Microsoft just announced a few days ago that China has a new capability to automatically generate images for use in influence operations to mimic American voters across the political spectrum and create controversy along racial, economic, and ideological lines. How much of a risk is this to our upcoming election? It's an enormous risk. Artificial intelligence. I've spent as much time on this, I think, as any member of the Senate. I never spent something where the more time I spend, in certain ways, the more confused I get. The whole economics around these large language models, which used to be who had the most data, who had the most compute power would win, that fundamentally changed after Facebook released its so-called llama model into the wild in the spring. We just had a major session, Leader Schumer put together, had the who's who in the room. What I'm concerned at is even the AI leaders who say they want rules, guardrails, I'm concerned that when you actually put words on paper, will those major tech companies support that? Because you've seen, we in social media have done zero. Now, in terms of China, China is a major player in AI. And where I think we ought to start, where AI tools, whether it comes from China or domestically, could have the most immediate effect would be the public's faith in our elections, which Microsoft just cited. Hear me out on this, but the other area beyond elections is faith in our public markets. These same tools could completely disrupt the confidence in our public markets by using these same deepfake tools. So I believe we ought to start, if we could put together an alliance between the capitalists and the small D Democrats, we might at least get guardrails coming in next year with the elections and with the concern about our markets. You're concerned not just about spooking, you know, the stock market. We're talking about misleading people going into an election. Congress isn't going to legislate ahead of the election, are they? Leader Humerson, it's the most difficult thing we've ever undertaken. This is why the notion of trying to solve it all, the bias questions, the whole question around deepfakes, the questions around what's called hallucination, where you get answers that have no relationship to what the question was asked. But we ought to at least start with some guardrails around trust in our public elections and trust in our public markets. There, I think we can move before our elections. I think it'll be bipartisan. Let's start on that framing point. I think we can all agree there could be huge disruption in both of those areas. And that's where I'm focused my time. You may have heard our CBS polling there at the top of the program, and one of the data points I want to show you here says, when people compare their finances now to how they were before the pandemic, by two to one, they say they're worse, not better. And when they feel worse, they tell us they're voting for Donald Trump. How can President Biden win over those voters? Well, I think we've seen from President Biden's actual record, record amounts of job growth coming again after COVID. We've seen major legislation, there's now law in infrastructure, in so-called chip spill and transition in our energy economy. And most of that has only been about 10 cents on every dollar spent out. So I think the positive effects of that will really continue to penetrate. Do the people in Virginia feel that, that you talk to? I think there is a general feeling, oh my gosh, everybody seems to be at each other's throats here in Washington. The notion that we're going to potentially go into a government shutdown. Mike Turner and I work very closely together. But I do think, I wish the House leadership would be spending a little more time on what would happen with a government shutdown, which makes us look bad around the world. And frankly, in a state like mine in Virginia, where we have so many government workers, government contractors, it will be a disaster. And yet the attention coming out of the House leadership is on impeachment and putting forward things they know will not ever pass the Senate in any kind of bipartisan fashion. And I think that is part of the underlying unease that voters feel. So you believe we are headed for a government shutdown? I would like to say no. But we're eight or nine days away, and we've not even been able to see the House pass the most basic defense appropriations bills. I hope and pray that Speaker McCarthy will say, hey, I'm going to throw over the far right and I'm going to put together a bipartisan effort with the Democrats and mainstream Republicans to keep the government funding. I think that would get, again, 350, 400 votes. Senator, good to have you here in person. We'll be back in a moment. Director and director Sean Penn is the co-director of a new documentary called Superpower. It's about President Zelensky and the war in Ukraine. Zelensky agreed to meet with Penn in person for the first time on camera on the same day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Great, great that you are here. It's very important now, all this support. And I think your voice, the voice of the United States, I think Americans has to hear. So I think you see that we are just ordinary people who wants to live in our country. Yeah, and how are you here? It's, I mean, it's so dangerous. To be here at this time in this country with you, with your countrymen, I mean, it's such, there's so much inspiration we had here. We spoke with Penn on Friday about his new film. In one of the clips, Andrei Yermak, one of the top advisors to President Zelensky, says to you, you know, the U.S. position should be stronger if the United States and Joe Biden doesn't do something now. Essentially, he says America's over. That followed with a pretty robust financial investment by the United States, more than $50 billion, pledges of weapons. But from what I've heard you say, you think the United States isn't doing enough. It is my absolute feeling that the caution with which the United States has pledged support, which seemed in my reading of February 2022, was a, like a lean on in the fear of nuclear conflict. I think all of us should look very carefully at it and understand it, of course, is possible. And that's to be concerning. The likelihood is extremely low. And as one of our witnesses in the film says, you know, are we going to let a gangster with nuclear weapons dictate the way we live? So I think that, and that the Ukrainians won't let him do that. In the documentary, you spoke with a Ukrainian fighter pilot named Juice, who I understand was killed later in a training incident. Was your personal connection to him and the case he made to you part of why you are pushing this point on F-16s so strongly? I was pushing it when I was with Juice and he was alive. He dreamt of flying F-16s. I think that he was a man who was born into a time where he had to do this extreme thing and he did it with poise and skill and focus and compassion. And so he had come to Washington to lobby for the F-16s and also was buying helmets for his helicopter pilot friends on eBay here to bring back. So it was like that. And then, I suppose now, was it July that it was announced that there would now be an F-16 program, those resources— Eventually, yeah. Yeah, over a long period of time. And a couple of weeks later, I got the message that he'd been killed. I think not only would Juice be alive today if we had been as bold as we like to claim to be historically as a country, with our principles, with our Republicans and our Democrats, with our leadership, the citizenry, too, while we were putting all those Ukrainian flags out, we should have been—demand decisiveness in this case, because at some point, caution becomes cowardice. But there's still an opportunity for us to do the right thing. Fifty-eight percent of Americans polled by CBS disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling the situation with Russia and Ukraine. I'm getting the sense from you, you're disappointed, too. Yeah, I respect President Biden very much. There have been a couple of things that I think have been disasters up to this point. There's an—it should be an implicit understanding between private citizens and leaders in government that there are things that I don't know about, things that should be—need to remain classified. Right. So, every day, even when I was with Juice, I was privately thinking, yes, it's our job to fight this fight. But privately, I was thinking, but maybe they're doing it behind closed doors, and tomorrow we're going to wake up to that squadron. Enough time has passed. I think it's been, to date, a tragic mistake. And I hope and encourage this president that he deserves the legacy of doing this properly. The polling also shows big majorities of Americans continue to support economic sanctions on Russia. Sixty-one percent of Republicans, though, say the U.S. should not send weapons to Ukraine. Fifty percent say the U.S. should not send aid and supplies to Ukraine. That is a big shift from where the Republican Party was in terms of, in the past, being very strong on Russia. But some of it, in terms of the rhetoric, reflects this sense that America needs to fix itself at home. How do you respond to that thinking? I think there's more than a compelling argument that would change those minds. And I understand why they're confused. I mean, I'm hoping, in its little way, that this film can help context. I would be confused if I hadn't had the opportunity to do this. Better communication of the why and the justification for the billions of dollars of American spend. Yeah. If the current leadership would just do one thing now, it would be the president saying to his Cabinet, we are not spinning the story on Ukraine anymore. So, if it's about what are they capable of, we're going to let our commanders in Fresno, at the Cal National Guard, that's been doing joint military exercises with them for 30 years, tell us what their capability is. And we're going to say it, unfiltered, to the American people. You end the documentary talking about this feeling of unity you had when you were in Ukraine, and you compare it to what you see here at home. And you actually end on the images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. And you say, we're going backwards. Why do you think they symbolize that? I think that we've come to a point where we, as the voters, we as the citizens, have to look at our politicians and say, look, you're very smart. We agree with your policy. Why would you want to call it socialist? Why would you want to put up a middle finger to people who have a reaction to that? You're a leader. Just get the policy across. I'm not interested in these people self-celebrating or grandstanding. Jerks like me do enough of that. Leaders can't do that anymore. And so on the right, on the left, we have to demand that people actually are accountable and ourselves for the division that we have and break it. Thank you, Sean Penn, for sharing your work with us. And Superpower debuts on Paramount Plus on Monday. We'll be right back. That's it for us today. Thank you for watching. Tune in to 60 Minutes tonight for its season premiere for an interview with Ukraine's President Zelensky right after football. Until next week, for Base to Nation, I'm Margaret Brennan.