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 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 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 were challenges

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