Even This Senator Had No Warning About Iran
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When news broke that the United States had bombed Iran, members of Congress—the only people who can authorize war according to the Constitution—found out at the same time as the rest of us. What can they do to wrest this authority back; and where is this war with Iran headed now?
Guest: Mark Warner, Democratic Senator from Virginia and Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Yesterday, Tuesday, June 24th, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, was supposed to be briefed by the Trump administration on what exactly has been going down in Iran. |
| 0:19.7 | And then he was supposed to talk to me. Unfortunately, for both of us, |
| 0:23.9 | this is not how his day went. They've punted that until Thursday. I'm concerned whether they |
| 0:31.8 | will try to punt again. You know, I have talked to Secretary Rubio in the last 24 hours, and I appreciate that. |
| 0:39.8 | But in terms of the status of the ceasefire, is it on? Is it off? |
| 0:45.5 | I'm vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. |
| 0:48.8 | If anybody in our government should know, I think I should know. |
| 0:57.3 | To be honest, a Tuesday briefing was already a little late. |
| 1:02.7 | Senator Warner is the ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. |
| 1:07.7 | That makes him part of the so-called Gang of Eight. |
| 1:10.6 | He's routinely briefed on intelligence |
| 1:12.4 | matters by the executive branch. But he was not briefed on this weekend's mission to destroy |
| 1:18.4 | Iran's nuclear capabilities, at least not ahead of time. Instead, he was finding out what was going |
| 1:25.7 | on around the same time his constituents were. |
| 1:29.7 | Then he was along for the ride, as the president declared the entire operation a huge success. |
| 1:36.7 | President Trump said both Israel and Iran had come to him seeking peace. |
| 1:41.3 | Eventually, Trump said he was engineering a ceasefire, even though it seemed to take a minute for |
| 1:47.7 | Israel and Iran to get that memo. |
| 1:50.1 | I'm not happy about that. I mean, you can kind of sense the president's frustration with where things |
| 1:59.6 | stand by just looking at what he sounded like this morning |
| 2:05.3 | when, you know, he was asked by reporters about the status of the ceasefire and he used an |
| 2:11.0 | expletive that usually a president does not use. |
... |
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