‘Take it with a grain of salt’ | Warner sounds alarm ahead of Trump’s primetime election speech
By Janet Roach
In 13NewsNow
No political figure is sounding the alarm louder than U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) ahead of President Donald Trump’s Thursday night primetime speech on election security.
As vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Warner is urging the public to exercise extreme caution.
“I would expect you to take most of what President Trump says tonight with a grain of salt,” Warner warned. “I don’t care if you’re a President Trump supporter or an independent, please take whatever he says tonight with a grain of salt. Let’s get it fact-checked and verified.”
Since his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has consistently maintained that the vote was rigged. Now, Warner and other top Democrats fear that Trump’s primetime speech is designed to lay the groundwork for unprecedented federal overreach into state-run elections.
Specifically, Warner expressed deep concern that the administration might attempt to wage a federal takeover of state elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, elections have traditionally been administered and run at the state level.
Warner fears the president will point to unsubstantiated or already-debunked claims of foreign interference. He specifically pointed to a conspiracy theory suggesting that China somehow smuggled hundreds of thousands of undocumented citizens into the country to secretly cast ballots, mostly in Georgia. Warner stressed that the intelligence community found absolutely no indication of such interference in Georgia or anywhere else during recent cycles.
Trump has been vague about what he plans to say.
“It doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” he said when asked by reporters earlier this week.
Warner’s warnings come amid actions that have already shaken election security advocates. Trump recently fired the last remaining bipartisan commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. Warner feels that banning voting machines that have been the subject of false accusations of rigging could be next.
“For him to try to do this at the same time that you get rid of all the EAC election coordinators—bipartisan—will completely sow chaos into this election,” Warner said.
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