Tag: Mark Warner

Democrats are fawning over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for “new rules” to regulate internet companies like his — and that should worry every freedom-loving American. This is one of the richest men on earth inviting the American government to help him do what he already wants to do anyway. Let’s be perfectly clear: Every single regulatory measure Zuckerberg is calling for would benefit his company, his political allies, and himself personally. At best, regulation would just deflect from the unsavory practices of Facebook and its competitors; at worst, it would enlist government sponsorship for those practices. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner greeted Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying he was “glad to see” that “the era of the social media Wild West is over.” Of course, when Warner refers to the “social media Wild West,” he’s not talking about tech giants routinely censoring and shadow-banning conservatives, banning memes that lampoon their journalist friends, and blatantly discriminating against Republican candidates during election campaigns. Those on the left are determined to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, which is why they are so adamantly pushing for more censorship online. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have demanded answers from Big Tech regarding its ever-tightening campaign of censorship against the political right and Silicon Valley’s exploitation of its power over the main forums of modern public discourse to potentially swing elections — but their point has been that censorship of any kind is an affront to the American people. We don’t need leftist bureaucrats to tell us what we can say on the internet any more than we need leftist tech executives to police our speech. We don’t need an “independent body” to protect us from “harmful content” — we already have the Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and 100 years of precedent to guide our governance of public forums. Sen. Hawley, for instance, has proposed that the special privileges Facebook enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be conditioned on it serving as a viewpoint-neutral public forum.

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers want to stop government leaders from manipulating the security clearance process for political purposes. Sens. By codifying those steps, the Integrity in Security Clearance Determinations Act aims to make the system “more fair and transparent,” Collins said in a statement. The bill would forbid government leaders from making decisions based on the person’s exercise of constitutional rights like free speech or other factors like race, gender and nationality. Leaders would also be barred from revoking or approving clearances as an act of “retaliation for political activities or beliefs.” Under the legislation, government employees would have the right to appeal security clearance decisions, and agencies would need to make the results of any appeals public. The bill comes as a thinly veiled rebuke of the Trump administration’s handling of security clearances. The New York Times last month reported the president personally intervened to grant his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner a top-secret clearance against the recommendations of the intelligence community. In August, Trump also revoked the clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, who’s been an outspoken critic of the current administration. “Americans should be able to have confidence that the security clearance process is being used only to protect our nation’s greatest secrets,” Warner said in a statement. Today agencies are crushed under a backlog of some 551,000 pending background checks, roughly double what security professionals consider to be a baseline “steady state” of 220,000 to 250,000 investigations in process at any given time.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on Sunday said there are "enormous amounts of evidence" linking the Trump campaign to Russia — the same day House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said there's "direct evidence" of collusion between the two. The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee disputed on NBC's "Meet the Press" recent remarks by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. claiming that the committee hasn't found "factual evidence" of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Warner, referring to "the litany of what we know," said, "the ongoing negotiations about Trump Tower, well into the campaign, I believe the fact that Mr. Trump knew about the dump of the Wikileaks material, the fact that clearly the meeting at Trump Tower meeting which was not described appropriately, in terms of offering dirt," were all evidence. "There’s no one that could factually say there’s not plenty of evidence of collaboration or communications between Trump Organization and Russians." Warner, however, did note that he'd be withholding full judgment until the Senate Intelligence Committee finishes its investigation into the 2016 presidential campaign. Meantime on Sunday, House Intel Chair Schiff said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that he believes "there is direct evidence in the emails from the Russians through their intermediary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what is described in writing as the Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump." “They offer that dirt. There is an acceptance of that offer in writing from the president’s son, Don Jr., and there is overt acts and furtherance of that… That to me is direct evidence," Schiff added. The Senate committee's investigation is separate from that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is also probing Russian election interference, questions of collusion and possible obstruction of justice by the Trump campaign. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate,” said the spokesman, Peter Carr. Both the White House and lawyers for Mr. Trump vigorously denied the BuzzFeed report even before the special counsel’s office weighed in. BuzzFeed News maintained that its report was accurate, its editor, Ben Smith, said after Mr. Mueller’s office disputed the account. One person familiar with Mr. Cohen’s testimony to the special counsel’s prosecutors said that Mr. Cohen did not state that the president had pressured him to lie to Congress. In a December court filing, prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller described how Mr. Cohen had repeatedly lied to Congress both about the length of negotiations over the Trump Tower Moscow deal and about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the project. They also said Mr. Cohen discussed the progress of the Moscow project with Mr. Trump more frequently than he had told the committee and had briefed members of Mr. Trump’s family about the negotiations. When he appeared in court to plead guilty to lying to Congress, Mr. Cohen said he had concealed his interactions with Russian officials and the fact that he asked Mr. Trump to travel to Russia to promote the deal because he wanted to support Mr. Trump’s “political messaging.” That day, Mr. Trump defended his role in the Trump Tower Moscow discussions, brushing aside concerns that he was advancing his business interests at the time he was hoping to become president. Mr. Cohen initially repeated his false statements about the Moscow tower to prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller after he pleaded guilty in August to campaign finance violations and financial crimes. Mr. Cohen said he initially lied because he did not want to contradict his congressional testimony, prosecutors said. Subsequently, he took care “not to overstate his knowledge or the role of others in the conduct under investigation” and provided “useful information” about his contacts with “persons connected to the White House” in 2017 and 2018, the special counsel’s filing said.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) tells CNN's Jake Tapper he does not believe George Papadopoulos' claim that he doesn't remember telling Trump campaign officials about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Executives from Twitter and Facebook have been grilled by members of US Congress on everything from foreign propaganda campaigns to allegations of political bias on their platforms. Just five months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced questioning by Congress, the company’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, trekked to Capitol Hill for hearings of her own, alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Like Mr Zuckerberg’s hearing before them, Wednesday’s hearings provided little closure, but did reveal the depths of the frustration many politicians feel towards the tech titans. During the Senate sessions, several legislators said they planned to introduce legislation to rein in companies like Facebook and Twitter. Or, as Senator Mark Warner put it: “The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end.” The executives, meanwhile, openly admitted to making mistakes in the 2016 election, when the Department of Justice says Russian actors staged a widespread foreign influence campaign that went largely undetected by both Twitter and Facebook. Ms Sandberg said Facebook had been "too slow to spot this and too slow to act," while Mr Dorsey said his work on the issue was "not done – nor will it ever be". The only company that received more criticism than Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday was Google parent company Alphabet, which refused to send CEO Larry Page to the hearing. Senators like Kamala Harris couldn't resist taking pointed jabs at the "invisible witness" in the room. The House hearing was slightly more contentious, with Republican representatives grilling Mr Dorsey over alleged anti-conservative bias on the site. We do not have a responsibility, nor you a right, to amplify your tweets to audiences that don’t follow you."

Senator Mark Warner speaks out after the White House revokes security clearance for John Brennan. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one…

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said that he he wants more administration officials in room when President Trump meets with Russian President Putin at their upcoming summit

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris highlighted very different worries Tuesday when they had their chance to question Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a televised Senate hearing that ran for nearly five hours. For Feinstein, the “alarming” Russian intrusion into the 2016 presidential campaign was her top concern. She added that she had previously asked Zuckerberg “several critical questions for which you don’t have answers,” including why Facebook hadn’t alerted users that their data had fallen into the hands of the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm when the platform discovered it in 2015. “Knowing what we know now, we should have handled a lot of things here differently,” Zuckerberg said, stating what was the theme of his long afternoon under the TV lights. she asked Zuckerberg. The company didn’t even identify the problem until “around the time of the 2016 election itself,” he said. “They’re going to get better at this, and we have to get better, too.” Harris took a much sharper tone with Zuckerberg, accusing him of avoiding answers to many of the questions senators were asking. Was there a discussion in 2015 “about whether or not the users should be informed?” Harris asked. “And we did that based on false information that we thought that the case was closed and the data had been deleted.” Harris also asked how much money Facebook had made from the fake Russian campaign ads, repeating a question she had asked executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter in November.

Most of these measures would have had little if any impact on the Russian operation, but they could open the door to significantly curtailing free speech on the internet. There are three areas of illicit Russian activities: hacks of emails, attempts to compromise voting systems, and using posts and protesters to foment division. The first two areas are major threats that should be and can be addressed with new federal programs. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has declared that 240 years after our founding, “our democracy is at risk. Clinton and Trump were the least popular candidates ever to run for the presidency, according to multiple polls. Likewise, Klobuchar, and her colleagues Mark Warner, D-Va., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have proposed the Honest Ads Act to require internet companies to disclose more about their advertisers and store copies of all political ads for the public to view. The bill would also force campaigns that want to spend more than $500 on political ads, tech and ad platforms to make new disclosures to the government about the organizations that purchased them, the audiences the ads might have targeted, and how much they cost. This could achieve what Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian countries have demanded for years: the forced disclosure of associations and information, in particular by foreign organizations and NGOs seeking to support issues and causes. Our closest allies have shown that the appetite of government to regulate internet speech is insatiable. France has prosecuted Twitter for allowing people to post offensive comments and forced the company to strip posters of anonymity.