Sen. Mark Warner: Trump Jr. emails bring probe to "whole 'nother level"
Sen. Mark Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He spoke with Anthony Mason on "CBS Evening News" about emails Donald Trump Jr. released Tuesday. The emails show a meeting being arranged between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer, and that Trump Jr. was promised information on Hillary Clinton that he was told was part of the Russian government's support of Mr. Trump.
ANTHONY MASON: How do these new emails affect your investigation?
SEN. MARK WARNER: Well, the last 24 hours is the first time that the public has seen evidence that Trump officials actually were willing to accept information that was part of a Russian government effort to hurt Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump. And what's disturbing to me is not only that fact, but that once again we've seen a pattern that has started right after the election, through the transition and throughout this administration where now it's more than a dozen Trump campaign or transition or current administration officials have constantly said they had no conversations with Russians, they didn't know anything about any kind of this intervention on behalf of the Russian government to intervene in our elections. Candidly, those kind of comments have now been disproven.
MASON: The Trump administration, senator, has denied any collusion between the campaign, the Trump campaign, and Russia. Do you see any evidence of collusion here?
WARNER: My job in this investigation is to keep it bipartisan until all the facts, until we see all these individuals, have a chance to question Donald Trump Jr., have a chance to question Jared Kushner, have a chance to question Paul Manafort and a host of these other individuals. And then I'll reach my conclusion. But boy oh boy, the idea that you've got these email in black and white that said to the president's son 'hey we've got damaging info on Hillary Clinton and this is part of a Russian government effort to help his father,' I don't see how anyone can deny that this brings the investigation to a whole 'nother level.
MASON: Lastly, senator, your colleague Tim Kaine said today that "This is moving into perjury... potentially treason." Do you agree?
WARNER: Listen, I'm going to keep my judgments to myself until I get a chance to have all these witnesses appear before us to hear their side of the story, and frankly, we've got a little more digging to do in terms of some other leads we've got to follow. But this is a very, very disturbing pattern. If it happened once or twice you might excuse it as rookie mistakes, but you don't make a rookie mistake when you take information from a foreign government, in this case a foreign adversary like Russia, where the information is being represented as part of a government effort to actually help one candidate and in this case besmirch another, in this case Hillary Clinton.
MASON: Sen. Mark Warner, thanks very much.
WARNER: Thank you, Anthony.