Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined One Nation with Brian Kilmeade to discuss the leaked Pentagon documents, President Biden’s inability to communicate effectively, and more. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On the Pentagon documents leak:
“Our allies have gotten uncomfortable about it. We can speculate as to some of the damage. But the real damage I’ll be looking for is—we don’t just rely on our intelligence. We have a lot of partners around the world that share intelligence with us. I want to see how that starts to apply here, whether they start sharing with us.
“We live in the ‘look-at-me’ era…. It’s not enough to just take a trip somewhere around the world. If you don’t capture pictures and post them on Instagram, it never happened. It’s like you never went there. I think that’s become a very unfortunate, normal part of our culture today. It reminds me a lot of these cases you hear about, paramedics respond to horrible accidents, take pictures of victims just to share with their buddies.
“In this case, it was posted online by a 21-year-old guy who doesn’t sound like he’s a spy for any country. He was trying to show off to his friends. But you’ve seen the damage that it’s done. This is going to require, I think, a pretty comprehensive evaluation, not just of how we classify things, but how they’re compartmented, how people have access to it, how we secure it. Obviously, the distribution [of] some of these things is hundreds and hundreds of people, in this case, an IT guy on top of it.”
On the Biden Administration’s downplaying of the seriousness of the leaks:
“If it wasn’t a big deal, why did the Defense Secretary have to call his counterparts around the world, the Secretary of State as well? I imagine our intelligence officials have had to do the same. This downplaying of this stuff—if it’s not a big deal, why did the FBI go raid the guy’s home and arrest him in an armored vehicle? It is a big deal.
“We have a separate problem related to this, and that is we have a president of the United States who cannot communicate effectively. He cannot communicate with the American public. He can’t communicate with the world. They have him in this bunker where they don’t let him speak too often off the cuff. Every time he does, he says things that embarrass the administration.
“On top of everything else, we have a fundamental problem in that we have a chief executive in our country who simply cannot effectively communicate without creating ancillary problems for the administration and for the country.”
On the Senate Intelligence Committee’s access to the classified documents misplaced by American leaders:
“Right now, we’ve only gotten a portion of it …. The stuff we’re reviewing…, it’s all stuff we would have had access to in the past. We just don’t know which parts of it [were misplaced].
“Our job is not to oversee the criminal justice investigation. Our job is to see what was out there, who saw it, what damage, if any, did that cause? What are you in the intelligence community doing to mitigate that damage and to prevent this from happening in the future? There’s no way we can conduct that kind of oversight if we don’t know what these documents were or who saw them. Our job is to oversee how the intelligence community is behaving and whether they’re doing enough to protect us if there was any damage. We can’t do that if they don’t share. This is an untenable position.
“Thankfully, it’s a bicameral, bipartisan insistence on seeing it. I think we’re going to get there. But it’s taken a lot of work. It’s very frustrating when the media leaks know more about this case than members of Congress that are charged with oversight have access to.”
On Florida’s new six-week abortion ban:
“[The people responsible for enacting the ban] are the elected representatives of the state. Every member of that House will have to run in two years or less than two years. Every member of the Senate will have to run at some point over the next four. The governor was just elected. I think most of our statewide leaders, if not all, have all campaigned on being pro-life. This is a pro-life legislature that was elected, not appointed, not put there. And so voters will make that decision.
“That ultimately was what the Supreme Court ruled last year, is that this was an issue that could be regulated at the state level. That’s what Florida is doing. I imagine other states will have different laws. I imagine the laws of New York and California are going to be very different [from] the laws in Florida. But that’s the way our republic works.”