President Donald Trump's congressional allies are playing "fast and loose" with confidential information, Sen. Mark Warner told CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
"I find it outrageous that the president's allies are, in effect, playing fast and loose with confidential information," said the Virginia senator, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "And don't take my word, take the president's own FBI director, [Christopher] Wray, who said, 'If you go out and start exposing classified information about informants that you will make America less safe.'"
Warner's comments came as Trump said that the FBI implanted a spy in his presidential campaign and there would be conclusive answers only with the release of classified documents from congressional investigators.
Trump later said, following the interview with Warner, that he would demand the Justice Department look into whether his 2016 presidential campaign was infiltrated or surveilled for political purposes.
Warner said that he has no knowledge of such actions by the FBI or Department of Justice and stressed that "when individuals want to try to reveal classified information about the identity of an FBI or CIA source, that is against the law. The first thing you learn when you get involved with the intelligence community is that you need to protect sources and methods and that if you were to out or to burn such an agent, that person's life could be in jeopardy."
Warner warned of an "ongoing assault" from Trump against the intelligence community, saying that it leads to a situation where "people can start saying 'I'm going to decide which laws I want to follow and which laws I don't want to follow.' I believe you may see that kind of result taking place in this circumstance where it appears that some of the president's allies are trying to decide, well, 'I don't want to follow a law that says I have to keep classified information secret.' If we get into that realm, we're in dangerous, dangerous territory."
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