Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told Newsmax on Thursday he agrees with Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, that China and Russia will benefit should the U.S. fail to raise its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.
The U.S. expected to hit the debt ceiling sometime this summer. The GOP-led House passed a bill that would raise it by $1.5 trillion along with $4.5 trillion in spending cuts. President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats are demanding a clean debit limit bill without any spending cuts.
If the U.S. hits the ceiling, it will default on its loans and could lose its reserve currency status.
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday on worldwide threats facing the U.S., Haines said if the U.S. does not raise the debt ceiling and defaults, it is "almost a certainty [U.S. adversaries] would look to take advantage of the opportunity.
"Generally, both Russia and China would look to perceive, sort of narrate through information operations such an event as demonstrating chaos within the United States that we're not capable of functioning as a democracy. They've done that on a range of things."
Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" he "absolutely" agrees with Haines' assessment.
"We've known for a long time that China is trying to replace the dollar as the reserve currency with their own currency, and it would be a disaster," Warner said. "It would be like giving China and Russia at this moment of the Ukraine war and our technology competition with China a complete gift if we were to default.
"They would suddenly be able to say to the rest of the world, 'Hey, you can't count on the United States to pay its bills.'"
Warner also touched on Russia claiming the Kremlin was attacked Wednesday by a Ukrainian drone in a failed assassination attempt on President Vladimir Putin. Warner said he talked with CIA Director William Burns on Wednesday, who told Warner he did not know the source of the attack.
"We have no evidence that it came from the Ukrainians," Warner said. "We've seen from some of the ham-handed Russian efforts, I wouldn't be totally surprised that this was a Russian false-flag operation where they would create this incident, which would then allow them to increase their bombing of Ukrainian civilians.
"I don't take the Putin regime at its word at all, and at least in terms of our intelligence briefing so far, there's no evidence that came from the Ukrainians."
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