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Transcript: Sen. Tom Cotton on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Sept. 29, 2024
The following is a transcript of an interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Sept. 29, 2024.
ROBERT COSTA: We are joined now by Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican. He sits on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees. Good morning, Senator. We appreciate you being here. What’s next? Senator Cotton, do you believe there will be an expanded war between Israel and Iran on the horizon?
SEN. TOM COTTON: Well Bob, I’m not sure that Israel is expanding the war so much as it is trying to end the war, I think it’s important to stress just sort of huge blow the last two weeks have been against Hezbollah. Iran is behind all of these terror networks, but Hezbollah is its most potent weapon. Hezbollah has over 100,000 rockets and missiles and mortars aimed at Israel. Iran has used that threat to deter Israel for years, going back probably 20 years or so, and now that Israel has absolutely devastated the entire leadership structure of Hezbollah, whether it’s at the attacks that came just late last week, killing not only Hassan Nasrallah and all the other leaders, or some of their other actions, or hitting their weapons depots and manufacturing sites in Syria. Now is not the time for a ceasefire or to de-escalate, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want. Hezbollah is on its knees. The United States should help Israel drive Hezbollah to the mat and choke it out and finish it off once and for all. That means for the first time in decades, Iran would be exposed on its flanks with no terror proxy capable- capable of devastating Israel or our troops and our friends in the region. That’s what we should do. Not demand that we have a cease fire. De-escalate at a time when Israel is trying to win. We should let Israel win.
ROBERT COSTA: Senator Cotton, when you say, drive Hezbollah to the mat, would that mean a ground invasion of Lebanon by Israel? And would you support that kind of incursion?
SEN. COTTON: If that’s what Israel needs to do to eliminate the remnants of Hezbollah’s leadership and its arsenal, then yes, of course. Again, Hezbollah had over 100,00 missiles and rockets and mortars. Now a lot of those have probably already been destroyed. Israel needs to destroy all of them. A lot of Hezbollah’s leadership has been destroyed as well. This guy that y’all just cited there, maybe he’s the leader, I don’t know who’s in charge of Hezbollah. I’m not sure anyone else does either. It’s probably someone who wasn’t important enough to have a beeper or a walkie talkie as recently as two weeks ago. But all of Hezbollah’s leadership needs to be eliminated, just like all of its arsenal needs to be eliminated, just like the United States needs to be much more forceful in attacking Iran’s terror army in Yemen, where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have had our sailors resting like sitting ducks in the Red Sea for months. When we finish mopping up all of these terrorist proxies, that means Iran, once again, is totally exposed. It no longer can threaten Israel and the United States and our friends throughout the region. That’s why we need to back Israel to the hilt and let Israel win, rather than continue to make these feckless demands for ceasefires and de-escalation that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have been doing for a year now.
ROBERT COSTA: You sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Is there an alarm sounding in your ranks about any potential threats to Americans in the Middle East or to US targets at this point?
SEN. COTTON: Well, from the minute Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got to the White House, there’ve been threats to Americans. Iran and its proxies have attacked our troops over 100 times–
ROBERT COSTA: – but in the wake of this latest news–-
SEN. COTTON: — and we barely ever struck back. There’s been continued attacks on us again, just like we should support Israel in striking back against these terrorists, we should be striking back harder again. But that’s not Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s policy. From the very beginning, they’ve appeased and conciliated the Ayatollahs. Kamala Harris, for instance, opposed Donald Trump’s strike that killed Iran’s terrorist mastermind in 2020. Over the last four years, they’ve given away tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. They’ve looked the other way as Iran violates sanctions. They’ve continually put more pressure on Israel than they put on Iran’s terrorist proxy. That’s why Kamala Harris is the Ayatollah’s handpicked candidate, and while the ayatollahs are hacking into Donald Trump’s campaign and trying to kill him.
ROBERT COSTA: Turning to Ukraine, former President Donald Trump- you’re a big supporter of his. He met with President Zelensky in recent days in New York. He talked about a potential deal to end the war. What kind of deal would that be? How would it exactly look? You’re close to Trump and this process.
SEN. COTTON: Well, he hasn’t been specific, and I think that’s for a reason. One, he doesn’t know what the world is going to look like in another three months when he takes office. He doesn’t know how much more Joe Biden Kamala Harris might screw things up. But here’s what we do know, this never would have happened on Donald Trump’s watch because it didn’t happen on Donald Trump’s watch. Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine twice, both times with Joe Biden in the White House. First as Barack Obama’s understudy, second with Kamala Harris in the White House with him. That came just a few months after the disastrous collapse in Afghanistan. Those things are not unrelated. When you project weakness, as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have, and you suggest to your enemies that they can push you around and walk all over you, you get the kind of conflicts we see in Europe and that we see in Israel, and you get the chaos we see at our southern border. Bob- the administration- Bob the administration, just acknowledged–
ROBERT COSTA: I know- I know- on Ukraine for a second. Just pause on this for a second, Senator. Senator Vance, who’s going to be at the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, hosted by CBS News. He’s talked about on a recent podcast a demilitarized zone as a part of a potential peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. He said it could look like something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine that becomes a demilitarized zone, heavily fortified so the Russians don’t invade again. The details matter here. Would a demilitarized zone be something as part of a peace deal that you would be comfortable with as a Republican senator?
SEN. COTTON: The details do matter. But Donald Trump has said he’s not going to negotiate against himself or against Ukraine in advance. Once he takes office, that’s the time to start hammering out the details in private and to make sure that something like this can’t happen again, which didn’t happen when he was president after the first invasion of Ukraine. But again, I just want to say the chaos that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have unleashed across this world, isn’t limited to the other side of the world. It happens right here. The administration just acknowledged that they released more than 13,000 convicted murderers who illegally entered this country. More than 15,000 convicted sex offenders. That’s 28,000 rapists and murderers who illegally entered our country who Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have let roam our streets. That’s the kind of chaos that they have unleashed for the last four years, and that Donald Trump will put an end to.
ROBERT COSTA: You’re confronting the Democrats here on this show. You’re bringing up all of your different arguments. Former President Trump, even though there are just a few weeks left in the campaign, has so far said he does not want to participate in another debate with Vice President Harris. Is that a mistake? Do the American people deserve to hear more from former President Trump and the Vice President about their views?
SEN. COTTON: Well, I think they deserve to hear a lot more from Kamala Harris, because she’s been lying to them for the last three months. If you look at her record–
ROBERT COSTA: — So why not debate again? —
SEN. COTTON: — she’s been trying to run. She’s been trying to run away from it from the very moment she took the nomination from Joe Biden. She wants to ban gas powered cars. She wants to give reparations based on race. She wants to ban fracking. She wants to take away private health insurance on the job. These are not positions that she took as a teenager in high school. These are positions she took as a 54 year old woman running for president in her own right. That’s the true Kamala Harris, a weak, dangerous San Francisco liberal. Kamala Harris is the one who owes the American people a lot more answers. Donald Trump can simply point at his record and say, for four years when I was president, we had peace, prosperity, a secure border, and we were respected around the world. That’s what the American people remember. That’s what they’re going to get when they elect him again to the White House.
ROBERT COSTA: But should Trump debate again?
COTTON: There’s no- he’s already debated twice, and JD is going to debate Tim, and he’s going to do a great job telling his story and pointing out what a radical record Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Have the American people know what Donald Trump will do in office. Kamala Harris is still trying to fool them.
ROBERT COSTA: Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, thanks for being here on Face the Nation. We appreciate it, and we will be back in one minute. Stay with us.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models.
The decision is a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models in the nation and paved the way for AI safety regulations across the country, supporters said.
Earlier this month, the Democratic governor told an audience at Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by software giant Salesforce, that California must lead in regulating AI in the face of federal inaction but that the proposal “can have a chilling effect on the industry.”
The proposal, which drew fierce opposition from startups, tech giants and several Democratic House members, could have hurt the homegrown industry by establishing rigid requirements, Newsom said.
“While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data,” Newsom said in a statement. “Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”
Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.
The measure, aimed at reducing potential risks created by AI, would have required companies to test their models and publicly disclose their safety protocols to prevent the models from being manipulated to, for example, wipe out the state’s electric grid or help build chemical weapons. Experts say those scenarios could be possible in the future as the industry continues to rapidly advance. It also would have provided whistleblower protections to workers.
The legislation is among a host of bills passed by the Legislature this year to regulate AI, fight deepfakes and protect workers. State lawmakers said California must take actions this year, citing hard lessons they learned from failing to rein in social media companies when they might have had a chance.
Proponents of the measure, including Elon Musk and Anthropic, said the proposal could have injected some levels of transparency and accountability around large-scale AI models, as developers and experts say they still don’t have a full understanding of how AI models behave and why.
The bill targeted systems that require more than $100 million to build. No current AI models have hit that threshold, but some experts said that could change within the next year.
“This is because of the massive investment scale-up within the industry,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in April over what he saw as the company’s disregard for AI risks. “This is a crazy amount of power to have any private company control unaccountably, and it’s also incredibly risky.”
The United States is already behind Europe in regulating AI to limit risks. The California proposal wasn’t as comprehensive as regulations in Europe, but it would have been a good first step to set guardrails around the rapidly growing technology that is raising concerns about job loss, misinformation, invasions of privacy and automation bias, supporters said.
A number of leading AI companies last year voluntarily agreed to follow safeguards set by the White House, such as testing and sharing information about their models. The California bill would have mandated AI developers to follow requirements similar to those commitments, said the measure’s supporters.
But critics, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued that the bill would “kill California tech” and stifle innovation. It would have discouraged AI developers from investing in large models or sharing open-source software, they said.
Newsom’s decision to veto the bill marks another win in California for big tech companies and AI developers, many of whom spent the past year lobbying alongside the California Chamber of Commerce to sway the governor and lawmakers from advancing AI regulations.
Two other sweeping AI proposals, which also faced mounting opposition from the tech industry and others, died ahead of a legislative deadline last month. The bills would have required AI developers to label AI-generated content and ban discrimination from AI tools used to make employment decisions.
Some residents east of Atlanta were evacuated while others were told to shelter in place to avoid contact with a chemical plume after a fire at a chemical plant.
Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDaniel told reporters that a sprinkler head malfunctioned around 5 a.m. Sunday at the BioLab plant in Conyers. That caused water to mix with a water-reactive chemical, which produced a plume of chemicals. The chief said she wasn’t sure what chemicals were included.
A small roof fire was initially contained, but reignited Sunday afternoon, Sheriff Eric Levett said in a video posted on Facebook as gray smoke billowed into the sky behind him. He said authorities were trying to get the fire under control and urged people to stay away from the area.
People in the northern part of Rockdale County were ordered to evacuate and others were told to shelter in place with windows and doors closed. Sheriff’s office spokesperson Christine Nesbitt did not know the number of people evacuated.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division were both on site, county Emergency Management Director Sharon Webb said. The agencies are monitoring the air “to give us more of an idea of what the plume consists of.”
McDaniel said crews were working on removing the chemical from the building, away from the water source. Once the product is contained, the situation will be assessed and officials will let residents know whether it is safe to return to their homes, she said.
An evacuation center was opened at Wolverine Gym in Covington.
Washington — Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will face off on Tuesday in the first and only vice presidential debate of the cycle, as the two candidates look to prop up the Republican and Democratic tickets with fewer than 40 days until Election Day.
The debate, hosted by CBS News at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City, will be moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” moderator and CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan.
Here’s what to know about how the candidates are preparing for the debate:
How JD Vance is preparing for the VP debate
The Ohio Republican has been preparing for the debate for more than a month, a source directly involved told CBS News, including with “murder board” sessions with a small team that includes Vance’s wife and his advisers, along with senior Trump adviser Jason Miller.
Among Vance’s main focuses during the preparation has been studying Walz’ debate style and policy record, the source said, noting that Vance will attempt to highlight what he sees as the Minnesota governor’s left-wing views during the debate.
Vance told reporters last week that his plan is to break down what the Trump-Vance administration would do to make “life better” and connect that to policy.
“So, we’re studying up as much as we can on the issues that matter to the American people, and I’m looking forward to it,” Vance said.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, is standing in for Walz during Vance’s debate prep, four sources familiar with the preparations told CBS News. Emmer and Walz have deep roots in Minnesota and are close in age.
Emmer told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he’s known Walz for decades and has spent the last month working to “get his phrases down, his mannerisms.”
“My job was to be able to play Tim Walz so JD Vance knows what he’s going to see,” Emmer said.
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How Tim Walz is preparing for the VP debate
Walz has been preparing for the debate with a close team of advisers, a source familiar with the preparations told CBS News. Some of the people involved also helped Vice President Kamala Harris take on former President Donald Trump, among others, like a long-time aid to Walz who worked with him during his bids for governor.
For Walz, whose name recognition was until recently limited outside of Minnesota, the focus is on continuing to introduce himself to the American people, according to the source. He’ll also work to highlight Harris’ vision for the nation’s path forward.
“You’ll hear me talk like I have about things that impact Americans, making sure they have the opportunity to thrive, making sure that we’re being factual in how we talk about that,” Walz told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow of the debate earlier this month. “And so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll work hard, that’s what I do.”
During debate prep, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is standing in for Vance, a campaign official familiar with the preparation told CBS News. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also assisted Harris during her debate prep in 2020, and is close in age to Vance.
When and how to watch the presidential debate
Debate coverage on CBS News 24/7 begins at 4 p.m. ET, with the debate getting underway at 9 p.m. ET on Oct. 1.
The 90-minute debate will be streamed on CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ across all available platforms and CBSNews.com. The debate will also be simulcast across other broadcast and cable networks.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes first-in-nation AI safety bill
Residents in Georgia ordered to evacuate or shelter in place after fire at chemical plant
Israeli airstrikes kill dozens across Lebanon as Hezbollah confirms a 7th top commander was killed
California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes first-in-nation AI safety bill