NASHVILLE, TN—Today, United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, joined Varney & Co. on Fox Business to discuss the national security implications of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as well as his legislative push to create a clear regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program: “One thing to keep in mind is the intent of the Iranian regime. If you go back to the agreement President [Barack] Obama signed, they promised under the JCPOA not to continue their enrichment program. The Israelis uncovered the fact that they violated that agreement, and they’ve continued to do it. Why in the world would they build deep underground facilities if they weren’t trying to hide something? They’ve clearly had the intent to weaponize nuclear material. They’ve been enriching it. We’ve known that. This absolute obliteration, which has been widely documented, has taken out these facilities. Is it possible that some material could still remain? Yes, that is a possibility. That’s what the Israeli intelligence is reporting right now. But it’s obvious this regime has intent, and certainly if they have the intent, they’d like to have the ability to weaponize it. What’s happened is that the weaponization capability has been completely destroyed. It takes months, if not years, to rebuild even parts of these facilities. At minimum, what has happened is we’ve bought multi-year protection from what the Iranians could do.”
Hagerty on concerns about Iran using nuclear material in a terrorist attack: “In a hypothetical sense, there is the potential to create something like a dirty bomb. That’s not close to the type of weaponization they were geared toward, but again, the Iranian regime has been put on notice. President [Donald] Trump was very deliberate and very clear: They violated his timeline, they violated his red line, and they suffered the consequences. The most important thing to keep Iran in check is the resolve of America and Israel. We demonstrated that clearly the time has come now for Iran to come to the table and for us to put this completely to an end.”
Hagerty on his cryptocurrency legislation and the need for regulatory clarity: “The problem is longstanding. Over the last four years of the Biden administration, they utilized a tool called Regulation by Enforcement. Rather than creating a legal framework for cryptocurrencies, for the technology, for the stable coin bill, the Genius Act that I just got passed out of the Senate and should come out of the House of Representatives next week, the [Securities and Exchange Commission], the [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], and all the regulatory bodies kept this industry guessing. The bad outcome of that is that if you guess wrong, you will be incarcerated. You’ll wind up being persecuted, and you’ll wind up having enforcement action launched against you that could be very expensive. The net result of that is that we pushed innovation overseas, pushing it offshore because developers did not know what the liability might be here. No one knew how to register or properly adhere to the laws because the laws weren’t made clear. Our aim right now is to make a clear regulatory framework available here in the United States so developers can thrive here and so innovation can happen here. That’s exactly what I want to see with my stablecoin legislation, The Genius Act, that will take our payment system into the 21st century. It will have an enormous economic impact on America and create greater demand for U.S. Treasury securities, because every stablecoin has to be backed up 1-1, dollar for dollar, by the U.S. Security.”
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