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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Fox & Friends to discuss the Chinese spy balloon. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On how balloon surveillance differs from traditional surveillance tools:
“There’s a lot the public should know because it’s not classified. I thought the president should have gone before the country last week at some point and explained, ‘Look, here’s what’s coming [in] our direction. Here’s what it is, and here’s what I’ve decided to do about it and why.’ I think people would have understood it. It’s that lack of clarity that has led to a lot of the concern that people now have. It’s very simple.
“Every country, all the major countries have satellites way up in outer space and they operate on an orbit. Every time they make an orbit around the Earth, they can take images and so forth. It’s like your Ring camera that sends you updates that it takes once an hour of what’s going on around there. We all know about spy planes and things of that nature, but in between those two, in between where spy planes can fly and satellites operate, there’s a very valuable space. Balloons allow you persistent surveillance, so they can loiter over an area and actually feed you back real time video of what’s going on. The Chinese are developing that capability. Pretty rudimentary, not complicated. What we’ve never seen is it loiter over the continental United States and over sensitive facilities for that long a period of time.”
On the Biden Administration’s failure to notify the public in a timely manner:
“What is clear is that agencies of the federal government knew that this balloon was headed towards the continental United States, something we had never seen [the Chinese do before], days in advance. They didn’t notify Congress until one of the news outlets was about to run with the story, and then they allowed [the balloon] to basically cut a diagonal path right across the middle of the country, and never explained to us why. And I mean to us, the American public.”
On the Biden Administration’s awareness of the balloon:
“It’s not just NORAD’s responsibility. NORAD has command over U.S. airspace, but we have other capabilities that see things and can project in advance, ‘This is where it’s headed from its trajectory.’ They knew that. They knew it was headed to the continental United States well before it entered North American airspace. They didn’t tell anybody about it, and they didn’t do anything about it.”
On how the Biden Administration should have handled the balloon:
“I think they should have shot it down before it entered over the airspace of the United States. I don’t dismiss this notion that you shoot something down [and something bad could happen.] Imagine this thing falls and kills somebody, damages property, or what have you. I don’t take that piece of it lightly. But I would flip it over and say, ‘What if this thing had a self-destruct mechanism? What if it had the capability to bring itself down…? That posed an air risk as well, right? What if this thing malfunctioned and fell out of the sky on someone?’ Then you would have to answer those questions.
“Those are the kinds of things the president could have come on camera and said, ‘Look, there’s this balloon. Here’s why I’m not going to shoot it down, and here’s when we’re going to take action.’ He could have done that. He just didn’t do it. I think that’s as much a problem here as anything else.”