Spy Balloon Drama: Biden WH’s Wild Claim

After what certainly looked like a lot of foot-dragging from President Biden, a U.S. military pilot finally shot down the Chinese spy balloon that was hovering across much of our country for days, including over extremely sensitive military installations.

After stalling for days, now President Joe Biden wants to puff up his chest and take credit for shooting it down. In response, China has issued a tepid threat of potential retaliation.

China lied and said it was a weather balloon. It wasn’t. They said it was blown off course and wasn’t floating over American airspace on purpose. That’s also not true. It was being directed along a specific course, like a drone. And now China has the nerve to wag its finger at us and say we overreacted and that we had no right to shoot it down. Give me a break.

But how can we expect China to be transparent with us when our own President won’t? We look weak and foolish to the rest of the world. An adversarial nation felt comfortable enough to fly a spy balloon literally right over our heads, and our government played dumb. That is the real offense here: that the sitting President of the United States did nothing for so long.

The spy balloon was blown up by a U.S. Air Force pilot, and the surveillance equipment is currently floating in pieces in the Atlantic Ocean, as we scramble to salvage whatever intelligence we can pull off of the remains. But we don’t know what it might have already collected and transmitted back to Communist China in the week that we just let it float along, undisturbed.

Now in an attempt to save face, the Biden Administration is claiming this happened during the Trump Administration too. The problem is, so far, there’s no proof of that claim, and former senior intelligence officials have come forward to say it didn’t happen, or they were never aware if it did. Apparently, if there was a spy balloon during Trump’s tenure in the White House, it must not have been allowed to hover so close that it was detectable by the naked eye, let alone every smartphone with a camera for miles around.

We asked ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about this, and he was very clear, “No one ever briefed me about a balloon the size of three buses flying over the United States, and I think I’d know.” We also asked him if this was even about spying or if China was actually testing the Biden Administration. Sec. Pompeo said it was indeed a test, and our Commander in Chief failed:

"Grade is F. Absolutely true. It was a little bit about collection, a little bit about intelligence gathering, and an awful lot about trying to gather intelligence about how will Joe Biden respond to a threat to things that he cares about. If you can’t defend from a balloon over Montana, the chances that you’re going to help Taiwan is very low. And that’s what [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is testing. And he has tested repeatedly."

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast includes more analysis of the Biden Administration’s apparent reluctance to hold China accountable for sending this spy balloon into our airspace and the communist nation’s half-hearted threat of retaliation over shooting it down.