possible explosives to deflate the balloon. gillian: in a moment, karine jean-pierre will be asked questions why the president waited nearly a week to shoot it down. john: we will bring you the white house briefing when it begins. john roberts in washington, good to kick the week off with you. gillian: you, too, john. i m gillian turner in for sandra smith. the president said ordered the military to take out the balloon after it had been drifting for days. they say the military should have listened. he projected weakness at this moment. i think the administration lacks urgency. became a situation of argument and everybody wondering what is the administration doing. this is a wake-up call for the country. gillian: john kirby pushed back, said it gave the u.s. time to study the balloon, as well as chinese s motives. john: seems clear china s motive is to replace the united states as the leading superpower. a list of how china has provoked and escalated tension
On February 10, 2023, the Chinese think tank Internet of Things published an article titled "Did the U.S. Spend $400,000 Shooting Down the Civilian Balloon in Order to Crack China's Key Air Technology?"[1] The article provides an overview of the Chinese spy balloon saga, echoing Chinese government narratives about the balloon’s civilian research mission, and it asserts that
been premature, and very political, there are a number of democrats on some pretty powerful committees looking at this thing and wondering how in the world it was allowed to enter into u.s. air space, and one of those democrats is montana senator john tester, a chairman of defense appropriations. he s already called for a hearing on the chinese spy airship. he says he s going to actually pull people in before his committee to find out how this happened. meantime, senate intel chairman mark warner tweeting his frustration over the weekend, he wrote there s no way the ccp would allow a balloon like this to fly over the chinese heartland. now, we are expecting the gang of 8 to be briefed this week, could happen before the state of the union akres happens tomorrow night, that is not confirmed. but it could potentially happen before then and then next week all senators will get a general briefing on the china threat. there are already republicans
most important single point of the speech tomorrow night. john: if he does the latter, it will be like when you were speaker of the house. you mentioned the balloon, and even though the president apparently gave the authorization to the military to shoot down the balloon days before they actually did it, he wanted to allow it to transit the entire country before they took the shot, which led senator tom cotton to say this to our shannon bream yesterday. what began as a spy balloon has become a test of the strength and resolve of president biden. john: you mentioned during the afghanistan pullout, the build-up to the invasion of ukraine, now allowed china to float the spy balloon across the country, it sure had propaganda value. not just that. first of all, these balloons are extraordinarily dangerous
we really don t have a problem of fentanyl killing our children, everybody is really economically happy, afghanistan was a great success, i think they called it largest airlift in history. the fact is that we were very clever and allowed the chinese balloon to go all the way across the country finishing its mission before we shot it down. i think what what s he going to say? look, presidents have to come into the state of the union, they have to be positive, they have to tout their accomplishments and then call for even better future. he ll do that, the biggest question in my mind, he and speaker mccarthy have had a decent conversation recently, does he come in and pick a fight with republicans or come in and reach out an olive branch and say we ought to be able to work together and i think that s a very big decision for biden. is he going to be the democratic leader running for re-election, or is he going to be the president of the united states trying to work with the new republica