The coast of myrtle beach, South Carolina. Tonight, military crews are jam bling to recover the wreckage, and china is responding angrily. Meanwhile, President Biden says he and u. S. Military leaders decided to wait until the balloon completed its crosscountry journey and was safely overwater before shooting it down. Listen to this. On wednesday when i was briefed on the balloon, i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. Cnn has Team Coverage of this extraordinary moment in u. S. China relations. I want to start with cnns Orin Lieberman over at the palm. Walk us through what happened earlier today. This was days of planning to get to this point, to figure out how best to shoot this balloon down and where best to shoot this balloon down. In the end, the Department Of Defense recommended waiting until it was out overwater and the prevailing winds over the United States, especially over the course of the past day, took it out over the waters of north and S
shot down. the u.s. destroys the suspected chinese spy balloon that triggered a diplomatic crisis. the presence of this surveillance balloon is a clear violation of u.s. sovereignty and international law. what s the fallout for the critical u.s. relationship with china? plus, the president gears up for re-election. four more years. four more years. and trumpets a blockbuster jobs report. the biden economic plan is working. can biden convince voters that the economy is back on track? donald trump unloads on his would-be primary rivals. ron desantis got elected because of me. nikki suffers from something that s a very tough thing. she s overly ambitious. as the 2024 field takes shape, are they ready for the attacks coming their way? welcome to in inside polit sun sunday , i m abby phillip. at 2:39 yesterday afternoon a tense and dramatic diplomatic crisis ended with one shot from an f-22 fighter jet. oh [ bleep ]. those a missiles. they shot it down. they
national security interests and threats as best we can. thanks, admiral. real quick, is there a timeline for recovery of this object? you d have to talk to the pentagon, i don t know. guys, again, this just happened in the last hour and a half and they re still assessing where this thing landed and the degree to which they can get to it. on the poland visit, i know in the statement that you put out, it says that the president is going to meet with leaders of the eastern flank countries. are any other european leaders, nato leaders expected to join the president on this trip? we re still putting the agenda together. the predominant reason is to talk to those nations who are literally on the eastern flank of the nato alliance. but i can t rule in or rule out there may be additional attendees that the president may have. thanks very much. back to lula, is there going to be any commitment to the amazon fund by the united states during this visit? let s have the visi
we can t rule that out completely. the key thing that i focused on was that apparently this object did not have the kind of connective capability that the balloon did. so that becomes a very different issue. and to what major lyons was saying, there is a big difference from an intelligence collection perspective. it actually is okay in some cases to collect the information, see how it actually talks to other entities. in this particular case you have a bit of a different situation where it didn t talk to anything, but you don t know what kind of a threat it poses except for the fact that you know it is a threat to commercial aviation. natasha, to you and the intersection of the military and politics here. i think oren s question is fair, considering that the argument to let the chinese balloon go across the country and then shoot it down, you can collect something from it, one has to
s assessed as having limited value from an intelligence collection perspective, colonel. so what are your guesses as to what its actual purpose was? why did china launch this huge balloon across the continental united states? so there s several possibilities. i used to work collection management operations, and what that means is you pick what the type of collection asset that you need in order to go after a particular intelligence target. so what may have happened is that the chinese may have an outage, may have felt they needed a gap filler in order to cover the particularly intelligence requirement they had for their forces. so what could happen is they could put balloons in place of satellites to do this. and the types of intelligence that they would be using, wolf, would include imagery intelligence, which is kind of hard to do in some cases from a platform like balloon, but also signals intelligence. and they would be able to collect data in various