Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said a “lack of clarity” from President Joe Biden on the status of the Chinese spy balloon is to blame for waves of concern and criticism.
Rubio said in an interview with Fox & Friends on Thursday that he wished Biden would have alerted the public to the balloon’s presence last week when it was traveling across the U.S. mainland for several days.
CHINESE SPY BALLOON INITIAL REPORT NOT MARKED URGENT
“I thought the president should have gone before the country last week at some point and explain, ‘Look, here’s what’s coming our direction, here’s what it is, and here’s what I’ve decided to do about it and why,'” Rubio said. “And I think people would have understood it.”
“And it’s that lack of clarity that I think has led to a lot of the concern that people now have,” he added.
However, Rubio said it is clear that federal government agencies knew the balloon was traveling to the continental U.S. and did not see fit to inform Congress.
The Florida senator said he does not believe the reports from defense officials that similar surveillance objects were in U.S. airspace during the Trump administration but were only recently discovered after Biden’s officials took over surveillance agencies.
“I was aware [China] had a balloon program. Has it ever done what this one did? Absolutely not,” Rubio said. “That has never happened. Period, end of story. Not now, not in the past, it didn’t happen.”
However, he said if there were similar objects, comparing the two is similar to comparing “two different universes.”
“They knew it was heading to the continental United States well before it entered American airspace, and they didn’t tell anyone about it and they didn’t do anything about it,” Rubio added.
Rubio’s remarks come after senior defense officials told CNN that an initial report on the balloon’s existence was sent through government channels but was not flagged as urgent — officials instead dismissed it and were not alarmed. Only when the balloon hovered over Montana on Jan. 31 did intelligence officials begin to suspect its mission was to conduct surveillance on U.S. military and defense systems.
He said he does not “dismiss the notion” that shooting the balloon down could have caused injuries or property destruction on the ground. However, he thinks the balloon should have been shot down long before officials did on Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina.
“I would flip over and say, ‘What if this thing had a self-destruct mechanism? What if it had the capability to bring itself down, probably [by] whoever in the Chinese military [was] operating it? What if it malfunctioned and fell out of the sky on someone?'” Rubio said. “Those are the kind[s] of things the president could have come on camera and said.”
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Lawmakers in the Senate will vote on a resolution sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Thursday condemning China’s “espionage mission” as “unacceptable.”
The House passed a similar resolution
, introduced by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX), on Thursday morning.
