Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) has warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was using the spy balloon to test the “weakness” of Democrat President Joe Biden.
Speaking during an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday, Zinke said the CCP would have been observing Biden’s handling of the Chinese surveillance balloon as it maneuvered through American skies and violated U.S. airspace last week.
As Slay News news reported, the balloon was shot down by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of the Carolinas on Saturday but only after it left the skies above the mainland.
As Republican Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) noted, Biden appeared to wait until the aircraft has “completed its mission” before downing it.
Slay News revealed on Sunday that the Biden administration was aware of the balloon long before it was first reported but tried to cover it up.
Zinke, a former longtime Navy SEAL, said the balloon “should have been shot down” as soon as it crossed into U.S. territory, a sentiment shared by many top Republicans, including President Donald Trump.
“I’ve been to the Aleutian chain,” Zinke told Breitbart.
“It’s one of the most isolated, desolate spots on the face of the planet, and then it drifts over Montana and the governor doesn’t know about it.
“Congress doesn’t know about it,” Zinke said.
“Look, this thing should have been shot down the moment it entered the U.S. airspace, period.”
LISTEN:
The balloon first caught the public’s attention around Thursday after a photographer in Montana caught sight of it floating over Billings.
However, a senior defense official said during a press briefing Saturday that the Pentagon had been tracking the balloon since it floated into U.S. airspace, just north of the Aleutian Islands, on January 28.
Questions quickly began to swirl as the photos from Billings spread across the internet.
Many public officials questioned why the Biden administration allowed the balloon, which it confirmed was a surveillance balloon belonging to Communist China, to float across the country from Montana to Missouri to its end point of South Carolina on Saturday, when it was taken out by a missile once it was over the ocean.
The senior defense official said Saturday after the balloon saga had ended that “the president was comfortable with us taking the balloon down if we could avoid undue risk to civilians, and so we worked up an option to take it out over the water, and that’s what we did this afternoon.”
“That doesn’t hold any water in the Aleutian chain and Montana,” Zinke said, noting their rural landscapes.
The defense official said Saturday the remnants of the balloon and its surveillance equipment spanned seven miles across the ocean.
The “bottom line: this is another example of showing weakness,” Zinke said.
“You know, it began very early in this presidency with Afghanistan, that worldwide showing of weakness that’s led, in my opinion, to Putin having the green light in Ukraine.
“We have no plan, by the way, in Ukraine, and we keep dumping money with no plan, with a blank check.
“And then you have Taiwan,” the congressman noted.
“And, look, if we can’t defend ourselves against a balloon, how do you think we can defend ourselves in Taiwan and make sure the South China Sea is a home to democracy and not Communist China?”
Chinese surveillance balloons, which only scratch the surface of the country’s means of intelligence gathering, have crossed into the U.S. at least four times in recent years during both the Trump administration and Biden administration, the Pentagon official said Saturday.
The official said that the Pentagon is “confident [the balloon] was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites” but that it “took all the necessary steps” to prevent the CCP from collecting sensitive data.
“A lot of balloons could go a lot higher,” Zinke said of the balloon, which was 90 feet wide and had an altitude of about 60,000 feet.
“This was a poke in the eye.
“You could see it from Billings, Montana. …
“I guarantee you if we flew something over China, it’d be blown out of the air.”
Zinke reiterated that the CCP’s balloon move was “blatant” and contended that the intelligence the communist government actually gathered was a gauge of the Biden administration’s military strength.
“It was blatant, right?” he said.
“It’s a poke in the eye, but the Chinese know at 60,000 feet with a balloon that size, which is about the size of three buses back, it’s gonna be visible, so it was a poke in the eye, and the intelligence they learned from it was that you can poke us in the eye and we won’t do a darn thing about it, not this administration. …
“Does China really care about sending the air balloon over the United States? No.
“Do they care about Taiwan? Yes.
“Do they have Taiwan in their front sights? Absolutely.
“So to me, this is intelligence gathering of how strong we’re going to be internationally.”
READ MORE: U.S Officials Confirm Third Chinese Balloon, Refuse to Reveal Location
