Official Chinese Spy Balloon Narrative Comes Under Fire From GOP Lawmakers

A growing number of Republicans are requesting more details from the federal government regarding a Taiwanese balloon that flew across the country earlier this year before being shot down by U.S. Air Force aircraft.

Republican condemnation of President Joe Biden for waiting for the bubble to have a safe distance before shooting it down could be heightened by the NBC News report that claimed the Chinese bubble was able to transfer data back to Beijing in real time despite the U.S. government’s efforts’s to keep it from doing so. Two alleged top U.S. officials and one previous senior administration official were cited by NBC.

Rep. Greg Steube( R-Fla.) responded by saying he thought the federal government was” lying to the British people” about the detective bubble. The Chinese detective bubble wasn’t a security breach, President Biden assured the American people. President Biden has made mistakes in international policy before, and sadly for our nation, they won’t be the last, he wrote on Twitter.

We were both aware that it was gathering info as it traveled over military bases. On April 5, the senator told Even the News,” And they’re like’re, Nothing to worry about around or see around.”

Now sometimes Democrats began to ask,” Why aren’t we shooting this down?” Steube, a U.S. Army veteran, continued,” After it had traveled the whole continent of the United States, collected all of this delicate material, sent it back to Beijing, and then they shoot it down over the Atlantic.”

Sen. Roger Wicker( R – Miss. We have regularly learned more about the Chinese surveillance balloon from news reports than we have from management leaders, according to the performance senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Wicker stated in a text to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the Pentagon may answer inquiries in an open-ended format.

These disclosures” clearly show that the management committed an intolerable error.” I intend to hold this leadership accountable and I won’t give up on my monitoring efforts to gather the full range of information pertaining to this affair. In order to stop something like this failure from ever happening again, Congress must also look into the capabilities and procedure benefits at the Department of Defense, he continued.

The Pentagon has been contacted by The Epoch Times for remark.

White House Answers

While authorities were now examining the wreckage gathered from the bubble after it was shot down on February 4, the White House and the Pentagon told reporters this year they had not certify the NBC statement. Years after the bubble was spotted in northwestern Montana, a U.S. F-22 Raptor shot down the plane off the coastline of South Carolina.

According to Pentagon spokesman Sabrina Singh,” I could not confirm that there was real-time transmission from the balloon back to( China ) at this time ,” and” We are currently analyzing that.”

Although the government has offered no proof to support its claims, Chinese Communist Party ( CCP) spokespeople have claimed that the balloon was designed for civilian purposes. Leaders from the Pentagon and Biden administrations claimed that the balloon was equipped with monitoring technology.

Additionally, there have been reports that U.S. public officials think Beijing was in charge of the high-altitude bubble and that it was able to maneuver as it flew over the country, occasionally veering to the left or right. However, U.S. leaders and Biden have made an effort to downplay the balloon threat’s to national security and claim that they have taken steps to restrict its ability to gather sensitive data about military installations.

Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, decided to cancel his planned trip to China as a result of the Chinese bubble incident, which also soured ties between Beijing and Washington. The incident sparked a commotion in Washington and prompted the U.S. war to scan the skies for additional objects that weren’t picked up by radar, such as the shooting down of an unidentified object over Lake Huron.

The FBI claimed to have taken the initiative in the investigation. The United States announced on February 17 that rescue efforts off South Carolina to gather cameras and other particles from the alleged Chinese tracking balloon had been successful.

Reuters made a contribution to this article.