From CNN’s Manu Raju
A Gang of Eight briefing on the suspected Chinese spy balloon may occur as early as Tuesday, according to a congressional source.
The group is made up of the top Democratic and Republican leaders in both the House and Senate, as well as key Intelligence Committee members from both chambers. It is generally privy to sensitive information that the rest of Congress is not always briefed on.
A full Senate classified briefing on China will occur on February 15, the source said.
US military fighter jets shot down the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States on Saturday, ending a remarkable public drama that prompted a diplomatic fallout between Washington and Beijing.
Schumer says Senate will receive comprehensive China briefing next week
From CNN’s Aileen Graef
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Sunday that the full Senate would receive a comprehensive briefing on China next week.
“The full Senate — all senators of both parties — will have a larger and full China briefing next week. And that is something that I think will be very important, serious and hopefully nonpolitical,” the New York Democrat said at a news conference in Manhattan. “Under this full brief, all senators in both parties will be briefed by the Department of Defense on their office of Net Assessment (ONA) US-China Overmatch Study.”
Schumer said the briefing will include information about China’s surveillance capabilities, research and development, advanced weapons systems, and other “critical platforms.”
He also pushed back on criticism from GOP lawmakers regarding how the Biden administration handled the response to the suspected Chinese spy balloon, which was shot down Saturday over the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
“We are hearing GOP criticism of the balloon mission. That they are saying we should have shot down the balloon the minute we saw it. I would use two words in answering these GOP criticisms: They are premature and they are political.
Our friends are playing politics with US intelligence. We sent a clear message to China that this is not acceptable. We protected civilians. We gained more intelligence while protecting our own sensitive information. And the bottom line here is shooting down the surveillance balloon over water wasn’t just the safest option, but it was the one that maximized our intelligence payload.”
Cruz praises Biden’s ‘guts’ in shooting down balloon but criticizes decision to wait
From CNN’s Aaron Pellish
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on Sunday praised President Joe Biden for “having the guts” to shoot down the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon but said the decision to wait days “telegraphed weakness.”
“I want to start by doing something that I don’t do very often, which is commending Joe Biden for actually having the guts to shoot this down. That was the right thing to do. That is absolutely what the president should have done,” Cruz told CBS News.
“Unfortunately, he didn’t do that until a week after it entered US airspace. He allowed a full week for the Chinese to conduct spying operations over the United States, over sensitive military installations, exposing not just photographs but the potential of intercepted communications. And more broadly, I think this entire episode telegraphed weakness to [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] and the Chinese government,” he continued.
Biden, for his part, told reporters Saturday that he gave the order Wednesday to take down the balloon “as soon as possible” and that the military waited to act until it had passed over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid “doing damage to anyone on the ground.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reiterated Pentagon and White House talking points on the suspected spy balloon, saying that “steps were taken to prevent any problems in terms of intelligence collection.”
House China Committee chair says balloon incident ‘makes us look weak and flat-footed’
From CNN’s Aaron Pellish
The Republican chair of the newly formed House select committee on China called on the Biden administration Sunday to be more firm in its diplomatic relations with Beijing following the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon episode.
Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher told Fox News that the balloon incident “makes us look weak and flat-footed on the world stage” and implored the White House to engage with China with a renewed skepticism.
“The message I have for the Biden administration is: ‘Don’t fall for the Chinese Communist Party charm offensive.’ It’s a farce. It’s a bedtime story they tell out-of-touch global elites at Davos. It’s time to push back before it’s too late, before something far more dangerous than a balloon is flying over American territory,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher criticized the White House for its response to taking the balloon down, likening the balloon’s dayslong flight over the continental US to a home invasion.
“Letting a Chinese surveillance balloon lazily drift over America is like seeing a robber on your front porch and inviting him in, showing him where you keep your safe, where you keep your guns, where your children sleep at night, and then politely asking him to leave. It makes no sense,” the congressman said.
Gallagher said he believes the balloon “absolutely” could have been taken down after it crossed Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. He said the US should develop the capability to take down surveillance balloons easily if the military isn’t able to already.
“If we don’t have the capability to neutralize it, corral it, collect it, look under the hood and exploit it, well, that’s a capability we need to develop with an $850 billion defense budget. Because I suspect it’s not the last time we’re going to see a Chinese probe,” Gallagher said.
House Intelligence Committee chair: ‘There’s no excuse’ for waiting to shoot down balloon
From CNN’s Morgan Rimmer
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, said Sunday that “there is no excuse” for the Biden administration waiting to shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon before it began crossing the continental US.
“The president taking it down over the Atlantic is sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over. The satellite had completed its mission,” Turner told NBC News. “This should never have been allowed to enter the United States, and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission.”
He added, “They need to make clear to all our adversaries, you’re not going to get to come the United States and take a tour of our most sensitive military sites, and have a free show.”
Turner told NBC News that there is a briefing scheduled for this week on the intelligence assessment of the classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s home, and that documents discovered in President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence’s possession will also be included in the briefing.
He was not specific as to whether the briefing would be with the Intelligence Committee or the so-called Gang of Eight — which includes the party leaders in the House and Senate and the four leaders of the two Intelligence committees.
“There’s nothing scheduled on the balloon, but they’re scheduling Donald Trump,” Turner said, noting that Biden and Pence documents would be “included.”
“It’s supposed to be this week, we’ll see whether or not the balloon happens first,” he said.
Navy divers will be used to help recover surveillance balloon wreckage
From CNN’s Jamie Crawford and Aaron Pellish
Multiple US Navy and Coast Guard vessels are in the area where the suspected Chinese spy balloon went down and are securing a perimeter, according to a senior US military official said.
The official told CNN that the Navy had anticipated having to recover debris in deeper water, but it landed at a depth of about 47 feet, which “will make it fairly easy.”
The official said “capable Navy divers” will go down as needed into the water to assist in the operation.
There are also “unmanned vessels that can go down to get the structure and lift it back up on the recovery ship,” the official added. The official did not know how long it would take crews to recover any salvageable equipment from the downed aircraft but noted that recovery could take “a relatively short time.”
“I don’t anticipate months and weeks,” the official said.
New Hampshire GOP governor calls Biden’s balloon strategy ‘too little too late’
From CNN’s Kiely Westhoff
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire on Sunday slammed President Joe Biden’s response to the suspected Chinese spy balloon as “too little too late.”
“This is all about China testing the American resolve,” Sununu said on “This Week” on ABC. “They know that tensions are escalating, and they want to see what kind of leadership we have.”
“The president clearly failed on this one,” he added.
Biden, for his part, told reporters Saturday that he gave the order Wednesday to take down the balloon “as soon as possible” and that the military waited to act until it had passed over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid “doing damage to anyone on the ground.”
CNN previously reported that the president also wanted the military to shoot down the balloon in such a way that it would maximize the ability to recover its payload, allowing the US intelligence community to sift through its components and gain insights into its capabilities, officials said.
Shooting it down over water also increased the chances of being able to recover the payload intact, the officials said.
Republicans such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have countered that Biden should have been more forthcoming with the American public when he first learned about the suspected spy balloon.
Rubio says Biden should’ve alerted public sooner
From CNN’s Morgan Rimmer
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, said Sunday the Biden administration should have gone public about the Chinese balloon much earlier than it did.
“Presidents have the ability to go before a camera, go before the nation, and basically explain these things early on, and his failure to do so, I don’t understand that, I don’t understand why he wouldn’t do that,” Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And that is the beginning of dereliction of duty.”
The Florida Republican expanded on that message in an interview with ABC News Sunday.
“I recognize that you shoot something out of the sky that’s the size of three buses and it lands in the wrong place it could hurt, harm, kill people or damage infrastructure,” he told ABC. “But by the same token, I think that if that was the case, then I think it really would have been helpful for the President of the United States to get on national television and explain to the American people ‘this is what we’re dealing with. this is what I’m going to do about it, and this is why I haven’t done it yet.’”
Rubio also expressed skepticism on Sunday that the recovery of the balloon would lead to the discovery of anything new about Chinese intelligence operations, or that the Chinese received information from the balloon that it couldn’t have gotten by other, less visible means.
“I think more than anything else, beyond just the ability to collect information, it is the ability to send a clear message,” Rubio told CNN, “and that is that ‘we have the ability to do this and America can’t do anything about it. If they’re not going to be able to stop a balloon from flying over U.S. airspace, how is America going to come to your aid if we invade Taiwan, or take land from India, or take islands from the Philippines and Japan?’”
Still, Rubio told CNN that he is “not sure there should be a direct individual consequence,” for the Chinese incursion into US airspace.
“I think the broader relationship between the US and China, to anyone who has any doubts about it, now the bottom line is here, and that is we are now a – China has been for some time and will be the primary strategic adversary of the United States and we should be focused on it.”
He also dismissed threats from the Chinese that the US had set a dangerous precedent by shooting down what they claim is a civilian balloon as “silly talk.”
“Listen, if we were to fly anything over China, they’re gonna shoot it down. They’re gonna shoot it down, and they’re gonna hold it up and they’re gonna take pictures of it and they’re gonna go bonkers about it. So, I don’t know what statement they’re making – you can’t fly anything over China now, anyway.”
Republican senator calls spy balloon incident a ‘humiliation’ for Biden administration
From CNN’s Aaron Pellish
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Sunday criticized the Biden administration’s response to the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, saying the White House was “paralyzed for an entire week” and calling the incident an “embarrassment.”
Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed the sentiments of other Republican lawmakers in accusing President Joe Biden of shying away from confrontation with China after the military waited three days to down the balloon.
“What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon testing President Biden’s strength and resolve, and unfortunately, the president failed that test,” Cotton said in an interview Sunday with Fox News.
Biden, for his part, told reporters Saturday that he gave the order Wednesday to take down the balloon “as soon as possible” and that the military waited to act until it had passed over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid “doing damage to anyone on the ground.”
A senior US defense official said Saturday that there were three instances during the Trump administration in which a Chinese balloon traveled over the continental United States. Cotton said Sunday he’s spoken to former Trump administration officials who told him they were “not aware of anything like this happening” while Donald Trump was in office.
“Maybe what’s even more worrisome is, one, that our senior military know about these balloons in the past and not inform their civilian superiors during the Trump administration. Or maybe worst of all, did we not know about these balloons in the past and we only learned about them in retrospect by studying historical data,” Cotton said.
