Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said the presence of a possible spy balloon over Montana should serve as a “wake up” call as China conducts espionage against the United States.
Rubio said the balloon should be shot down since it could be gathering intelligence, though he added that the same information can be gathered using satellites and possibly Huawei equipment installed in U.S. infrastructure. The Florida Republican is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and privy to classified intelligence briefings available only to the party leaders and top members of the intelligence committees in both chambers.
“This is just one more method that they use to collect intelligence on us. We have to be cognizant of it and protect ourselves against it. By the same token, we need to wake up,” Rubio told The Mike Gallagher Show on Friday.
The Biden administration has said it doesn’t have plans to destroy the balloon. Although Rubio joined Republican calls for the military to “shoot it down,” he cautioned that the device needs to be approached carefully so the debris doesn’t hurt anyone.
“If these things are flying over our airspace, and there’s an opportunity to bring them down, we’re going to do it. We’re not going to do it in a way that’s going to fall on a major city and kill anyone. It can be a little unpredictable, so it’s not as easy as just going up there and knocking this thing down. [But] we have to make that pretty clear,” he said.
He added that it’s “disappointing that [the Biden administration] chose not to bring it down when it was over a sparsely populated area where they could have retrieved it and sent a pretty strong message.”
The Chinese government acknowledged that the balloon appears to be theirs, but said it’s a weather balloon that was merely blown off course.
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“The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Friday. “Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course.”
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has postponed a trip to Beijing in the wake of the discovery.
