Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said cases of China deploying high-altitude balloons over the United States during the Trump presidency are not comparable to last week's incident under President Joe Biden.
After a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over sensitive military sites in Montana, ultimately drifting eastward before the U.S. shot it down days later over the Carolina coast, it came to light that a separate balloon “drifted past Hawaii and across Florida” during the Trump presidency in 2019, according to a U.S. air force intelligence report reviewed by CNN.
The senator, who said he had been briefed on Tuesday, insisted to reporters that the most recent occurrence is not close to what happened under former President Donald Trump.
“There are no parallels, and anyone who says that is a liar. There’s nothing like it. There’s no parallel of intrusion, this extensive, for this long period of time, at this level. It’s just not true,” Rubio said ahead of a Senate vote on Tuesday. “Anyone who is saying that needs to stop saying that — they are lying to you.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing in response to detection of the balloon, marking an escalation in already cool relations between China and the U.S. China maintains the balloon was used to monitor weather and that it had been blown off course into U.S. airspace.
Rubio, hesitant to divulge too much information, was still able to provide a few clues about how the incidents under Biden and Trump were apparently different.
“I’ll put it to you this way without getting too deep into it — sometimes, you cross over some area briefly because you’re on your way somewhere else. But, other times, you deliberately go into that place. We’ve never seen anything like this. This was deliberately going to that place,” Rubio said.
Following his most recent briefing, Rubio was critical of the Biden administration’s response to the flyover, accusing the White House of displaying weakness on the international stage and saying that “mistakes had been made.”
He said the answers he got Tuesday were “not satisfactory and raise new questions.”
“I think both the Department of Defense and probably as high up as the commander in chief, certainly the intelligence agencies as well, in terms of responding and assessing — I think that this isn’t the last time something like this could happen. It’s concerning,” Rubio said. “I think the lack of clarity both to the American public and to the relevant agencies are unconscionable, their unwillingness or inability to keep us up to date on the latest incident,” he said.
When asked how he would have recommended the Biden administration respond to the balloon, he said there were opportunities to take it down earlier in the week.
“I’m not saying they should shoot it down over populated areas, but I think they had opportunities well before then, the trajectory of that balloon was clear before it entered over the continental U.S. They knew where it was headed, and they had an opportunity to take it down and they didn’t,” Rubio said.
President Joe Biden said he asked the Pentagon to shoot the aircraft days before it was taken down, but defense officials voiced safety concerns.
SCHUMER SCOLDS REPUBLICANS FOR OUTCRY OVER SUSPECTED CHINESE SPY BALLOON
Earlier Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) scolded Republicans for their criticism of how the Biden administration handled the incident.
“Republicans, even before they saw and knew what was happening, started — some of them, not all — lambasting the president,” Schumer said during a Tuesday morning press conference ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address. “Those criticisms were, at best, premature and, in all probability, highly political. This is one area where we don’t need politics.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not want to elaborate further on the situation.
“I don’t want to comment. I want Intel to weigh in, DOD to weigh in, policymakers. Let’s get all the information, then we can make some judgments. But, I think it’s better for us to get all our facts first,” Warner told reporters on Tuesday evening.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address, Rubio said he hopes the incident will serve as a wake-up call, adding that he hopes the president acknowledges the situation directly.
“I don’t know how he will justify their response. I think he needs to acknowledge that this is part of a much broader problem,” Rubio said. “The Chinese Communist Party, they are coming and they intend to be the world’s most powerful country and to challenge us, and they’ll get even more brazen in those challenges in the years to come. We’ve been warning about this for almost a decade now. It’s finally here. And we need to wake up to that reality, and hopefully, you know, having a balloon fly overhead and having people see it is a pretty good wake up call.”