Biden Admin: ‘There’s Not An Investigation’ Into Spy Balloon
When a vessel identified as a Chinese spy balloon traveled over the continental United States earlier this year, the Biden administration opted to wait until it had drifted off the East Coast before bringing it down onto the Atlantic Ocean.
The move was widely denounced at the time by critics including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who lamented that President Joe Biden “allowed a full week for the Chinese to conduct spying operations of the United States, over sensitive military installations, exposing not just photographs but the potential of intercepted communications.”
Biden made some effort to talk tough on China in a subsequent public statement, declaring: “I expect to be speaking with President Xi and I hope we are going to get to the bottom of this.”
Earlier this week, however, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby confirmed that there is no ongoing probe into the balloon, its mission, or what information it was able to collect on behalf of the Chinese government.
“Just to be clear, there’s not an investigation going on,” he said. “There was forensic analysis done on the material we recovered from the payload of the spy balloon. That was done by the FBI in Quantico largely, and I don’t know the status.”
Biden’s policy regarding China has been described as unjustifiably weak by his critics since the earliest days of his term in office, leading to speculation that he is somehow compromised by his family’s complicated foreign business deals involving the communist country.
Just last week, U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) asserted that Biden’s State Department eliminated from a recent statement on the fentanyl crisis any mention of China’s role in facilitating the drug’s manufacture in Mexico.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “We’ve actually seen the State Department pulling down critical statements. When the Treasury secretary puts out a sanction that names a Chinese company for sending fentanyl precursors into America and into Mexico, our State Department actually rips that out of their messaging because they don’t want to offend — I presume, they don’t want to offend the Chinese. They’re still trying to get some type of high-level meetings, and they’re willing to sacrifice our strength for that. I think it’s absolutely the wrong way to be dealing with this. We should be dealing from a position of strength and a position of power.”
