U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio on Friday said President Joe Biden made a “mistake” by not shooting down the Chinese spy balloon making its way over America.
The Florida Republican, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, added that the balloon’s presence is only another example of the rampant Chinese spying going on within the United States — something former President Donald Trump also alluded to on Friday.
“It was a mistake to not shoot down that Chinese spy balloon when it was over a sparsely populated area,” Rubio tweeted on Friday about Biden’s inaction over the intrusion into America’s heartland. “This is not some hot air balloon, it has a large payload of sensors roughly the size of two city buses & the ability to maneuver independently.”
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“A Chinese spy balloon over the U.S. is alarming but not surprising,” Rubio added in a second tweet. “The level of espionage aimed at our country by Beijing has grown dramatically more intense & brazen over the last 5 years.”
Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec on Friday noted the balloon’s path: “Amazing,” he tweeted, “how the Chinese ‘weather’ balloon is randomly drifting around and also accidentally blows over all of our Air Force installations.”
In a follow-up tweet early Saturday, he added, “The Biden admin knew about the balloon all along but didn’t want to make China mad before [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken’s audience with [Chinese President Xi Jinping] this weekend. But a Montana newspaper got footage of it and they had to go public.”
Trump’s message was unambiguous: “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON,” he said Friday on his social media platform Truth Social.
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In a video released on Rumble, the former President noted, “It’s rarely even mentioned that China has many thousands of spies working in the United States in business, finance, academia, technology, media and likely, even government, very sadly.”
He also criticized Biden for disbanding a special Justice Department unit that targeted Chinese spying in the U.S. Biden, said Trump did so because he thought it was racist.
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