Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) said Monday on FNC’s “America Reports” that the military treated President Joe Biden like a “suggester-in-chief” when coming up with a plan to shoot down the Chinese balloon that flew across the United States.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said, “What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon, testing President Biden’s strength and resolve.”
Anchor John Roberts said, “So, again, his strength and resolve is tested just as we saw, you mentioned it, during the Afghanistan pullout, the buildup to the invasion of Ukraine. Now, we’ve allowed China to float a spy balloon across the country. Maybe Dan Davis is right that it didn’t have tremendous value to the Chinese, but it sure had propaganda value.”
Gingrich said, “Well, not just that. I mean I mean, first of all, these balloons are extraordinarily dangerous because you could put an electric magnetic pulse weapon on them, float them across, explode them where you want to. I mean, we have no idea what the Chinese are doing. And it was a huge risk to allow it. But there’s an internal question here. When the military learned about it, apparently, there’s a three or four-day period where they don’t tell the president. When the president learns about it, he says, shoot it down, and the American military says, you know, you’re not really the commander in chief. You’re kind of a suggester-in-chief, and we’re not going to do it. And so if you believe the White House, the president on Wednesday ordered it to be shot down, and the American military just ignored it. That’s pretty extraordinary if true.”
He continued, “Furthermore, the idea that they couldn’t find a way to bring it down safely over the United States, there was a very funny thing in Babylon Bee, where they said first. First, the balloon accomplished its mission. Then I had it shot down. That sort of captured where we are. Why would you let a Chinese balloon go all the way across the country, including over many of our most important military bases? And only then, after it’s all done, bring it down and then bring it down in such a way that now they’re having to go out and try to find it in the ocean. I mean, we had plenty of capacity to scoop that balloon out of the air. We used to do it all the time with satellite photographs back before you had an electronic transmission. We’d have planes who would go off and actually capture the capsule that had the satellite, the spy material. The fact that we couldn’t in four or five days organize an ability to capture the balloon in the air, bring it to the ground safely, and then know exactly what the material is.”
Gingrich added, “This is just one more example of a bloated Pentagon bureaucracy that’s more worried about being dealing with social issues than it is about defending the United States. From Afghanistan on, we have seen failure after failure, and the Pentagon needs a deep, thorough shakeup.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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