During an appearance on Fox News Channel, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) criticized the Biden administration for how it handled the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. airspace more than a week ago.
The Kentucky Republican lawmaker said the Biden administration should insist on a public apology from the Chinese.
“I think it’s appalling,” he said. “If they want to let us know that it’s an accident, don’t you think they would want to apologize? The fact that they have already got their backup and they’re resisting and talking about retaliation doesn’t sound like much of an apology. If there is an innocent explanation for this — and it doesn’t seem that there is at this point, but if there were, they should be apologizing. But either way, the Biden administration should have the Chinese ambassador come in to speak to the secretary of state, and there should be a full examination of the question.”
“With regard to what they should have done, we need a commander-in-chief that’s able to respond and a national defense that is able to respond within seconds to minutes to penetration of our airspace,” Paul continued. “So this sort of long, drawn-out, that we let this drift over the ocean to Alaska, across Alaska, across Canada, and then, when they finally decided to do something, it still took them four more days, this really is probing our defenses in a way. Even if there was no surveillance on board, they have gotten a great deal of information as to how sluggish the Biden administration is in their response. So, if you decide to shoot it down a week later, you probably could have made that decision a lot quicker when it was over a deserted part of either Alaska or before it crossed the coast of Alaska.”
“So, this looks very, very weak in the eyes of our enemy, and I think was a huge mistake,” he added. “But, at this point, moving forward, what they need to do is, they need to demand a full apology and explanation. If it was supposedly civilian, they should feed us all the data they took in and show us what they — what the — what the balloon was absorbing. And if they’re not going to show us that, we tend not to trust that they’re telling us the truth.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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