White House: ‘Confident’ Spy Balloon Didn’t Get Anything Beyond What China Can Get Anyway ‘Because We Knew Where It Was Going’

On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby reacted to an NBC News report on the Chinese spy balloon gathering data from sensitive sites by stating that while we’re still analyzing material from the balloon, “we’re confident, because we knew where it was going, we were confident that it didn’t discover anything really additive to what they could have gotten from other intelligence sources.” And that the U.S. “exploited on” the balloon while it was over American airspace and “took really appropriate steps to make sure that it wasn’t going to get anything of great value.”

Host Elizabeth Vargas asked, “We’re now learning that China was able to maneuver that spy balloon over sensitive military sites to actually gather spy data in real-time and erase it after downloading it and even directing the balloon to form — perform figure-eights over very sensitive sites. So, do we really know what China collected, were they collecting far more intelligence than we had previously known?”

Kirby answered, “We’re still exploiting and looking at and analyzing the material from that spy balloon that we pulled up off the bottom of the ocean. And I don’t want to get ahead of that analysis, but we did — while that thing flew over the country, we exploited on it. We studied it. We analyzed it. And we’re confident, because we knew where it was going, we were confident that it didn’t discover anything really additive to what they could have gotten from other intelligence sources. Again, we’re going to learn more as we continue to analyze that balloon and the debris, but we’re comfortable and we’re confident that we took appropriate steps to minimize any additive value — intelligence value that the Chinese could have gotten off of that.”

He added, “[W]e took really appropriate steps to make sure that it wasn’t going to get anything of great value.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett