This Tuesday, Raw Story reporter Matt Laslo asked Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene her thoughts on the Chinese spy balloon and reports that similar balloon incidents took place during Donald Trump's time in the White House.
"It didn't happen!" Greene declared. "It did not happen. President Trump said it didn't happen, people in his former administration said it didn't happen, people who didn't even like President Trump from his former administration said it didn't happen -- and then all of a sudden, poof, like a spy balloon has happened? It's crazy!"
Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, told reporters Monday that Chinese surveillance balloon incidents that occurred during the Trump administration and early under the Biden administration were not spotted by NORAD at the time.
"We did not detect those threats. And that's a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out," VanHerck said, according to ABC News.
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Greene went on to say that she thinks President Joe Biden "literally told America that he is incapable of protecting our country," adding that "there could have been anything in that spy balloon, and it traversed the entire United States, and then they shot it down down after it went over the ocean."
"The whole world knows Joe Biden's weak. He's basically impotent."
The craft spent several days flying over North America before it was targeted off the coast of the southeastern state of South Carolina with a missile fired from an F-22 plane, Pentagon officials said, falling into relatively shallow water just 47 feet (14 meters) deep.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called the operation a "deliberate and lawful action" that came in response to China's "unacceptable violation of our sovereignty."
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But China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs blasted the US action in a statement Sunday morning, saying the downing of the "civilian" aircraft was "clearly overreacting and seriously violating international practice."
Saturday afternoon was the military's first chance to take down the balloon "in a way that would not pose a threat to the safety of Americans," a senior defense official told reporters, while still allowing authorities to collect the fallen debris from US territorial waters.
In eyewitness video posted to social media, the balloon appeared to disintegrate in a white puff before its remnants dropped vertically into the Atlantic Ocean below.
Twitter user Haley Walsh posted that she "heard and felt the explosion" in Myrtle Beach, a popular resort town in South Carolina.
President Joe Biden, who earlier Saturday had promised "to take care" of the balloon, congratulated the fighter pilots involved.
"They successfully took it down. And I want to compliment our aviators who did it," Biden told reporters in Maryland.
With additional reporting by AFP
