During Tuesday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Biden should not be embarrassed if he sent the military to shoot down weather balloons.
“[Biden] was criticized for waiting too long on the first balloon and so the over-reaction, critics would say, is that he moved too quickly to shoot down the other ones before even knowing what they were. How do you respond to that?” a reporter asked.
“I hear you,” Jean-Pierre responded. “And I know you just read me the whatever, the national weather data on numbers of balloons. I get that. What I’m telling you is what I can give you from our vantage point. The Chinese surveillance balloon was very different from what we saw with these three objects.”
“The National Weather Service website says weather balloons are released around the world from 900 locations twice per day every single day, including 92 released by the National Weather Service inside the U.S. They fly for at least two hours per day, drift as far as 125 miles… If it turns out, as it looks like, that the president and Mr. Trudeau sent top gun fighters to blow weather balloons out of the sky, does the president regret that, and is he embarrassed by that?” the reporter asked.
“I’m not going to get ahead of any final decision, we just don’t know yet. We actually don’t know… It is a consideration that, that could be a leading explanation here,” Jean-Pierre responded.
“Is the president embarrassed by that? The idea that you would take hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment –” the reporter said.
“Let me answer the question,” Jean-Pierre interjected. “I don’t think the president should be embarrassed by the fact that he took action to make sure that our airspace, civilian airspace is safe… The president took action because we did see that these objects were in the airspace of civilian airspace. So to protect the civilian airspace, the president took action. The action he took was a recommendation by the Pentagon to take that action. I don’t want to get ahead of what will be the final analysis of what the objects may have been or may not have been, so don’t want to get into a hypothetical, but look, the president does everything in his power to defend, to track, and to protect our airpace. That’s what you should glean from the actions the president took.”
