Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Sunday that President Biden’s failures in dealing with the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off the East Coast started with his decision not to brief the American public early on about the balloon’s existence.
During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rubio, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed incredulity at why the Biden administration waited until Thursday to announce it was tracking the balloon, five days after it entered U.S. airspace north of the Aleutian Islands, and it wasn’t shot down until Saturday after being allowed to drift across the continental United States.
Rubio said he agreed with comments by fellow Republicans that the administration’s handling of the incident was an abdication fo responsibility.
“I think the dereliction of duty begins with this,” Rubio said, “Why not on Tuesday or Wednesday – you know people are gonna see this. At some point, you’re gonna have to disclose it, and they probably didn’t want to, because they didn’t want to have their hands forced on canceling this Blinken visit, so they didn’t have to talk about it. But why didn’t the president go on television?”
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“Presidents have the ability to go before camera, go before the nation and basically explain these things early on, and the failure to do so – I don’t understand that,” he continued. “I don’t understand why he wouldn’t do that, and that is the beginning of dereliction of duty.”
“The second is, you have to act swiftly on these things,” he added. “I think that’s part of the one of the things the Chinese are trying to message, and that is the U.S. had to see this coming and decided they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it early on, and how they had to wait until this thing went across the middle of the country.”
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“And what are we going to do the next time this happens?” he asked. “Are we going to allow it to fly through here again and shoot it down once it gets to the East Coast? I mean, these are questions the White House needs to answer, and I don’t think these are partisan claims I’m making. I think there would be a broad agreement that we need to know moving forward what our policy is going to be with regards to this.”
Chinese officials have claimed the balloon was a civilian craft gone adrift but U.S. officials insist it was a surveillance vessel, and it was finally shot down by an F-22 pilot off the coast of Surfside Beach, S.C., on Saturday afternoon.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to Beijing due to the incident, while Republicans hammered Biden for failing to shoot down the balloon earlier.
The White House said that Biden followed the advice of the Pentagon and top military leaders not to shoot the craft down over the U.S. in case it caused civilian casualties and other collateral damage.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw contributed to this report.