The US military shot down the Chinese spy balloon that floated through U.S. airspace on Saturday, as Americans learned President Biden and his administration had known about the incursion for a week — but kept it secret, fearing it would derail Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
A pair of American fighter jets circled the surveillance craft as it neared the coast of South Carolina, then pierced it with a missile once it was safely over the Atlantic Ocean, video showed.
The huge white orb – as large as three school buses, experts said – deflated in a puff of white smoke, its remains trailing behind as its heavy solar panels and surveillance equipment plunged down into the sea below.
“I want to compliment our aviators who did it,” Biden told reporters as he cheered the downing en route to Camp David – then sought to explain his tardy response to the intrusion.
“On Wednesday when I was briefed on the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down – on Wednesday – as soon as possible,” he said.
“They decided, without doing damage to anyone on the ground, they decided that the best time to do that was as it got over water,” he added.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed that the craft “was being used by the PRC in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States.”
“Today’s deliberate and lawful action demonstrates that President Biden and his national security team will always put the safety and security of the American people first,” Austin said.
But Republicans expressed “outrage” over the president’s prior refusal to act.
“Communist China’s surveillance balloon violates international law and threatens our homeland,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island) told The Post.
“It’s an outrage that the Biden Administration spotted this balloon days ago as it was flying over the Aleutian Islands and did nothing about … this unacceptable act of aggression by the CCP,” she said.
The politics of the looming 2024 presidential election also played a role in Biden’s actions, sources told Bloomberg, with the fraught US-China relationship expected to be a central foreign policy issue.
Team Biden became aware of the balloon on Jan. 28, Bloomberg reported, when it was spotted over Alaska.
The US military tracked it as it flew into Canadian airspace, then re-entered American skies on Tuesday. The next day, Biden received a detailed briefing on the balloon and its course, attended by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Sources told Bloomberg that Milley and Austin argued against shooting the craft down due to the danger its debris could pose to the public. Biden initially wanted it destroyed, but acquiesced, according to the report.
But the president also chose to conceal the crisis from the American public. Instead, his administration sought an explanation from the Chinese embassy in Washington — while making the finishing touches on plans for Blinken’s diplomatic visit to China on Sunday.
The administration finally came clean to the public Thursday, after the Billings Gazette, a local Montana paper, published photos of the floating orb and the story jumped into the national media.
“Not gonna lie,” tweeted witness Chase Doak, whose video of the high-flying spying platform went viral. “First, I thought this was a #ufo. Then, I thought it was @elonmusk in a Wizard of Oz cosplay scenario. But it was just a run-of-the-mill Chinese spy balloon!”
The uproar forced Blinken to postpone his trip indefinitely, while China repeatedly insisted that the “airship” was meant for meteorological research and had been innocently blown off course.
Former president Donald Trump, ex-veep Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley have all demanded that the balloon be shot down, accusing Biden of weakness against Beijing.
