Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is pushing a resolution Thursday to condemn China after one of their surveillance balloons was shot down on the Atlantic coast. The balloon spent several days in U.S. airspace before being shot down.
The resolution states that the Chinese Communist Party’s “espionage mission” is “in violation of international law, is unacceptable and should be condemned.”
The resolution also calls on President Biden to be “transparent” with the American people and with Congress on Chinese surveillance missions.
“I’d like to know who would vote against it,” Hawley told Fox News Digital.
“I certainly look forward to seeing who might block it, if anyone does. I mean this ought to be easy, and what I hope to get out of it is demonstrating to Beijing that we’re not all as weak as the White House.”
“Congress should not just be standing by while China flies espionage assets over our country, over our states, photographs and transmits it back home,” he continued
House Democrats joined Republicans on Thursday to pass a resolution that condemns China for its “brazen violation of United States sovereignty” by sending surveillance balloons over U.S. territory. They demand more information from the Biden administration about what happened.
The resolution came the same day as Senate and House lawmakers met with intelligence officials for a classified briefing on the surveillance balloon.
Hawley said that what he learned in the briefing was “most disturbing.”
“The bottom line is that we absolutely have the ability of the administration to shoot this thing down before it got to the continental United States, and they opted not to do it. I mean, they chose not to. And I think that was a serious, serious misjudgment,” he said.
Hawley added, “Obviously, the other thing that it made was crystal clear from this briefing was how unprepared, totally unprepared the administration and frankly, the Pentagon was for this to happen.”
The closed-door briefing included officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, and the State Department.
Last week, Hawley wrote to Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.), of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to demand an investigation into the Chinese spy balloon.
Hawley wondered if China was spying on the United States’ nuclear capabilities with the surveillance balloon.
Representative Mike turner, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said, “If you ask somebody to draw an X at every place where our sensitive missile defense sites, our nuclear weapons infrastructure, our nuclear weapon sites are, you would put them all along this path.”
The balloon made its way to many U.S. military bases, including Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base, and Malstrom Air Force base in Montana.
The balloon did not visist all of the United States’ known nuclear arsenals.
It remains unclear of the intentions of the surveillance balloon sent from China. What could it have gleaned? Congress is pressing to know just what it could find out.
