The U.S. military has shot down four more high-altitude balloons over the past week and a half. What's going on with all of them? And why are they flying so high in the sky?
00:04:52.460That's a much more – you know, we've seen in prior wars, balloons used to drop off dangerous weapons.
00:04:59.000Actually, in the Middle East, in Israel, we see the Palestinians.
00:05:01.980It's a major issue there right now with Hamas Hezbollah.
00:05:03.860And they use balloons and they'll drop often gasoline and firebombs and it's a – it's a – in sometimes a cheaper way than a missile of –
00:05:42.980Look, the Chinese have satellites, so they're taking pictures.
00:05:46.060And that was the argument the White House made very clear.
00:05:48.680And they were trying to say, hey, this is a balloon that is not – that is doing basically the same thing as their spy program, their satellite, their space program.
00:05:57.200They were trying to say this is a redundant thing.
00:06:00.580I think clearly now that we're shooting these things over Alaska, shooting this next one that we just learned about, that was a lie or misleading the American people.
00:06:38.320One of the things about a balloon, you can hover over a military base.
00:06:42.600You can hover over where we have stealth jets.
00:06:45.620You can hover over nuclear missile silos.
00:06:49.420And you can hover for some real time and take extended pictures, extended video.
00:06:54.720And that's what people didn't understand, and I think everybody's trying to get caught up to speed here, is a lot of people thought they launch a balloon and it just flies to the wind, right?
00:07:05.640This was a balloon that had steering where you could basically hit the pause button over an area you wanted it to be, and then once you got whatever it is you wanted, you could then redirect it to the next place you wanted it to stop and take pictures or do whatever it was doing.
00:07:22.740And its path demonstrated it was clearly maneuverable.
00:07:25.840It wasn't just wandering over some cornfields.
00:07:27.960It wasn't like, send it and you hope it gets you close to where you wanted it to go.
00:07:31.680Yeah, it wasn't just sitting over a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield.
00:07:34.120It was just miraculously going from one military base to the next military base to the next military base, and there were obvious national security concerns all along the way.
00:07:45.200The path it traveled was not accidental.
00:07:49.160So you have the capacity to be a lot closer than you are with a satellite.
00:07:52.800You have the capacity to be stationary and stationary for an extended period of time.
00:07:57.500So you can take pictures, presumably, possibly you can take video.
00:08:16.660Whatever communications are happening beneath you, you've got to assume in the big spy package they've got there, they've got gadgets that are designed to try to intercept whatever's going on.
00:08:28.560Trudeau got involved with this with NORAD, and before I put up his tweet, I want to remind people about one of our sponsors.
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00:10:34.580And he says now NORAD is going to be looking over all this.
00:10:37.600Are they basically now our brothers in this fight against these unidentified objects?
00:10:42.480So the way the military is structured, you've got NORTHCOM, which is the northern command that is protecting North America.
00:10:49.060And then you've got NORAD that is engaged in watching what's happened in the skies, whether from planes or missiles or other aerial attacks that could be coming in to North America.
00:11:02.220In both instances, NORTHCOM and NORAD, we work very closely, we work seamlessly with the Canadians.
00:11:09.520We are blessed to have a very strong ally to our north.
00:11:15.100We don't always agree on economic or cultural matters, but on defending North America, we are lockstep.
00:11:26.300If, God forbid, we ever come to World War III, if, God forbid, we come to a nuclear weapon, the most likely paths for missiles to travel that are going to hit the United States are going up over the North Pole and down over Canada.
00:11:40.220And so Canada has a huge chunk of the airspace right above us, which in the event of a serious war, that's where the paths get in it.
00:12:27.560Hey, whoever gets there first, if in America you can get there first, knock this thing out of the sky.
00:12:31.340So we don't make it a practice of shooting down anything over someone else's airspace.
00:12:35.820That every country has a right to their own airspace.
00:12:39.560You think of the first Chinese balloon that we had when Biden should have shot it down was when it entered U.S. airspace.
00:12:46.240We don't have to ask anyone's permission.
00:12:47.820If it enters U.S. airspace, we can shoot the damn thing down.
00:12:51.680Over Canada—and remember, that first Chinese spy balloon entered Alaskan airspace, was there a couple of days, and then it went into Canada.
00:12:59.640And it was there a couple of days, and then it came down into the United States over Idaho, Montana, and it kept working south and east across the United States.
00:13:07.480So for the first balloon, we asked the administration multiple times, why didn't you shoot it down over Alaska?
00:13:14.460They gave lots of spins about, well, this and that and this and the other.
00:13:18.140One of the things they finally admitted is, yeah, Joe Biden didn't even know about it.
00:13:21.340Like, the whole time it was in Alaska, we didn't bother to tell the commander-in-chief.
00:13:24.260He had no idea that we were just sitting there with a Chinese balloon surveilling us.
00:13:29.680So Biden finds out after it's left Alaska airspace.
00:15:03.500Well, we've seen now three shot down in a row.
00:15:06.260The biggest thing that's changed is I think they had so much egg on their face for sitting there for over a week and doing nothing that they finally grew a pair.
00:17:19.820The Biden administration had a couple of spins on why it didn't shoot down balloon number one.
00:17:24.460One of the spins was, well, it was up at 60,000 feet, which means it's not a risked commercial air traffic.
00:17:31.700And, and in fact, as a sort of throwaway that line, they said, if it were 40,000 feet where there's commercial air traffic, we would have shot it down.
00:17:39.080That gives them a fig leaf to say these were down at 40,000 feet.
00:17:44.180We had no choice because it was where commercial airlines fly.
00:17:47.260Even the White House tried to act like, and you can see, they're still trying to figure out how to backpedal on the embarrassment of the last one.
00:18:03.540I'm not going to speak for the Pentagon.
00:18:04.660I can tell you that the president doesn't regret the, the way that we handled the first balloon.
00:18:09.580And that time we, first of all, apples and oranges here in terms of size.
00:18:15.040As I said, this was the size of a small car.
00:18:17.900And it was over a very sparsely populated area, but also more critically over, it was over water, water space when we ordered this down as we did, as we did the last one.
00:18:29.700But a completely different size and the debris field for this, we expect to be much, much smaller than would have been for the other one.
00:19:03.260But what I will say, so Kirby starts off there with a statement that is demonstrably false and laughable, which is, oh, Biden doesn't regret not shooting the first one down as he sat there over a week looking weak and impotent while it engaged in espionage all over the United States.
00:19:27.140And even when he did find out, he had an opportunity to shoot down earlier and he didn't.
00:19:29.980But to their credit, they learned the lesson.
00:19:32.840And remember, one of their defenses as to why they didn't shoot it down before is, well, it was over land, very sparsely populated land, but over land.
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00:21:44.800We've heard China, last question on this, but it's one I think people want to know.
00:21:50.660And we hear this, and it's China, China, China.
00:21:53.640Is there a real possibility that there are other bad actors in the world that have the same capabilities that could have been pulling this off?
00:22:01.600And I go back to what we learned after 9-11.
00:22:03.800We had a lot of vulnerabilities that we didn't even see.
00:22:07.560Is this one of those kind of new vulnerabilities that maybe we didn't even know we had until recently when a guy in Montana saw it in the sky?
00:22:15.500Is it possible that this big of a vulnerability could happen with all the money we spend on surveillance and everything else?
00:22:22.320So now it's just like, oh, we're waking up to this.
00:22:28.460You know, our military, part of the reason they say people spotted it over Montana is that we knew it was there and we were engaging with it.
00:22:35.660And so they did, among other things, they halted airspace over Montana, and that got a lot of attention.
00:22:43.120Now, as we pointed out in this podcast before, look, I don't think Biden would have acted if it hadn't gone public, if it hadn't gotten on Twitter, if it hadn't gotten on NBC News.
00:22:54.800I think they would have let this balloon go all over the United States and never said a word, never told anybody about it, and kept it a secret.
00:23:00.700So it is only because people noticed it that they got guilted and shamed into acting.
00:23:06.500In terms of could it be other actors, my guess is it's likely China.
00:23:12.420If you look at the combination of military technology, economic resources, and hostile intent, all three of those are most heavily concentrated.
00:23:26.580In China, look, could it conceivably be Russia?
00:23:41.940North Korea has put satellites, and they put satellites that have crossed the United States multiple times.
00:23:47.960So I don't know if it's impossible that North Korea is trying this also.
00:23:53.660It does seem like such a simplistic way.
00:23:58.320But I'm purely speculating here, so I want to put that marker down that I know nothing on that question other than what I've read in the paper and then just speculating.
00:26:08.380They brought in 50 and they actually called up more National Guardsmen to come deal with 50 than the number of illegal immigrants that were shipped there.
00:26:16.300So now the liberal Democrat mayor of New York City is buying bus tickets and plane tickets to send illegal immigrants in New York to Canada and send them by the hundreds.
00:26:32.120And by the way, he's paying New York City tax dollars to transport them out to say, get them the heck out of our city.
00:26:40.740It's cheaper than the hotels they've been putting them in.
00:27:59.020They're signaling that they're going to change the way they do immigration with the United States of America and how they're going to secure their border.
00:28:06.040If they do that, is that at the height of hypocrisy?
00:28:09.320There's an old line that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.
00:28:15.660And what is fascinating is all of these lefties love illegal immigration until it shows up on the door of their country club.
00:28:30.000He took a lot of heat when he started busing illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C., when they went to New York City, to Martha's Vineyard.
00:28:44.020It's brilliant to let the left understand what we're dealing with on a very, very small scale.
00:28:50.960Like you said, five million-plus crossings in Texas.
00:28:53.880You look at the numbers under this administration.
00:28:57.160They've hit every record basically you can hit on the number of illegals coming across, the number of illegals caught, the number of illegals that are apprehended, the number of illegals that have criminal records that are caught.
00:29:07.220They've blown every record out of the water.
00:29:09.820Is there a tide, do you think, turning in this country in general on this issue finally?
00:29:24.840It's an issue that if you look to the substance, the Democrats can't defend.
00:29:29.240Their only defense is hoping the media ignores it.
00:29:32.000And I do think there are some Democrats who realize that it's dangerous for them politically.
00:29:37.660But I think the reality is they've handed their agenda over to the extremes.
00:29:41.900And the extremes on this issue want open borders.
00:29:45.300They look at every one of those people coming in as a Democrat voter, and they want them all in.
00:29:51.460And so I wish I were optimistic that things are going to get better in the next two years, and I'm not.
00:29:57.780I think this administration is going to continue to do everything they can, not just to fail to secure the border, but to speed up illegal immigration, to facilitate it, to act as the last mile.
00:30:13.540Look, Joe Biden is the biggest human trafficker in the world.
00:30:17.280And I said that a couple of weeks ago on a TV show, and it made a bunch of press statements.
00:30:21.620But listen, that's not political rhetoric.
00:30:26.460There is no human being on planet Earth who has trafficked more people, more children, more women, more people who are vulnerable than Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
00:30:39.620And the cartels who are making billions, they bring people across the Rio Grande, they drop them off to the Biden administration, and the Biden administration is the last mile of their trafficking.
00:30:49.740And now, apparently, they get to New York City, and the last, last mile is the Democrat mayor sending them to Canada.
00:30:56.380So it really has gone the full loop of absurdity.
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00:32:26.700We talked about that in one of our earlier podcasts.
00:32:29.700He's sending out these letters saying, I might be suing you, and you might want to keep all your records to all these Republicans acting like he's going on offense here.
00:32:41.500Then you have people asking the question now about this administration, how compromised are they by China because of the family's business deals?
00:32:50.640There's a new polling out that says 64% of Americans believe that Joe Biden's involved with his son's business dealings, and it could put them in a negative, basically, place when it comes to doing his job as the president now.
00:33:01.640You look at all that, and we still haven't had a president walkout, telling or demanding or calling out China directly, you better stop seeing these damn balloons.
00:33:11.140So you now have the House looking into all this.
00:33:15.680When you see all these different areas coming together, how big of a deal do you think this story can become?
00:33:21.660Well, look, if 64% of Americans believe Joe Biden was involved in his son's business dealings, then 36% of Americans either aren't paying attention or are such partisans that they refuse to acknowledge facts because it is screamingly obvious that Joe Biden was involved and quite possibly deeply involved in Hunter's business dealings.
00:33:45.440Hunter's business, I believe, was selling access to his dad, and it was a very lucrative business.
00:33:50.920Now, I will say the whole investigation into Hunter Biden has taken an interesting turn because we talked about the last podcast how Hunter's lawyer is getting very aggressive, is going after Republicans, going after everyone he perceives as his opponents.
00:34:08.720So the House Oversight Committee, James Comer is the chairman of it, sent a request to documents to Hunter Biden for a whole series of documents that they're examining.
00:34:17.520And Hunter's lawyer wrote back and essentially said, go jump in a lake.
00:34:39.340What's going to happen next, and I think this will be in a matter of days, if not weeks, is you're going to see the House Oversight Committee subpoena those documents.
00:34:47.420And if and when Hunter Biden defies the subpoena, which is what he said he's going to do, I think you will see the House of Representatives hold Hunter Biden in contempt.
00:34:57.840And the reason that is, I think, such a massive strategic mistake on their part is during the prior administration, when the House subpoenaed Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon refused to comply and the House held him in contempt, what happened?
00:35:17.280The Department of Justice prosecuted Steve Bannon for that contempt.
00:35:27.060What Hunter Biden's legal team is setting up for is the same thing to happen to Hunter Biden.
00:35:31.400And if you're Merrick Garland, how the hell do you explain, well, when Steve Bannon defies a congressional subpoena, it's a criminal offense that I'm trying to put him in jail for.
00:35:41.120But when Hunter Biden does it, never mind, nothing to see here.
00:35:44.340Even as political, even as double standard as the Biden DOJ has been, that's an impossible position.
00:35:51.180And so I think Hunter's team would have been better to say, we're happy to cooperate and with reasonable requests we'll comply.
00:35:59.860And we may have some disagreements over scope and we may go back and forth.
00:36:16.480That tends to escalate pretty quickly.
00:36:18.460So I think they made a stupid decision, both legally and politically, because it is going to continue to put not only the Biden family, but the Biden DOJ in an impossible double standard conundrum.
00:36:32.480We're going to tell that story in a moment.
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00:38:48.220So I've met multiple times with his daughter, Rosa Maria.
00:38:55.360And one of the things that I've done is I filed legislation to rename the street in Washington, D.C.,
00:39:04.700in front of the Cuban embassy, Oswaldo Payá Way.
00:39:08.580Now, a couple of things are interesting on this.
00:39:13.580One, oddly enough, in the last 10 years, I've actually had a strange body of work, legislative work and legislative success, on street namings.
00:39:30.780By the way, when you ran for Senate, I'm sure you never thought that was going to be something, one, you would work on and, two, be very successful on.
00:39:37.540Well, so the first one that happened, you're right, I would not have thought that, was back about eight years ago.
00:40:07.120This was not, maybe it was a harebrained idea, but if it was harebrained, it was not my harebrained idea.
00:40:12.520It was actually Ronald Reagan's harebrained idea.
00:40:14.820So during the Cold War, Reagan renamed the street in front of the Soviet embassy, Sakharov Plaza, after the famed human rights and dissident Sakharov in the Soviet Union.
00:40:27.120And it was part of a broader strategy of winning the Cold War, of calling out the evil empire.
00:40:51.080So you have to acknowledge that Lu Xiaobo exists, that this dissident, this Nobel laureate who's been wrongfully imprisoned, that he is real.
00:41:00.900You know, you've got someone who wants to go find the embassy.
00:41:03.880You've got to go on Google or MapQuest and look for it.
00:43:23.700And I will say I had some harsh words for the Republicans involved in not taking it up at the House at the time that I expressed very directly to them.
00:43:36.100But the second epilogue, and this is very interesting, beginning of the Trump administration, 2017, I'm having breakfast with Rex Tillerson, the new secretary of state.
00:43:46.100I'm at Foggy Bottom in the State Department.
00:43:48.720And we're talking about a whole host of issues, and we're talking about China.
00:43:51.780And he said that he had just had a meeting with his counterpart, the foreign minister in China.
00:43:57.300And he said they came, and they said they had three top priorities at the time, foreign policy priorities.
00:44:04.740And he said, Ted, it is the damnedest thing.
00:44:06.820One of their top three priorities is to stop you from passing your legislation to rename the street in front of their embassy.
00:44:13.940He's like, I think it's idiotic, but that's what they list.
00:44:19.200I thought it actually speaks volumes about the weakness of a tyrannical regime, just how vulnerable they are to sunshine, to being called out.
00:44:27.100But what I told Rex at the time, I said, I'll tell you what.
00:44:29.380So at the time, Lu Xiaobo had passed away.
00:46:18.980Number one, it was the first time they'd seen a movie that showed segregation.
00:46:23.000Like there's a great scene where, you know, they had tragically segregated bathrooms and Kevin Costner gets a sledgehammer and slams down and knocks down the sign that says colored restrooms, knocks it down.
00:46:36.660And I remember my girls were like so puzzled.
00:46:41.180And we had a very good, long conversation about the tragic history of segregation, but they'd never seen it depicted in a movie.
00:46:49.620But we were also talking about, so my mother, she came out of Rice in 1956 and she went to work at Shell as a computer programmer.
00:47:01.660She was a mathematician, a computer programmer.
00:47:03.300But then she went to work at the Smithsonian and the opening scene of the movie, Hidden Figures, they're computing the trajectory of Sputnik, the Russian satellite launched that started the whole space race.
00:47:19.480When my mother was at the Smithsonian, one of her job responsibilities was writing the computer program or helping write the computer program to track the orbit of Sputnik.
00:47:30.520And so I told our girls, I said, Mimi, they call my mom Mimi.
00:47:34.100I said, Mimi was one of those pioneering mathematicians and computer programmers.
00:47:39.920And she was actually doing it 10 years earlier.
00:47:43.120She was doing it in the 50s, whereas the movie is set in the 60s, so it's 10 years later.
00:47:47.080And I asked my mom, I said, OK, how realistic was the movie?
00:47:49.880Like, like, and she thought it was very realistic, just sort of the challenges women faced in that era in science and computers and math.
00:47:58.580And I told her, I said, you know, mom, one of the things that I thought sounded weird just to the modern ear was they referred to these women as as computers.
00:48:51.780I introduced the legislation, and oddly enough, a Democrat member of the D.C. City Council sees my legislation and thinks, this is a really good idea.
00:49:05.140So he introduces it in the D.C. City Council.
00:49:52.480And they're going to hear the story of these heroes, these African-American women who never got recognized in history, who did something historic.
00:50:00.380So that is done and accomplished, which leads us back to where we started this whole thing, which is Oswaldo Payawe.
00:50:08.060So I introduced that legislation last Congress.
00:50:11.660And much like Lou Gebao, it passed the Senate 100 to nothing.
00:50:34.940Bob and I are going to pass it again in the Senate, I believe.
00:50:37.080We did it last Congress, so I think it's quite likely.
00:50:40.660And I think there's a very good chance the House will pass it this time, too.
00:50:44.420I hope to, just like I was at NASA for the dedication, I hope to be at the Cuban embassy, which I've never been to in D.C.
00:50:51.660I'm not a fan of the Cuban government, but I will happily attend the dedication of the street sign so that every day those communist bastards go into work can look at Oswaldo Paya and have to confront the courage of standing up for freedom.