Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Turner joined Jake Tapper for “State of the Union” Sunday morning, where he weighed in on the Biden administration’s latest action of shooting down a pair unidentified flying objects over Alaska and Canada between Friday and Saturday.
“I would prefer them to be trigger happy than to be permissive,” Turner told Tapper, “but we’re gonna have to see whether or not this is just the administration trying to change headlines.”
The statement comes as a nod to the Republican Party’s general discontent of how Biden handled the so-called Chinese spy balloon the week prior, which the administration waited to shoot down until it had crossed the country and was off the coast of South Carolina.
The difference here is there has been wide speculation on what these objects actually were and what threat they posed to the U.S. and Canada.
“I certainly don’t know, as the administration is saying they don’t know [what it is],” Turner admitted. “They do appear somewhat trigger happy, although this is certainly preferable to the permissive environment that they showed when the Chinese spy balloon was coming over some of our most sensitive sites.”
Turner then added that Biden’s response here seems to poke holes in his argument for not taking action against the balloon sooner.
“I think one thing that this shows is certainly the fallacy of the argument that the Biden administration’s saying – that the height of the Chinese balloon caused them to have no concern. Because certainly as we know whatever goes up, can come down, and just saying that this Chinese spy balloon was high and these were lower and therefore they absolutely pose a hazard, really isn’t a differentiation I think anyone’s comfortable with.”
But don’t think that Turner and his Republican colleagues in the House are unanimous in their support of how Biden handled these instances of flying objects. He revealed later in his interview with Tapper something that he finds “particularly annoying about this administration” and how it relays news to its elected officials.
“The Biden administration needs to stop briefing Congress through our television sets and actually come and sit down and brief us,” he said. “What we’re seeing here is a number of announcements by the administration without any real information being given to Congress. This could be because they don’t have any information. From the press conference we saw, it does seem they took this action without a real understanding for what they were going after, but having declared it a hazard. But we’ll see as the information comes to Congress. I do think there needs to be more engagement between the administration and Congress.”
Watch the the full “State of the Union” interview in the video above.
