China’s intelligence capability may be even greater than we’ve feared.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that the spy balloon that crossed the continental United States this month was redundant from an intelligence perspective, speaking on ABC News’ This Week Sunday.
CHUCK SCHUMER: “We got enormous intelligence information from surveilling the [Chinese spy] balloon as it went over the U.S.”
Q: “Didn’t get the Chinese get enormous intelligence as well?”
SCHUMER: “Well they could’ve been getting it anyway.” pic.twitter.com/mQfkejWApr
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 12, 2023
Schumer claimed that U.S surveillance of the balloon was itself an intelligence coup.
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“We got enormous intelligence information from surveilling the balloon as it went over the U.S,” Schumer said.
Schumer dismissed the intelligence threat the aircraft posed to the nation in response to a question from anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“Didn’t the Chinese get enormous intelligence as well?” Stephanopoulos pushed back against Schumer’s claims of a U.S. intelligence success.
“Well, they could’ve been getting it anyway,” Schumer said.
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He didn’t explain the statement and Stephanopoulos didn’t press it, according to an ABC News transcript.
But taking the words at face value, the majority leader of the United States Senate just went on national television to tell the country that American national security secrets are so compromised that an overflight of the continental U.S. by a rival nation’s spy balloon was not a uniquely threatening situation.
In fact, in Schumer’s telling, the U.S. gained more from the incident by being able to study the ballon for insight into China’s intelligence operations.
“But we have to know what they’re doing,” he said. “And we don’t know exactly.”
If Schumer is incorrect, or being deliberately deceitful, it would mean the U.S. gave away a week’s worth of potentially vital intelligence to the Chinese by allowing the balloon to cross American skies unmolested until shooting it down over the Atlantic on Feb. 4.
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