U.S. SENATE –U.S. Senator Steve Daines today delivered the following remarks at the weekly Republican Senate Leadership press conference highlighting his concerns with the aerial objects that have been shot down by the United States and calling on President Biden to address Montanans and the public following these security debacles.
“Sixty-five years ago, NORAD was founded. It was under the Eisenhower administration. For sixy-five years, NORAD had never identified an object and taken down an object out of the sky until ten days ago. And now we’ve seen three more objects downed, the results of NORAD’s detection just in the last five days.
“Two of these four objects, one of course, was a Chinese spy balloon and one of the other objects were in Montana, over Montana. Over very sensitive military installations that house the greatest force known to man of a weapon of mass destruction was the intercontinental ballistic missiles. Montanans are worried. My phone’s ringing from Montanans saying, ‘What is going on? What are you doing about this?’
“We probably would not have known about that Chinese spy balloon had it not been for a photo journalist in Billings, Montana, Larry Mayer who works for the Billings Gazette. And one of his buddies saw that orb up in the sky because they had closed the Billings airport. Larry Mayer is a Cessna 180 pilot. He looked on FlightAware and saw that there was military aircraft performing tactical maneuvers. He took his big telephoto lens and got that picture and posted it on the Billings Gazette. The AP stringer picked it up and that is what exposed the Chinese spy balloon to the American people.
“The White House was quiet up until that point, and in fact, they’ve been much too quiet. The indecision of the White House, the weakness displayed is a great concern to myself and many Americans.
“It seems as if the White House thought this Chinese spy balloon was on some kind of concert tour, going coast to coast. Perhaps they’d have t-shirts talking about where it’s stopping next.
“It’s time for the President to step up. We tell our kids Homeland Security tells us this: See Something, Say Something. The President needs to address the American people and he doesn’t have all the answers right now but he should address the American people like Prime Minister Trudeau did yesterday. They just shot one down in Canadian airspace and three in U.S. airspace. It’s time for President Biden to address this head on and speak to the American people.”
Background:
After the first spy balloon entered Montana’s airspace, Senator Daines was the first to demand a security briefing on the situation from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Since then, Daines has been actively calling on the Biden administration to take action and be transparent with Montanans.
Daines also released a list of questions he hoped to get answers too at the security briefing. The administration has failed to answer these questions.
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Contact: Matt Lloyd, Rachel Dumke, Blake Kernen