On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) stated that China was “gathering information” with the spy balloon and “I don’t know how much they got at this moment in time,” and stated that he would have “shot the thing down over the Aleutians.”
Tester said, “What I think is what the Chinese Communist Party did was completely unacceptable. And the truth is — and I have said this before and you know this, Neil — I’d have shot the thing down over the Aleutians. But there was an assessment made and it ended up getting shot down over the — off the coast of South Carolina. But the bottom line is this: They invaded our airspace. Our airspace, they invaded. That is unacceptable. And the fact is, they say it’s a weather balloon, [that’s] a bunch of baloney. And the bottom line is that we have ICBMs in Montana. They’ve been a great deterrent since the early ’60s. We’ve got Malmstrom Air Force Base. And if you take a look at the path that balloon took, there was nothing accidental about it. They were gathering information. I don’t know how much they got at this moment in time, but I’m sure we’ll find out as time moves on. But the fact is, it was inappropriate behavior. And we need to respond in a way that shows them that we don’t stand for inappropriate behavior.”
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