Former DNI Ratcliffe: “Not True” That Three Spy Balloons Entered U.S. During Trump Administration

MARIA BARTIROMO: John, the Biden administration is trying to minimize this explosive situation in this past week. And the Department of Defense is claiming that there were three balloons, Chinese spy balloons, that entered the United States airspace during the Trump administration, and that they were not shut down and they were not disclosed.

Can you please tell us the truth and if that’s true?

RATCLIFFE: Well, it’s not true. I can refute it. Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper refuted it yesterday. Secretary — former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has refuted it.

But, Maria, the American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn’t reporting?

I don’t remember that either, because it didn’t happen. As I said to you earlier, this was unprecedented. We have never had a circumstance where an adversary has had spycraft over our country, our continental United States, posing a threat for the better part of a week straight.

And that’s why I said to you before, the — not only is it unprecedented, but the damage from this is incalculable, both from an intelligence standpoint and the possible payloads. You talked a little bit earlier about the different types of payloads that a stratospheric balloon could carry. Those possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

But what we do know is, none of those are possible to be deployed against the United States if a stratospheric balloon isn’t allowed to traipse across our countryside for four straight days, something that has never happened before.

But, beyond that intelligence damage, Maria, the other thing is that the damage that it wasn’t just 320 million Americans that were watching this balloon paralyzed for a week. It was Russia. It was Iran. It was North Korea. It was American adversaries who also were surprised that this type of thing could happen and are, frankly, thrilled at the possibilities of what they could do to deploy the same type of stratospheric balloon or device over the continental mainland and have this kind of slow, weak, timid, late, frankly, terrible response by the Biden administration.