Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees: Interview With Sen. Jon Tester (D-MO)
Interview
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So, look, Anderson, first of all it's great to be on your show. Secondly, Montanans, and I think all Americans appreciate our freedoms and our privacy, and to have a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over a State like Montana, which has our ICBMs and is critical to deterrence to any sort of conflict is disturbing, to say the least.
I also depend upon our military officials to keep us safe, and the folks that I have worked with are sharp, they are good. They tend to analyze every situation that's out there. So I will go with what they're doing right now as being the right decision.
But I will also tell you that the reason we're going to have this hearing, as soon as possible, is to find out what went into the thought process as to why they handled this situation the way they handled it and what the threat was. Because I think anytime you have China, a country that wants to replace us as the economic leader and the military leader in the world, doing this kind of garbage, it requires some explanations.
And to make sure that if this happens again, we are very confident that there will be no good thing that come out of it for China.
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I think this is the first time people are noticing and I have never been informed that there have been balloons previously. And I'm Chair of the Defense Committee on Appropriations, so we get classified briefs all the time.
But the truth is, this is unacceptable. China needs to know it's unacceptable and they need to knock this stuff off.
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I do not think anything out there is a coincidence when it comes to surveillance. I think everything is very well planned out and I think there was no errors being made here. I think China knew exactly what they were doing, and we just have to make sure that they got no information from the surveillance below.
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I don't know where it was launched from, but I do know the details of when it entered the US airspace, but there are far more questions that need to be answered by the military, and we are going to get the right person in front of us to get those questions answered, because I think this is a very serious matter that China has decided to do.
Like I've said, we've seen things happen in the Indo Pacific, we've seen it things happen on the internet, we know there's a lot of stuff happening in space. Now, this is one more thing to add to China's list of bad behavior.
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I want to know what went into the process of whether they were going to shoot it down or any other procedure that might be out there to be able to capture that balloon. I want to know how many times this has happened in the past. I want to know how many times it has flown over Montana, because we are an ICBM site. And there are just a lot more questions that need to be answered as far as what happened.
Now, I'm not making any assertions of what the military, the decisions they've made are the wrong ones. I just want to know the thought process behind them so that we can be assured that this country remains safe.
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A hundred percent correct, Anderson. Senator Rounds and myself have a bill we're carrying to stop Chinese in particular, but Russia, North Korea, and Iran from buying farmland in this country. Look, and that's something that that people know about, the farmers know about that are on the ground in Montana and we need to stop that from happening because it puts our National Security and our food security at risk. They're both very, very much connected.
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You bet. Thank you, Anderson.
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