CNN Newsroom: Interview With Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX)
Interview
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I don't ever recall hearing about it. And, you know, as we think about it, I know there's been a lot of conversation about -- and a lot of debate about when you should shoot down this balloon or take it out. And remember, there's at least three different considerations that the military and the intel officials are going through. The first one, of course, is what the intelligence vulnerabilities are. What kind of information that balloon is collecting about nuclear sites, about defense sites, and so forth.
The second one is what is the counterintelligence value of observing what that thing is doing? There is very likely a very important counterintelligence value to the United States government in understanding how China is collecting information on the United States. And then the third one, of course, is the one that President Biden made clear, which is public safety. You know, Donald Trump Jr. going on Twitter, wherever it was, Truth Social, and saying that, you know, people should just shoot guns up in the air and try to take it out, there's a public safety concern about debris and people shooting guns, of course.
So I think the president made a very clear and decisive decision in asking the military to take it out as soon as possible, and they advised that the best time to do it was when it was over water.
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Well, I mean, I would think that over the course of his presidency, because of the presidential daily briefing and other intelligence briefings, that the president would have a pretty good idea about China's intelligence surveillance of the United States. So I would think that over those four years, he would have a good understanding about how exactly China was gathering information about the United States.
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Well, the first thing is people like Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan and others, they're going to criticize Joe Biden no matter what he does. If they'd shot it down an hour later, they would have still been criticizing him. And apparently while President Trump was in office, there were a few of these balloons that were up, and it appears that President Trump and his administration never took action against the Chinese because of that.
So President Biden was decisive. He took the military's advice that the best time to do it, mostly because of public safety, was when this thing was over water and it was taken out.
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I think so. You know, apparently the debris was seven miles long, and so debris falling like that over one of the states in our country could cause great damage to people and to structures. And so the best and prudent thing to do was to wait. And as I mentioned earlier, I also think that there was probably very likely a counterintelligence value to understanding how the Chinese are collecting information against the United States. The value of that counterintelligence really can't be overstated. It's incredibly important.
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Yes. And that's one of the most interesting parts of this whole thing is that usually nations will collect intelligence against each other in very quiet ways. In other words, they don't usually try to make it public or make a show of it. And so for China to be this brazen about it and then make a statement about it after this thing was shot down and not distance themselves from this thing or say, oh, it wasn't ours or so forth, I thought was incredibly interesting and incredibly telling.
A sign, I thought, of Chinese aggression and a little bit akin to what the Russians did in 2016, where they essentially were part of an operation to dump all this information from the DNC and weaponize information. This, of course, was different. But in a similar vein, it was the Chinese being more aggressive and not keeping quiet about intelligence.
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There's so much for the president to talk about. First of all, so many successes in terms of helping the country beat back the pandemic. We're not completely out of the clear, but we've come a long way since January of 2021. Also the economy bouncing back the way that it has and having the lowest unemployment rate now since 1969. Those are things that the president and the country -- that we can be incredibly proud of.
So I think he's going to talk about the economy, about where we are now. But I hope that he'll talk about things like immigration and finally getting some big issues done that have been lingering with the Congress and the administration for quite a while. You know, and then of course I think he's probably going to have to address some of the issues or some of the ways that Republicans are waging culture wars in the country, like banning books in Florida and so forth.
All of these things because they have no plan for governing. They have no substantive plan for the country, so they're trying to ignite culture wars all over the place.
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Good to be with you.
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