CNN Newsroom: Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) Is Interviewed About The Unidentified Object That Was Shot Down By U.S. Military
Interview
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Thanks so much, Paula. It's disturbing. It's troubling. I was in contact with DOD yesterday for several hours through the evening.
And I was assured by them that once they had some daylight where they could get eyes on the object, they were going to get in touch with me and let me know what was going on. When we experienced a 12-hour gap with no information whatsoever, I started reaching out again. And at that point, I was again told there is some type of an object and they are trying to find out just where it is and what they're going to do.
Another six hours went by. And that's when I started making sure that all of my staff was scanning twitter feeds and news broadcasts to find out what was going on, because quite frankly, DOD was not bringing information forward fast enough for me to be able to report back to the citizens across Montana.
We have 140 ICBMS located in Montana. We have mounts from air force bases. This is very sensitive equipment and facilities and we are not being given good, accurate, timely information from the Department of Defense, and I have shared my displeasure with them. You know, we're talking about different-sized devices, Paula.
The first balloon was a Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic. And at that time, I started questioning, when did it enter our air space? How long did they know about it? How long did they keep this information away from the American public? Why wasn't it brought down earlier in such a fashion that we could have acquired all of the equipment and evaluated it to find out what they had been collecting and transmitting back to China?
And now, it doesn't give me much safe feelings knowing that these devices are just smaller. They're more difficult to track, but they're still accumulating data. And I'm very concerned with the cumulative effect of the data that is being collected. Whether that's cellular activity, whether that's information about our civilian infrastructure, whether that is information about our military infrastructure and our defense systems. I need some answers. And the American people need answers.
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Well, I think that we need to do is make sure that these devices are not allowed to enter the -- across the land area of the United States of America. And we would be better served to have them removed, brought down out of the sky if we could keep them intact and get the equipment, great.
But if not, we are still better served making sure that they do not enter across our land areas so that they could collect more data on what we were doing. Again, whether that's cellular or civilian infrastructure or military infrastructure.
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It depends on what method they are brought down with, Paula. That's just exactly the question. And these are questions that I have been asking for over a week now, to find out what is the most effective way to keep these devices from collecting information about the United States of America and yet find out what our adversaries are trying to do to us.
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Most definitely. And I would certainly hope that my colleagues across the aisle would embrace a bipartisan effort to keep the Chinese Communist Party from collecting information about our country.
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I think that we're heading in the right direction, but I also believe that this is a clear demonstration of the Chinese Communist Party's desire to poke, to prod, to see just how far they can push the United States of America under the Biden administration. And listen, Paula, we're not just experiencing an invasion from the air, we're experiencing an invasion on the southern border, as well.
And when you have a million people a year that are coming across the southern border, completely undetected and not having any encounters with law enforcement, we don't know who those folks are either. So, we had better start stepping up our national security coverage or we're going to have major problems.
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No, that I'm not concerned with. I think they are prodding to see just how far we will allow them to penetrate into our country and how long we will allow them to collect data about our country.
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Thank you, Paula.
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