Tag: china balloon
marjorie taylor greene

Greene Threw 'Screaming And Cursing' Tantrum In China Balloon Briefing

Two days after heckling President Biden at the 2023 State of the Union address, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) yelled profanities and sounded “irrational” in heated exchanges with administration officials during a classified House intelligence briefing on the China spy balloon incident.

The meeting — held Thursday morning behind closed doors at the U.S. Capitol — was intended to fully inform House lawmakers on the Biden administration’s downing of the high-altitude balloon above the Atlantic Ocean over the weekend.

A member who attended the briefing told The Hill that when it came Greene’s turn to ask questions, she yelled expletives at the officials without provocation and questioned the intelligence lawmakers were being provided.

“When she got to ask questions,” the lawmaker said, “she was yelling out, saying ‘bullshit,’ and, you know, ‘I don’t believe you.’ Just screaming and yelling, irrational in my estimation.”

Approached by The Hill for an explanation of her outburst, Greene — one of the loudest voices on the right blasting the Biden White House for shooting down the invading balloon when they did — gleefully implied the average American would’ve done the same.

“I had to wait in line the whole time. I was, I think, the second to last person, and I chewed them out just like the American people would’ve,” Greene told the outlet. “I tore ‘em to pieces.”

Biden wanted the U.S. military to shoot down the balloon, which was the size of three buses and cruising at an altitude of 60,000 to 65,000 feet, upon discovery, but top Pentagon officials had warned its debris could crash down on the people and infrastructure below.

The top officials determined it would be best to wait until the balloon “got over water” before taking it out, which they did last Saturday with a Sidewinder air-to-air missile from one of two F-22 fighter jets scrambled from the Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.

Greene dismissed the White House’s decision to err on the side of caution, saying it made Biden look “weak” and “like a fool.”

“I said the president may be a Democrat, but he’s still the president of the United States, and they made him look like a fool and made him look weak the week before the State of the Union — I’ve said that publicly, too — by not shooting it down,” Greene told The Hill.

“And I said there was nothing I heard there today that gave me any confidence in what they did,” she added. “They tried to give me some more excuses, and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear more of your excuses.’”

She continued, “He [an administration official] said, ‘Well, it’s a matter of opinion.’ I said, ‘no, you’re nothing but excuses, and it’s wrong, and I’m just telling you: this is how the American people see it, and it’s a serious problem.’”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) told the publication that Greene’s tirade had caused “tension in the room” during the briefing.

“There’s some members who just don’t want to believe what they said. They [the detractors] said, ‘Oh, I don’t believe you,’ you know, that kind of thing, ‘I don’t trust you.’ So that’s the kind of tension, just the fight back,” he said.

Greene offered a bizarre explanation for her behavior Friday after the outlet published its piece on her tantrum.

“I refused to accept excuses in today’s briefing about the Chinese Spy Balloon. They could have safely shot it down over the Pacific or rural AK or MT. Jet liners have crashed & not killed people on the ground. Americans are outraged they did nothing,” she tweeted.

The intelligence briefing flare-up wasn’t Greene’s only reported outburst in recent weeks. In mid-January, The Daily Beast reported the Georgian and fellow Freedom Caucus firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) had screamed at each other in a Capitol ladies’ bathroom.

“The gentlewoman from Georgia came up and started, you know, being kind of nasty about [Lauren’s opposition to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)’s speakership bid],” Boebert told a radio show, recounting the altercation.

“I looked at her and said, “Don’t be ugly,” Boebert added. However, that wasn’t the last of Greene’s “ugly” public and vocal reactions to positions she disagreed with.

When Biden was midway through his roughly 7218-word state of the union speech, Greene — who attended the address in a furry outfit critics said was reminiscent of Cruella De Vil — shouted, “liar,” heckling the president along with a contingent of Republican lawmakers.

Greene said Biden deserved the disruption for “act[ing] like he's terrified of China and unwilling to talk about the fact that they spied on us last night, yeah,” according to Newsweek.

Why Trump Administration Failed To Detect Previous China Balloon Flights

Why Trump Administration Failed To Detect Previous China Balloon Flights

Three Chinese spy balloons traversed United States territory unseen during former President Donald Trump's presidency due to a "domain awareness gap," CNN reports.

U.S. Air Force General Glen D. VanHerck, who serves as commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, confirmed to CNN that the successful balloon transit was due to the domain awareness gap but also said he did not "want to go into further detail."

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” he said.

This comes after the Pentagon said last week that "balloon incidents occurred during the Trump administration," of which former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he was “surprised," according to CNN.

“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Esper said.

Additionally, former National Security Advisor to Trump, John Bolton asked, “Did the Biden administration invent a time machine? What is the basis of this new detection?”

Trump administration staffers assert “they were not aware” of the balloons during Trump's term, and the former president called reports of the three undetected balloons under his leadership "fake disinformation" on his social media site Truth Social.

John Kirby, National Security Council strategic communications coordinator,attributed the "difficulty" of detecting the balloons to a few factors, CNN reports, such as the balloon "altitude and speed."

He said, “They fly very, very high, very, very slow and in order to track, you’ve got to run the traps along many different lines of information and technology. Their dynamics, their trajectory, their flight behavior complicates the ability to know exactly where one is at any particular moment in time depending on where it is over the Earth’s surface.”

VanHerck noted intelligence officials were later "able to gather intelligence 'from additional means that made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America.'”

An official told CNN "the intelligence community is prepared" to brief top Trump administration staffers on "the Chinese surveillance program."

The Biden administration says the program "has been deployed in countries across five continents over the last several years," CNN reports.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump: Pentagon Disclosure About Earlier Chinese Balloons Is 'FAKE DISINFORMATION'

Trump: Pentagon Disclosure About Earlier Chinese Balloons Is 'FAKE DISINFORMATION'

Former President Donald Trump called a new U.S. military disclosure that Chinese surveillance balloons traversed the continental United States several times during his presidency — and, worse, that his administration failed to detect them — “FAKE DISINFORMATION!”

The Associated Press reported Sunday that high-altitude surveillance balloons operated by China had traversed the US at least three times when Trump was president. A top military commander confirmed Monday that the incursions went undetected because the U.S. military had a “domain awareness gap” under the Trump administration.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, told reporters on Monday.

In a rant on his beleaguered social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed without evidence that the disclosure was fake and a cover-up for the Biden administration, whom he branded “fools” who “are only good at cheating in elections.”

“The Chinese Balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden Administration,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

“They are only good at cheating in elections, and disinformation — and now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the 'heat' off the slow moving Biden fools,” he continued.

“China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!” the former president added.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox News Digital that no such incursions had occurred under his leadership because China "respected us greatly."

"It never happened with us under the Trump administration. And if it did, we would have shot it down immediately," Trump told the right-wing network. "It's disinformation.

Former Trump administration officials, Republican lawmakers, and other Twitter-based luminaries of the far-right MAGA movement have also derided reports of Trump-era Chinese spy balloon invasions.

John Bolton and Robert O’Brien, former Trump administration advisers, told Fox News that they were never briefed — and thus, were not aware — that Chinese-operated surveillance balloons had flown over the U.S. under Trump, according to Forbes.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said “no one believes” the U.S. military’s assertions because “every single person in the Trump foreign policy sector said that this didn’t happen.”

[Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who for days sought to stoke outrage over the balloon the Biden administration detected and promptly shot down over the Atlantic, echoed Jordan’s claims that the reports were false because Trump, who lied over 30,000 times as President, said so.

Dinesh D’Souza, the producer of the far-right voter-fraud fabricating 2000 Mules documentary, castigated by Americans as “simply horrible,” was caught copy-pasting his defense of Trump: that the Pentagon was wrong because it didn’t provide “any proof that I’m aware of.”

Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.