Marco Rubio Tells a Skeptical Jake Tapper There’s ‘No Comparison’ Between This Chinese Spy Balloon and Those That Flew Above U.S. on Trump’s Watch

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) argued “no comparison” could be made between this week’s Chinese spy balloon incident, and those that encroached on U.S. airspace back when Donald Trump was president.

The Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman joined CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday to discuss the political messaging surrounding the spy balloon, and what kind of information it might have been able to gather before it was shot down off of the U.S. east coast. While the Biden administration has said that they waited on downing the balloon due to safety concerns, the development has been a major point of criticism as detractors slammed President Joe Biden for not acting against the balloon faster.

Tapper brought up the reports noting that Chinese spy balloons also made it into U.S. during the Trump administration. Rubio shook his head in response and made his case that the difference lies in the duration of their flights.

The difference is this. Are we aware? Have we seen the Chinese fly these balloons in the past? Yes. I think there’s even Twitter pictures of it flying at one point off the coast of the U.S. down south somewhere. The existence of the balloons is not a mystery to people in that field. What we’ve never seen, what is unprecedented, and whoever the source is at the Department of Defense would have to acknowledge what is unprecedented is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho, flew over Montana, over all these sensitive military installations, air force bases, ICBM fields, right across the middle of the country.

That has never happened before, that’s unprecedented. That it flew briefly over the continental U.S., that’s one thing. But what we saw this week is unprecedented. That’s why everyone’s reacting the way they’re reacting. We’ve never seen this, so this has no comparison to anything that may have happened up to this point.

Watch above via CNN.

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