Senator John Barrasso Has Strong Opinions About The Chinese Spy Balloon

Senator John Barrasso has some strong opinions on the Chinese Spy Balloon fiasco and whether Joe Biden is competent to be president.

Wyoming Senator John Barrasso
Getty Images

The senior Senator from Wyoming was in the Cowboy State yesterday, specifically visiting Worland and Greybull.  He was interviewed by our Big Horn Radio Network reporter, Tony Demars.  Hear the full interview here:

Senator Barrasso was asked about his feeling about what happened with the Chinese spy balloon, which entered U.S. airspace and was discovered by a civilian in Billings, Montana. The balloon was allowed to drift over the continental United States until it was ultimately shot down off the coast of South Carolina.

Senator Barrasso said the spy balloon debacle is on everyone’s mind, especially people in Wyoming, because the 200-foot tall balloon, “had solar panels so that it could be controlled and hover, which is what it did. Which meant it could hold over a location and collect data more than a satellite in outer space. I thought we should’ve shot it down once it had crossed the Aleutians [islands], and it was in Alaska. There was no reason to not. But the president was too slow to act. So it went over Montana, like Wyoming, we have the intercontinental ballistic missiles.  These are part of the Triad of the nuclear defense to prevent a nuclear war.”

Senator Barrasso went on to say that President John F. Kennedy called the silos with the ICBM’s our “ace in the hole.”  Barrasso was quick to condemn the president’s lack of action saying, “Biden doesn’t mind showing our ‘hole’ cards to China.  China knows what they were looking for…so I think it should’ve been taken down much, much earlier.  When Biden ran for president he said that China was our friend, he said that they are not our competition.  [Biden] is just wrong.”

But China is not just using spy balloons to gather intel on America, as Barrasso wrote in an op-ed for USA Today last week.  In the piece, Senator Barrasso illustrates how China steal our intellectual properties, patents, and other data in the name of “science.”  By adding a layer of legitimacy that Barrasso claims is “often accepted and perpetuated by America’s leader and decision-makers.  It helps China steal $600 billion per year of America’s intellectual property.

But it’s not just American airspace that China us using to gather intel. “American academic and scientific institutions are routinely weaponized by the PRC for its own military and economic benefit. U.S. national labs develop state-of-the-art technology and conduct pioneering research funded by American taxpayers. Many of these scientific breakthroughs have military applications. Too often, China has a front-row seat to their creation,” Barrasso wrote in the editorial piece.

Senator Barrasso claims that there are Chinese nationals who are working in science labs and universities that are recruited by the Chinese National Party. These nationals are then either “black mailed” or told that they “owe” the information, that the scientists are duty-bound to move back to China, reunite with their families and give information and secrets that they have discovered in America.  In fact, a report came out in 2022 by Strider Technologies which found that from 1987 to 2021, “the Chinese government successfully targeted at least 160 Chinese researchers working at Los Alamos, our top nuclear weapons lab. These scientists later returned to China to “advance key military and dual-use technologies in areas such as hypersonics, deep-earth penetrating warheads, unmanned aerial vehicles, jet engines, and submarine noise reduction.” Barrasso went farther in his piece by writing, “Every piece of this sensitive knowledge now in the hands of China was developed and paid for by Americans.  Everything we [America] has invented, they [China] has tried to steal.”

But what is the point of all the high-tech espionage, balloons overhead, and secreting valuable information out of the country back to China?  “Their goal, I believe, is to be the military, the economic and the technological Super Power of the World and the only way to do that is to take down the United States.”

When asked about President Biden’s physical last week at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where the doctors found him to be not only “healthy” but also “vigorous,” Barrasso replied, “I served with Joe Biden in the Senate. He’s not the same guy.  And the level at which he has been governing, has not been…” Barrasso stops just short of saying “competent” and instead finishes his sentence with a more obtuse opinion, stating that the level of competence that Barrasso would like to see in the president governing the country just isn’t there.  “And in some things, he [President Biden] is just wrong.  Like his attack on American energy, the oil, the gas, the coal.  What we have here is America’s energy breadbasket here in Wyoming.”

Senator Barrasso blames Biden’s lack of leadership to the president’s being beholden to the “woke” mentality that pervades Democratic politics.  “That is really hurting our nation and makes us more dependent on China, more dependent on other countries, and less dependent on ourselves and we have it here.  We ought to use what we have here.”