Fmr. Obama Sec Def Leon Panetta: Biden Should’ve Shot Down Spy Balloon Before ‘It Was Allowed to Transverse the Entire Country’

A top level member of the Obama administration said President Joe Biden should have taken swifter action against the Chinese spy balloon, instead of letting it “transverse the entire country.”

The balloon was shot down Saturday over Atlantic waters, after spending several days dominating news coverage and inspiring countless memes.

Leon Panetta served as CIA director and then Secretary of Defense in President Barack Obama’s White House, and before that was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. On Sunday, CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta interviewed Panetta about the balloon, and specifically the Biden administration’s response to it.

He was awaiting confirmation that the balloon was in fact a spy balloon and was maneuverable, but regardless, said Panetta, it was cause for concern that the balloon had been “clearly invading U.S. airspace,” and Biden “made the right decision to shoot it down.”

Citing Panetta’s past roles as defense secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff, Acosta asked him if he would have advised Biden to “shoot down that balloon immediately, as soon as it was becoming noticeable over the skies in Montana, or do you think it made some sense, from an intelligence-gathering standpoint to let it drift for awhile and let it get out over the ocean where it could be brought down without any really potential for danger below?”

There were “going to be lessons from all of this,” said Panetta, and “if we were aware of the balloon, I think we should have taken steps to prevent it from entering our air space and I’m not sure that we should have allowed it to simply crossover the country, crossover what were obviously sensitive military sites.”

“I don’t see the logic of that,” Panetta continued:

So the question obviously is — the Pentagon said there were risks here. I understand that argument that there were debris risks. At the same time, I think we should have acted earlier if our suspicions were valid that this was, in fact, on an intelligence mission.

I hope in the future we make clear to China, that this kind of incident cannot happen again, and it will not happen again. And in the future, if we see that kind of balloon, we are going to — if they don’t take action to prevent that balloon from entering our air space, that we will indeed shoot it down much earlier than we did this time around.

“I think if I have you straight, you’re saying that you think this should have been shot down perhaps over Montana, something like that, maybe over a sparsely populated area, that sort of thing, before it crossed over almost the entire continental U.S.?” asked Acosta.

“Yeah, that bothered me that it was allowed to transverse the entire country,” Panetta replied, adding that Biden should have been more “transparent with the country about what was happening here,” regarding the government’s discovery of the balloon, assessment that it was an “intelligence-gathering balloon,” and “when the president made the decision to shoot it down.”

“If he made the decision on Wednesday to shoot it down, I think that should have been made public,” said Panetta. “It would have prevented some of the criticism that occurred later and the American people I think are entitled to know just exactly what our adversaries are up to. So I think greater transparency would have helped the White House as well.”

Watch above via CNN.