‘We’re Not Dummies’: Kristi Noem Spins Theory on Why U.S. Military Waited to Shoot Down Chinese Spy Balloon

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) spun a kind of conspiracy theory on Thursday, claiming the U.S. military waited to shoot the Chinese spy balloon down over the Atlantic Ocean so that they could conceal anything “they didn’t want the American public to know.”

“I suspected, Greta, and this is just me and speculation. I may be a bit cynical, but I assumed they waited to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon over the ocean so that if something couldn’t be recovered, that they didn’t want us to know that it was an easy excuse, that it was somewhere in the ocean and they couldn’t find it,” Noem told Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren.

“That if there was some piece of information on that balloon or something that was detrimental, that they didn’t want the American public to know that there would be a good reason to why it couldn’t be recovered,” Noem continued, concluding:

These last three balloons and now they have shot them down over land. When you shoot things down and there is debris, we should have been there immediately to recover it and done an analysis and known exactly what these objects are. The fact that they tell us they don’t know what they are is unacceptable. And we’re not dummies.

President Joe Biden and the Pentagon have repeatedly claimed that the military assessed shooting the balloon down over the continental U.S. carried too great a risk of “civilian injuries or deaths or significant property damage” on the ground.

The Pentagon predicted that the debris field for the Chinese spy balloon would encompass a seven-mile radius in which the payload would fall from a high altitude.

Watch above via Newsmax.