about it buried in the lead and in the press conference, came up 11 minutes into the press conference because of an errant question and not much more. what do you think? first of all, i think that the president acted a bit different than he did than when the balloon came over and took this thing down, where we should have taken the balloon down. now, that said, i am very concerned about this whole situation here because of the way we hesitated in the balloon taking the balloon down, if you stop and think about it, there is a possibility that that could have been filled with some kind of warhead that could have been an emp, which would have knocked out a substantial part of our power grids, it could have been a chemical or a biological warhead that was in that balloon and we re letting
from u2 spy planes that circled the balloon as it crossed the u.s. reveal multiple antennas capable of collecting signal intelligence, say u.s. official s that could let china get information from phone calls, emails and text messages. fbi counterintelligence experts on electronic spying are studying the debris. a senior u.s. official says the amount recovered so far adds up to a small car. but searchers have not yet found the payload. likely by now on the ocean floor, which could provide critical information on what sensitive intelligence the chinese may have gotten. the balloon, which flew over montana, today outraging the senators. quite frankly, i will just tell you, i don t want a damn balloon going across the united states. i guarantee you they could have taken that balloon down, that spy balloon, and the greatest risk would have been hitting a cow, a prairie dog or an antelope. reporter: the president tonight on telemundo. do you regret not
anything, come from the search. sandra: still waiting on the pentagon briefing, we will get there as soon as it begins. a warning that two of our adversaries are teaming up on a weapons project that could lead to more chaos, more mayhem and more deaths so what are we doing to stop it? that reporting ahead. john: word the military has found the payload from china s spy flight. size of a school bus, and found it mostly intact. what secrets could that hold about what the chinese communist party was doing above our heads? we ll ask mark esper. in the future, i believe we need to take the balloon down, if it ever happens again, before it gets to alaska or the united states. it s happened too many times in the past, now we will be prepared. thing costs more: gas, groceries, cars. we all need cash in the bank to stay ahead. well here s great news for veterans who own a home.
ali vitale joins us now from capitol hill. they re clearly not happy about any of this. they had that classified briefing. what did we learn about what they were told, obviously within limits because we don t have classified clearance. reporter: right. that s exactly right. the questions we asked after the classified briefing that the senators and frankly house members several hours before that, we didn t get many details from those lawmakers, but publicly for the hearings that we saw on the senate side this morning, you could tell there was a lot of frustration there, not just from senators tester and murkowski who are considering their home state politics in all of this, the fact that alaska and montana were central points during this balloon s travel across the country, and they were important points of inflection as you saw the senator saying, the administration could have decided to shoot the balloon down, and ultimately didn t, waiting for it to cross the country, and then sh
down over the ocean. but what we re seeing start to develop here is most democrats after that classified briefing on the senate side, being a little more tempered and measured saying they re generally satisfied with what they were able to hear from officials behind closed doors, part of what might have been frustrating about the hearings is that they were public, and thusly they could not be as transparent as some of these lawmakers think they should be outside of a classified setting. we re also hearing from republicans who are still continuing to criticize the administration s response. not the reason they waited so long to shoot the balloon down, the lack of information they re giving out publicly at this point too. ali vitale, thank you very much. joining me is university of amsterdam assistant professor of international criminal law, widely considered an expert on the mh 17, testified many times.