president biden downplayed that balloon s significance in an interview this week saying the flight was, quote, not a major breach. let s bring in retired four-star general jack keane, chairman of the institute for the study of war and a fox news senior strategic analyst. general, good to see you. thanks for coming in. so do you think the administration did the right thing here shooting down this latest object so quickly after it had waited a long time to shoot down the balloon? no, yeah, absolutely. it s the right call. i mean, it s interesting what we don t know, as you indicated, we need a lot of answers. what s very revealing though and concerning is that this we did not pick this up before it entered u.s. air space which is very similar to the historical record we were able to put together after the spy balloon transversed the entire swath of united states. we went back and looked at what s the history of chinese fleet balloons, and we found several of them that had, in
besides daddy has an hawaii vacation booked in about 223 days, but who is counting? jesse: if you don t have musical chops, got to have jokes. number 7. make sure the white house library has lots of books with big print and pictures. [laughter] [applause] number 6, just for fun, issue executive order commanding my brother jeb to wash my car. jesse: all presidents have a presence about them. donald trump showed up to a ufc fight in miami saturday night and sat front row at the octagon. [chanting] [chanting u.s.a.] jesse: trump rolled up with a mali crew. iron mike tyson, kid rock; even the fighters were giving the president a shout-out. trump has been cultural icon for decades. iconic brand that people respond to. he forces people to react to him. some people react positively and as you know some people react negatively. but trump doesn t need any help. his support is organic. it s authentic. every president in the modern era has had that. every president until joe b
ukraine. the lead with jake tapper starts right now. welcome to the lead, i m jake tapper. we start with breaking news, the united states military has taken down another high-altitude object flying over the united states this afternoon. the white house announced the object was shot down at 1:45 p.m. eastern time at the direction of president biden. u.s. officials say it was flying off alaska s northern coast at an altitude of 40,000 feet and was approximately the size of a small car. as of now, the administration is not offering many more details than that. we re calling this an object because that s the best description we have right now. we do not know who owns it, whether it s it s state owned or corporate owned or privately owned. we just don t know. the context, of course, is crucial. last saturday, less than a week ago, the u.s. military shot down what the biden administration says was a chinese surveillance balloon. they did this off the coast of the united
that s the same type of aircraft and missile that shot down the chinese balloon off the coast of south carolina. one of the questions we asked at the pentagon briefing was if there was so much intelligence to gain by letting the previous balloon fly across the united states and being able to observe it, why was this one shot down so quickly especially when the senators were furious it wasn t shot down earlier. was the pentagon wbowing to political pressure. the decision to shoot it down before it entered into u.s. airspace, the pentagon bowing to pressure from the hill? we re going to judge each of these objects on its own merits. it entered into u.s. airspace on february 9th. we sent up aircraft to assess what it was. the decision was made that it posed a reasonable threat to civilian air traffic. the president gave the order to take it down and we took it down. in the end this was shot down just a few miles over the water. that water frozen so it did essentially fall
causing serious destruction. ukrainian government is now imposing energy restrictions, rolling blackouts across the country, after repeated strikes on critical energy infrastructure. in the meantime president biden responding to putin s declaration of martial law in these ukrainian territories saying it reveals his dwindling options in the war. i think vladimir putin finds himself in an incredibly difficult position. and what it reflects to me is it seems his only tool available to him is to brutalize individual citizens in ukraine. cnn got rare access to ukraine s military on the battlefield frontlines. matthew chance is live in moscow first, but i want to go to fred 34r50i9 plight ken who is in kramatorsk. tell us what you saw. reporter: and we ve been hearing so much about the long distance strikes that the russians have been carrying out on critical infrastructure and of course that school that they hit overnight there in zaporizhzhia. but there are still a lot of