0 a little further detail on that, the decision was made this morning he just revealed, asked when did the president give the order to shoot it down? this morning. john: talk about burying the lede, talks about all of this other stuff, and then a reporter says, oh, by the way, did you shoot something down? oh, yes. here are the details. my gosh. martha: grade to be with you come have a great weekend. i m sandra smith. martha: elsey and monday, thank you for joining us, the story with martha continues to breaking news. it s actually a trace, good afternoon, and trace gallagher in for martha maccallum, the story is a bombshell as we can train new breaking news, about to go to the pentagon as a white house confirms a high altitude object was shot down over alaska today. though there is no confirmation on who owns the object. we don t know if it is state owned or corporate owns, we just don t know that right now, mainly because we spotted this thing at night. in a moment, repu
our viewers, those are the top leaders from both parties in the house and the senate as well as the chairman and ranking members of the intelligence committees in both the house and the senate. they will be asked as to why the balloon wasn t shot down sooner but also about the administration s claim that they were able to block this chinese balloon from gathering a lot of the intelligence that it intended to as well as the claim by the biden administration that they were able to gather counterintelligence on this chinese balloon as it crossed the united states. you can also imagine that these members of congress will be asking about the recovery efforts so far, what they have been able to glean, what the recovery efforts will look like going forward. so, jim, this week-long saga of this balloon crossing the continental united states, that may now be over as much of it sits 47 feet below water. but so many questions still to be answered. jim. absolutely. all right. alex marquardt, tha
information they want to glean. it is worth pointing out that the intelligence gathering operation from the u.s. perspective hasn t started now. it happened as this balloon made its way across the united states. the pentagon says they took steps to mitigate the ability of the chinese to gather information or intelligence from this and instead, tried to gather their own about the capabilities and technology aboard the balloon. so now that will shift from it being in motion to once they bring it up, seeing it in person, up close, instead of at a distance of something like 12 miles in the sky, jim. what did it take to shoot this balloon down? it was executed it seems perfectly. from what we can see, it certainly looks like it. there were days of planning ever since president biden gave the green light to shoot it down as soon as possible. the pentagon decided it wouldn t be safe over the continental u.s. and over what would be a
intelligence gathering to be happening here when it comes to that debris and what they can really kind of glean from this chinese spy balloon. we will be learning more over the next couple of hours as we learn how this operation actually went down really and what china s intentions were and the timing of course of all of this as we talked about this diplomatic dance happening. overseas. want to bring back in if we can to the conversation dan de luz, who is standing by for us and has been following this. dan if you will, kind of bring us up to date on what we have been learning so far? now of course breaking news at the spy balloon has in fact been shot down? yes we have really seen the end of this episode, the chapter of the episode. since we learned that a chinese surveillance balloon according to the pentagon was spotted floating over u.s. airspace. we first learned about it when it was over in montana, and made its way through the continental u.s. to the heartland over missouri.
tortore ntore torrance, california, saw the white van and saw that long standoff yesterday as police officers tried to stop that car. the suspect fled. officers there heard one shot. they backed down and called in the s.w.a.t. team. the s.w.a.t. team eventually going in, clearing that van and found the suspect deceased from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. sheriff saying they found additional evidence inside that van that linked that suspect to these two locations. that s all they re saying right now. we do know, however, that authorities are conducting a search warrant at the suspect s residence trying to gather as much information as they can. obviously, he is deceased. they can t interview him, glean the motive from him directly and have to look at other avenues to include his residence and talking to people who may have known him and get to an indication why he came here and caused a mass loss of life here saturday night. thank you both. bring in retired lapd sergeant sheryl d