wail land skies or the careibben sea. just to give you an idea of the context here, the zvenezuelan protested the aggression, as they call it, from the united states in downing the balloon over south carolina yesterday. you can see venezuela is a staunch ally of china in a land, latin america, fiercely contested between washington and beijing in the last few years, investments through china through the silk road initiative here in latin america has increased a lot. china is the biggest commercial partners of some giant latin american economies, argentina and brazil. that means that latin america right now is in the middle of
officials simply aren t buying china s claim this was an errant weather balloon. one senior administration official i spoke with last need said they are confident that china was trying to seek and gather information over possible military sites. additionally, they ve been pointing to some of the technical components of this balloon, things like that collection pod and also the solar panels that were located on that metal truss below it. they re arguing ha is not consistent with steve meteorological devices. as president biden asked his team to formulate plans for shooting down this balloon, he really was taking two things into consideration. one, he wanted to maximize the safety of americans, but he also was very explicit that he wanted to ensure that they were maximizing their ability to recover that payload, trying to glean as much information about this device as possible. that is what is under way right now through this recovery
with me democratic congressman john garamendi of california. he s a member of the house armed services committee. we just learned that top leadership in both parties, both chambers and key intel committee members could be briefed as early as tuesday. what kind of information do you believe should be shared with congress about what transpired? well, fredicka, first of all, it s great to be with you and thank you for carrying this story, very, very important story. that balloon was an observation balloon to try to sort out what the united states is doing. we have a very, very sophisticated, and a lot of things that aren t being said on your show or any other show is what exactly the united states was doing while that balloon was traveling across from alaska all the way to south carolina. i can assure you that we were gathering information. we probably gathered information
hello, everyone. thank you for joining me this sunday. i m fredicka whitfield. a dramatic takedown and now a race to recover pieces of that suspected chinese supply balloon. the u.s. military shooting it out of the sky on saturday just off the coast of south carolina. you watched it with us live. president biden on wednesday ordering the balloon to be destroyed as soon as possible. his top military brass advising the president to wait until it was safely over the ocean. efforts are now under way to collect the fallen debris which will be taken to the fbi lab in quantico for analysis. the balloon had made its way across the country after first being spotted in montana on wednesday. its appearance over the u.s. and the military operation to take it down complicating the already tenuous relationship between the u.s. and china. beijing accusing the u.s. of
the chinese didn t want us to have, communications systems, the way in which they re communicating from that balloon, probably the satellites. also what it was that the chinese were looking for as they were on this little journey and also all of the detail, and we ll go back and take all of that apart, and we ll learn from this. i suspect the strong words that you re hearing from the chinese are not nearly as strong as the chinese government is giving to whomever was responsible for sending this balloon and allowing the united states to gather so much information about what the chinese are up to. so do you think that information gathering, the u.s. information gathering of that balloon helps explain the gap between making the observation or at least the public knowing that the observation was being made as far back as wednesday when it was sighted over montana throughout its journey to the