China Issues Warning to U.S.

Today on Secula, if the United States finally shoots down the Chinese spy balloon, China responds with a warning to the United States. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now more than ever, this is Sekulow.

We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

Alright, welcome to Sekulow. We're taking your phone calls. 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. The United States finally shot down that Chinese spy balloon. Of course, after it had traversed the entire United States, continental United States of America, and I think Alaska as well.

So you're talking about, again, whether or not we're able to finally recover some of this that ended up in the water in the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina. The question is, did they get everything they wanted out of this already because they were able to use the surveillance drone the entire length of the United States? And at a point where you could literally see it from the ground.

It went from 60,000 feet to 30,000 feet, so you didn't have to have some special kind of telescope or special kind of satellite device or tracking device to realize this thing was flying above the air. The administration, Joe Biden tried to take this tough tone that he ordered it shot down, but this is one of those questions where you look at the bureaucracy again being more powerful than the elected President of the United States. He said to shoot it down on Wednesday when it was over Montana, which is one of the least populated parts of Montana is eastern Montana. Even the governor said they could have made it secure. So they were okay with shooting it down over Montana, the leader of Montana. And Joe Biden was rebuffed by his own military and he didn't say, do what I said.

No, but what's interesting here is... The whole bureaucracy runs the government now is what we're finding out. Yes, which we knew they tried to under the previous administration.

The leaders didn't let them. But in this particular case, I think the troubling aspect is when it was hovering over Montana, it was over an ICBM base, intercontinental ballistic missile base in Montana. And we didn't take it down. And also when it entered US airspace off the coast coming in from Alaska, we didn't take it down.

And you had all that open area where you could have done it, which would have made also the retrieval of the hardware easier. But having said that, I think now they're also saying, which is interesting to me, oh, by the way, the Trump administration doesn't know this, but there were some balloons that came over during their administration too. They just didn't know that happened.

So, I mean, how do you not know these balloons are coming over? I don't believe... Mike Pompeo will be able to ask them. Three of these balloons, Mike Pompeo has already been quoted as saying that's not accurate. So has the former Secretary of Defense under the Trump administration.

Esper said, no, that's not accurate. And the Biden administration's response was, well, they wouldn't have known because we found out about it later. This is a balloon you can see from the ground. So whether they're trying to, again, compare an apple to an orange to some other kind of... Listen, we know the Chinese got surveillance devices up in the air trying to surveil the United States. It's a very different question when you go within our airspace, when you literally have to ground flights because the FAA has got to ground flights.

And then it's hovering to the point where you can take a picture of it off your iPhone. So whenever they're trying to compare what happened to the Trump administration, I have a feeling if we dig further there, of course, they'll say it was classified. Right. But if you do dig further there, it was comparing an apple to an orange. And in this situation, the Biden administration allowed a spy balloon to traverse the entire United States of America.

Yes, and including our most sensitive areas. And it was directed to, we understand. That's another thing that was a fallacy. First they said it was Winchert. The Chinese tried to claim it was Winchert, choosing its altitude and direction. Yeah, but it's all controlled by them in China. So Beijing's controlling all of this.

It's a drone balloon. We've got Mike Pompeo coming up in the second half hour of the broadcast, which will be fascinating because we're going to talk to him about all of this. And then you've got a Russian, a US general, saying that war with China could be imminent in 2025. This sure doesn't look like it, by the way, because their response back is pretty tepid. They didn't threaten to do anything. They're just saying they can't believe we escalated it like this. Well, we can't believe you're flying your stuff over US airspace, but actually we can't believe it because that's what they're doing. All right, we're going to take your calls at 800-684-3110.

What do you think the appropriate response should have been here? 1-800-684-3110. What about this little add-on that during the previous administration it happened to them too?

You think that's just a cover? We'll take your calls at 800-684-3110. Support the work of the ACLJ. Do that at ACLJ.org. Some brand new cases being filed this week.

We'll talk about those later in the broadcast. All right, welcome back to Secular. Take your phone calls.

1-800-684-3110. Let me play this. Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is also former Director of the CIA. Under the Obama administration, take a listen, Byte 8. That bothered me that it was allowed to transverse the entire country. And for that reason, I think it probably would have been well for the President to have been transparent with the country. And instead, it was a guessing game with what this was. A lot of it we were picking up from members of Congress.

When Joe Biden did finally respond to it, he was like nasty to the media. Like no one was going to ask about the giant Chinese balloon transversing the entire United States. When you look at the path, I don't think we have that graphic yet, do we? That graphic, when it comes over from Alaska, it goes right through the center of the country.

That is very well planned. When it's over Montana, it's over bases. And all the stars you see, for those watching, are areas where they were sensitive military. Interesting too, in Tennessee, we have the nuclear plants.

That's not technically a military base, but it's a nuclear facility. Obviously, they knew exactly what they were looking for when they did it. And we delayed way too long in getting it down, in my view. But it's down and that's a good thing. But the question now will be, will they be able to obtain the... Probably not as much because it landed in saltwater.

Yeah. And then Montana, it's pretty sparsely populated. I don't know why we didn't take it down there and not let it go. I'm not a military person, so I'm not going to... Their governor was happy to do it.

The governor wanted it done. And the senator said we should do it. What's interesting with all this is that, what does this do to our U.S.-Chinese relations? And so the Chinese said that the People's Republic of China said this was an overreaction on the part of the United States. And we're saying, and correctly so under international law, that the Chinese Communist Party's actions violate international law. They breached the airspace of another country here in the United States and violated our sovereignty, which is something that, of course, Taiwan is dealing with on a regular basis as well.

But now the United States. So we're going to take your calls on this. 800-684-3110.

1-800-684-3110. Interesting on Rumble. We got a comment. So does China get a pass for this? How will we ever know what the data they were collecting actually is? Well, you know, are they getting a pass for it? Well, I mean, it was shot down, but it was shot down late.

The question, they're not going to escalate anything over this. Will we find out what the data was? Supposedly we started jamming it by the weekend. They were able to jam the signal going back to China.

We have very sophisticated intelligence, the most sophisticated in the world. So there was, did they catch it before then? I don't know. That's why the Biden administration acting upset like people are asking is ridiculous.

Of course, people are going to ask. They said they didn't know about what was over in Montana. So that would have been Tuesday if you didn't know. How is that possible? How did we not know there was something floating in our airspace at 58,000 feet?

It could have started higher. This is why Panetta said this deserves a briefing. And see, what we're going to do is we're going to have a State of the Union tomorrow night where this won't come up. Or he's going to act like he acted decisively because there's no questions at that. It's not a press briefing. And try to move on. They're going to try to move us on quickly from that.

I think the Chinese too, if you look at their statements, they're doing the same thing. If you're watching on any of our social media apps, we encourage you to share. A lot of you are watching right now and we encourage you to share. Let's go ahead and take a phone call. Sure. Let's go to Joanne in Ohio online one. Hey, Joanne.

Hi. Not to dismiss the fact that it took us 10 days to get rid of this thing. My question is, is why are we letting, why did we obliterate the thing? And why two days later are we still looking for it? Why couldn't we have brought this thing down gently somehow that had the Navy in the water waiting for this stuff? Well, it was interesting because both Mike Pompeo when he was on and Rick Grenell, so you've got the former director of national intelligence and the former secretary of state, both saying we had the capacity and former director of the CIA capacity to take this down and secure the data.

When you, when you put the water in play, it's a whole different ball game because these things sink. You didn't have, you didn't know exactly where it was going to be. The aircraft were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Northern Virginia and Washington DC area. They could probably reach there in about 17 minutes. Some went up from Norfolk.

We, we live near, we have an office near and we live near the Oceana Naval Air Station. I think the scramble time there is about 16 minutes also. So those move quick.

But let me tell you how ships move. Really slow. Oh yeah, that stuff sinks quick. And that stuff, so now it's in shallow area. They see the water where it's in is like 40 to 80 feet. So they should be able to get it, but it's going to take time and who knows what the water does.

We are taking your calls on this 800-684-3110. What do you feel like the reaction should be to the Chinese government? Now we've canceled the trip with Blinken, which was really. You know what the Chinese wrote back, says he was going to be a machine.

Yes. Their response was we were never going to be, he was going to be with his baby's counterpart. But he was not going to be, I mean, so they were already ready for that.

Move. No, they did this knowing this. Yeah, I mean if you're going to put up a law like this, you've got to know that you should get caught. They wanted to get caught.

Like everyone is saying, this was to get caught intentionally. This is when you start pushing your head to see where's your red line. Yeah, well our red line is we waited a week. All right, we're taking your calls at 1-800-684-3110. Let's take another call. I think it's Bill from Wyoming. Hi Bill.

Hi, thanks for taking my call. I've got two questions, I guess. One, wasn't there others classified sensitive areas that that balloon passed over? And two, couldn't they research some of that other technology possibly and share with our allies like Israel, Taiwan, and Japan? You mean the balloon technology? I'm sure, I don't think the balloon itself is the high-tech part of it. No, the high-tech is what's under the balloon.

What's under the balloon and what they're taking. And of course... We need to analyze it first before we give it to anybody. You think about Israel, a place like that, this wouldn't even work for Israel. It would be overdone with before... They would have knocked it out of the sky. Well, it would be two seconds too. If you're talking about how much this traversed, it came over where we are in Tennessee I guess overnight. I mean it was already in two more states.

It was not slow moving. No. So yes, I think eventually, obviously you're going to share with your allies, but the question here is this administration, because the way they decide to shoot it down, may have, we don't know all this, may have given away a lot of the ability to collect the technology behind this. But there's something else here. This is not as much about the balloon and the technology, what they got. It's about testing the Biden administration's responses. I want to play Senator Cotton's statement of Fox News yesterday. What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon testing President Biden's strength and resolve. And unfortunately, the President failed that test.

And that's dangerous for the American people. The President was paralyzed for an entire week by a balloon. We should have shot this balloon down over the Aleutian Islands. We should never have allowed it to transit the entire continental United States.

I mean, think about what Senator Cotton said. This went through the entire continental United States from coast to coast, coming in through Alaska and then coming down the mid portion of the country. And it was a trial balloon for the Biden administration and the Chinese have got to feel pretty good. What did they lose? How many of these do they have?

Nine zillion. Well, they also found out what tech we have. So that's part of these trouble is we might have jamming technology. They now know how it works. They know what the jamming technology is. They know it took us five days to seven days to react to this.

They cut to agreement. They know we couldn't move quickly. We did bring their ambassadors in to express our displeasure.

I mean, it's almost laughable, frankly. But this is the way in which it went. And, you know, I'm sure the Biden administration wanted the visual of the balloon being blown up, but it's a balloon.

So, of course, we could build. I think the visual was that impressive. I mean, the military did a good job. They got it in one missile strike. It wasn't an armed. That's wonderful.

It's fine. I mean, I think you could have done that with a lot of old tech. I don't think it was any super high tech to get the balloon down. They used the guns, right? No, they used the missile.

They ended up. They used the guns if they were going to try to recover it, because they were going to try to make holes in it so it slowly, they could track it better. They decided to get the visual of the big. But it was a sign winder missile, which, by the way, is old technology. I mean, you're talking about 1980s.

They still work, obviously, but this was against an unarmed. Giant target. Big target. So, I'm glad they got it.

Look, I'm not. It's not the enlisted people's fault. This is the administration's problem. And the leadership of the armed forces are so left.

That's unreal. I'm sure they're wondering what the Chinese are going to think about all this, because that's what they care about. I mean, look, the geopolitical on this is not a balloon came over the United States and we were able to shoot it down. The geopolitical on this is the Chinese had the guts to launch a balloon over the United States. It traversed the entire continental United States.

We take it down off the coast of Hilton Head in South Carolina, and they, meanwhile, get away with this for about eight days. That's the test. That is what the test is. And that is the test that was not successful. So, I don't think we passed that test with flying colors. And the Chinese, I think the Chinese response to that also, by the way, shows that they think they, I think they got what they wanted, Jordan, which was, you know, you really overreacted to that.

That's what they said. If you do this to us, we'll do the same thing. They didn't say we're going to take another aggressive step in response.

The response was, listen, now if we catch one of your balloons, we're going to shoot it down. So, somebody in Rumble asked, will the Communist Party of China, will the Chinese take us to the International Criminal Court over this? We're not a member of the United States. It's not a member of the ICC.

I don't think they are either. No, and I don't think the Chinese Communist Party is a member of the International Criminal Court either. So, no ICC jurisdiction. We do have a case with the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, that we're involved with. We're sending briefs and letters in as we speak.

We got a lot more ahead, some work in the UN coming up that we want to get into. Well, more on this. We'll take your calls as well at 800-684-3110. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. Back with more in a moment.

Alright, welcome back to Secular. Take your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. Mike Pompeo is going to join us in the second half hour. We've got some reporters in boats off the coast of South Carolina. So, we have, media is searching for the downed Chinese spy balloon, which is kind of just, isn't that just sad? The whole, look, I mean... Because that whole perimeter should be shut down by the U.S.

Here's the problem. By letting it go into the sea, which may have been safer for the populace, although over Montana there's very little population, so the governor said it could be secured, the senator said it could be secured. By letting it go out to sea, it makes it more difficult. Now then, if you wanted to get, you know, if you want to get, you know, kind of conspiratorial, and I don't want to do that, is you do wonder, did we let it go out to sea because we don't want to escalate this? Because one of the things I was going to ask, we'll take calls in a minute here, we are, our European Center for Law and Justice is an accredited NGO at the United Nations. There is the U.N. Security Council, which deals with these kind of incursions, so I don't know if the United States has done that, but we could, and they may have, and just not notified us publicly. Just to put it on record, that we deem this to be a violation of U.N. declarations also. Yeah, and that's, I mean, the Security Council would be, it's a security issue, a national security issue, you know, this balloon flying all across the United States gathering who knows what information, and the fact that it was allowed to go all across the United States before it was shot down, you know, who knows what they have. So I think there could be something that could be filed there. I mean, so you got the whole international angle, someone asked about the ICC, that would not be appropriate, but you got this other aspect, we got a lot of calls coming in, 800-684-3110, let's go ahead and take one.

Wayland, Colorado, online 4, hey Wayland. Hey, thanks guys for taking my call. My concern is, being as weak as this administration is, why should we not assume that they were getting a live feed all the way across the United States for their whole eight days? I would assume that.

I was going to say the same thing, 100%. But I don't know why we wouldn't assume it's pretty easy to get live feeds these days. I think we acknowledged that they were getting live information. It was whether or not the data was going back like every hour or any, that you're talking about too, like the actual data versus like, are you talking about like a video feed? Yeah, that'd be live. If you're talking about, because they were piloting it.

Yes. So we know that they had a live feed. If you're talking about what data they were then taking up, that may have been something that transfers every, you know, because it's so much data.

Three hours, we don't know. But something happened. But they did have a live feed. I mean, they were flying over the U.S. with a live feed because they, how would you pilot it without that? Well, no, I think that, again- It's a drone for all intents and purposes, it's just a balloon drone. We got to also, you know, it's the balloon that was spying okay. It was more than that.

And I think this is where the, you got to understand international diplomacy and international, the way it works internationally. This was a test by the Chinese Communist Party to see if they could fly a balloon over the United States, the entire continental United States, for a week without us taking action. And they found out they could. That's right. And the answer to that is, yes, we can.

Absolutely. We can take a balloon, we can fly it into airspace over the United States, and we can get away with it for a week's period of time and nobody, no consequences. And now they're asserting, Jordan, this, oh, by the way, the Trump administration didn't know this, but we now know that this happened during the Trump administration too. Except I think you're going to hear from Mike Pompeo, who's on our broadcast on our senior council, no it didn't.

And they would know. The Biden, the Pentagon said it happened three times over the Trump administration, but no one who worked for Trump or Trump would have known because they didn't find out until after the Biden administration came in. So the government, the military had it? What are they comparing this to?

Because again, I think that's an apple to orange situation because this you could see from the ground. Correct. The FAA had to get involved. So there's no way to hide that from the previous administration.

They closed down airspace. They have satellites and they have things that are outside of our technical, they're outside of our... About 60,000 feet. Right. Our jurisdiction, technically. Yes.

That's different, but satellites are not hovering 20,000 feet above your nuclear site. No. Let's go ahead and take another call.

1-800-684-3110. Obviously good calls coming in too, I might add. Yeah. Amy's calling from New York.

I'll ride one. Hey, Amy. Amy, you there? Nope.

Doesn't look like you. Okay. So we will... She had a good question though.

And let me read what the question is. She said, what is the exact standard operating procedure for our satellites and balloons? It was above our airlines, but beneath our communication satellites.

That part's true. And international law recognizes about 60,000 feet as your airspace. Over that, it's international.

And once it's international, other things can be on it. Not things that put you in harm's way, but satellites, we have them, they have them. It's 12 miles. Yes, it's 12 miles.

Roughly. One, the fact that they could see it. I mean, apparently people are seeing it floating over. They knew where it was. And it dropped to 30.

And dropped to 30 at one point, right? Yeah, which was well within air traffic. I mean, that's below where jets fly. Yeah, jets flying usually around 42,000. And our military aircraft and all those aircraft, they do fly at that much higher.

I mean, they put... Listen, it's a big risk. Let's grab another phone call here. We'll try to get Stanley in California on Line 6. Stan, welcome to the broadcaster on the air.

Thank you. I was wondering if General Milley had to contact his counterpart, General Lee, in China to get his permission to shoot the town. I don't think they would ask permission, but I can assure you that there were communications going back and forth between the Chinese and the United States. Why is that? Because you don't want it to escalate to something else. So we needed to let them know. We're taking it down. You didn't even have to tell them when you were taking it down. We're taking action on this.

You didn't even have to be specific. But you don't want it to escalate to something else. Right. No, I mean... And these have that risk.

These kind of incidents have that risk. I'll look this up on purpose because 60,000 feet can sound like a lot, but their commercial aircraft has flown at that level before. The Concorde flew at 60,000 feet. So the higher speed jets that have been in use before and are being redeveloped as we speak now, again, that got to... That's the height that they flew at. So the danger that puts in... We know that there's military aircraft flying at that height. That's not a spaceship. That's just a plane, a jet. But the fact is it dropped well below that.

This was unexplainable. Are we so weak as a country that we're willing to be spied on by our top adversary because debris might hurt somebody? That's also a question we have to ask as a country. We are so weak that we allow another superpower to spy on us because shooting it down might cause a civilian injury. Which puts the question to... The Governor of Montana said they could have been done. If you make that as always your calculation, you'll never go to war.

You'll never defend yourself. Well, I think the clear thing here, and this is what we go back to, is that the Chinese were testing... The Chinese Communist Party was testing the United States. That's what this is.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. I think that's what they do on a daily basis is what can we get away with? It's just like a child tests your parents. What can you get away with? And they've realized, hey, we can get away with this. So what's coming next? Who knows? You know, it'd be very interesting, and I may have our team look at this, filing something we can file with the UN Direct, pointing out the violations of international law here.

Because it's pretty interesting. I think we could take a look at that. All right, folks, we've got a great half hour coming up, including Mike Pompeo is going to be joining with us. And they did try to tease out this, oh, this happened under the Trump administration too, but the Trump officials didn't know about it.

Well, the military knew about it, but the Trump officials, the Secretary of State, the President did not know about it. Glad we got Mike on. That'll be a good way to find that out. Folks, support the work of the ACLJ. If you enjoy this broadcast, 1-800-684-3110 to talk to us on air. But to support our work, you just go to ACLJ.org. And whether it's cases, whether it's our work at the United Nations, whatever it might be, or this broadcast itself, it stays on the air because of your support for us. So I want to encourage you to go to ACLJ.org, that's ACLJ.org, and support the ongoing work of the American Center for Law and Justice. It is that critical and that important. Coming up, we'll be taking your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110.

We'll be joined by Mike Pompeo. So we've got a lot of issues to discuss. Again, support our work at the ACLJ.

We really encourage you to do that. ACLJ.org, that's ACLJ.org. We've got three new cases being filed in federal court we'll talk more about later, probably tomorrow, but a lot going on right now.

ACLJ.org, back with more in a moment. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Hey, welcome to Sekulow. We are taking your calls to 1-800-684-3110, talking about the Chinese spy balloon that was ultimately shot down after it traversed the entire continental U.S. and Alaska.

Put that up on the screen again for people watching this. I mean, this is, when you say traversed the entire, I mean the whole thing, coming in from Alaska. Hit part of Canada and then right through the United States, right through the middle of the heart. We know the President was not willing to override his military generals who were too scared to shoot this down over eastern Montana because it might hurt someone. Even though the governor of Montana said it would be no problem. And we've heard from Mike Pompeo, Rick Riddell, and a number of leaders that we didn't have to shoot it down. That there was a way to get it down without shooting it. There was a way to take it down, which I'm sure would be much more complicated, but worthwhile.

So the risk that we're unwilling to take, even inside of our own borders, it might hurt someone, it might be a difficult, more military move. So it's just easier to wait and then just blow it up into the sea. So now we have CNN out on boats off the coast of South Carolina looking for pieces, which I'm sure they will find. Eventually. No, I mean, reporters.

Oh yeah, they'll find pieces of it, yes. All right, we're taking your calls at 1-800-684-3110. Let's go ahead and take Roberta's call from Colorado and we will take your calls at 800-684-3110. Hello.

Yes, you're on the air. All right, thank you. I just wanted to say next time there should not be a next time. The Chinese need to be told there will not be a next time. It will be shot down immediately on site. Well, I think the delay was exactly what the Chinese government was testing us on.

Listen to what President Biden said when asked about this two days ago. On Wednesday when I was briefed on the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible. They decided we got to and damaged anyone on the ground.

They decided that the best time to do that was when we got over water and decided it was within our 12-mile limit. They successfully took it down. You know, they keep calling it a balloon. Why don't we call it a spying device that was flying over the United States at 50,000 feet and he gave the order on Wednesday and they didn't execute that order on Wednesday. And the reason they didn't, they said, was because it was going over areas. It was over Montana, sparsely populated ICBM missile center there of the United States and they let it go.

This is why I'm glad we're doing this broadcast. It is not about the balloon. We could take the balloon down. It's about the Chinese willing to test us. And what they saw was the United States delays in its response. And I'm not blaming the pilot.

I'm blaming the leadership because it's sending a message to the CCP that we're not so strong. We're taking your calls 800-684-3110. Let's take Sean out of Indiana. Hey, Sean. Welcome to Secular. You're on the air. Hey, guys.

Thank you for taking my call and I appreciate what you do. I've had a weird feeling since the beginning of this balloon situation that we weren't really looking at the risk. And to me, I look at this balloon situation as I don't think, and you guys can tell me if I'm wrong, that they're able to get much better data from a balloon than they can their satellites already. So what I was wondering is, is it possible that we just showed the Chinese or even the world how to sneak a nuclear bomb into the US? Our national security is porous and it's porous to not just individuals. I'm willing to take action if it might be a more difficult military maneuver or impact US civilians. When you have things that are coming across the border, you've got to start making decisions like that again. Maybe we've gone through a period of time in our history in the United States we're not used to thinking that we're going to be under attack. But you retrain the populace. But that takes the administration talking about it. Instead, they try to play it down like it's a balloon and there's no big deal. I think, again, one, I think you can get much better data than a satellite. This was so low and satellites move so fast.

They get imagery, but nothing like this hood. Yeah, slices. But this was in your back door. We're taking your calls. Mike Pompeo coming up 1-800-684-3110, 800-684-3110. Support the work of the ACO. I'm going to look at the UN angles on this when we're done with the broadcast today to see if there's something we need to file with the National Security Council. We have the capability of doing that because of the European Center for Law and Justice, our NGO that has access to the UN. So we don't just talk about it here, folks. We take action. Our government may not, but we might.

1-800-684-3110, that's 800-684-3110 and support the work at ACLJ.org. Back with more in a moment. Welcome back to Secular. We're joined now by our Senior Counsel for Global Affairs, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Secretary Pompeo, I want to go to the first issue which is on everyone's mind, which, again, Ambassador Bolton, who I don't love for some various other reasons, but I will say he said it sounds like the Biden administration has a time machine. Because they're accusing this of happening three times while you were serving in the administration, but you didn't know about it. They didn't find out about it until you all were out and the Biden administration came in. Your reaction to that statement? Yeah.

I'll have a look. Speaking for just me, I certainly never knew about it. No one briefed me on a balloon the size of three buses flying over the continental United States for a handful of days.

I think I would have known as CIA Director or as Secretary of State. And we now have Ambassador Bolton, Ambassador Bryan, two National Security Advisors, my former classmate at West Point, Mark Esper, all saying it didn't happen. They now say it did and that they just pieced it together.

I am befuddled by that. And I think they're just trying to tell a wolf tale to cover up what they know was a major failure of their security policy over the last handful of days. Mike, one of the things I'm looking at here is, I mean, a lot of people are focused on the balloon itself and what that meant and what capacities they had.

I want to focus in on the test that the Chinese Communist Party just put the United States through. We let a balloon traverse through the entire continental United States. I mean, it went from coast to coast. We've got the map up on the screen for people that are watching us on TV or other social media platforms.

But for our radio audience, it goes right from Alaska, right down the center of the country, and then ultimately out to the coast. The geopolitical impact of this was, this was a test. That's what I'm concerned about here. And I don't think we passed that test. We failed it. Great, great as F. Absolutely true.

It was, it was a little bit about collection, a little bit about intelligence gathering, and an awful lot about trying to gather intelligence about how will Joe Biden respond to a threat to things that he cares about. If you can't defend from a balloon over Montana, the chance that you're going to help defend Taiwan is very low. And that's what Xi Jinping is testing.

And he has tested repeatedly. I was just, Jay, you'll get, you'll appreciate this. I was just having a meeting with one of my counterparts, a former counterpart of mine when I was Secretary of State. And he said, all of Europe was watching this balloon, saying, oh my gosh, these are the folks that want us to do more and defend ourselves more. This is our friend, our ally, our partner. They are befuddled by the fact that this President allowed this to happen for five days.

And our adversaries surely saw that too, Jay. Well, that's what I'm concerned about. I think the geopolitical impact of this is significant. And that is what's getting overlooked in the fact that we took the balloon down and we're getting some information, Jordan. People are wondering, Secretary Pompeo, what will they try next to see what, you know, what does it take for the U.S. to actually take a more aggressive action than just waiting? I mean, so it sets this precedent that we don't have any red lines.

I think that's right. You know, I wrote about this a lot. We had red lines. We didn't draw all that many red lines in the Trump administration.

But when we did, we were serious about enforcing them. And that sent a message even more broadly. This is what you were getting to, I think, Jay. Not only did Xi Jinping realize, okay, I can push this far.

I can drive the bayonet this far before it's going to hit steel. I promise you, Vladimir Putin is watching it. Chairman Kim, other bad actors, Taliban, the Ayatollah, these folks are all watching an administration that can be pushed off of defending its own sovereignty from a balloon.

That has second and third order implications that I don't know that we can even fully appreciate. And if you add in all the other things China has done, right, stealing our stuff through TikTok and WeChat, continue to arm the islands in the Pacific, meeting no resistance from the Biden administration, we have two years of real challenges of making sure that we don't permit this continued weakness to be even more provocative. One of the things that you've been very concerned with, and we have too at the ACLJ, that has been Chinese influence on American higher education, which you have an article up at ACLJ.org saying it's a threat to all Americans.

It really is. You have these Confucius centers, which are now getting attention. But the Chinese Communist Party has a multiple strategy approach in dealing with impacting and influencing the United States right even to the college level.

That's right. Certainly in our elementary and high schools, but also at the universities, there's two main thrusts, Jay. The first is, you know, they spend an enormous amount of money doing research.

We saw this at the Penn Biden Center, right? Chinese money going to a former vice President of the United States and that institution. That money allows them to do research and conduct influence operations inside those universities. I don't think there's a single university, Jay, that isn't dependent on Chinese money to keep their engineering labs open and their research institutions fully functioning.

And then second, we have 360,000 or so Chinese students studying here in the United States of America. They're not all spies. They're not out here for indecent missions, but the Chinese Communist Party is absolutely using them as tools of Chinese influence propaganda and trying to figure out how it is they can undermine our way of life. They talk about an America being in decline. They're not just observers.

They are working to make that happen. Which brings up this question I want to go back to, and I think it'd be important for our audience to understand. So as Secretary of State, as the director of the CIA, in a situation like this develops, balloon coming in from the Chinese government over the United States, what actually happens inside government? Oh, assuming everything's working right, the information would have flowed immediately to the most senior leaders for something of this scale and this size and this magnitude. We would have all either gathered in person, or if we were traveling, we'd have been on the phone within a handful of hours sorting through option sets that would have been delivered by the Department of Defense and then reviewed at the State Department and elsewhere to say, what's the best course of action? And we would have immediately taken an option set to the President.

And I'm convinced in this particular option set, I know what he would have done, and he would have never had this happen. Let me ask you this question, too, because the President's giving his State of the Union tomorrow. The question's going to be, and you've been to him, I've been to him, it's going to be, does he even address this Chinese threat, or does he take a victory lap that's saying, well, we knocked it down outside of Hilton Head? It's going to be very interesting. Does he send a warning to China in his messaging tomorrow, or does he ignore this? Well, I hope he does, but, Jay, there's nothing in evidence that would suggest that's what he's going to do. Whenever he talks about China, he says, we've got to find places to cooperate.

Yeah, they're not perfect, but, boy, we've got to all figure out how to get along. It's kind of a kumbaya deal. I'm sure he won't admit that he screwed this up. He'll claim he'll do a victory dance if he mentions the balloon and all, but it's like when a spy came in and stole all your stuff, and then you wrapped him up after all the damage was done.

One should never claim such a victory. I want to take Kim's call from Maryland, Mr. Secretary, because I think it's really, it's a great question. Kim, go ahead, you're on the air.

Hi, thank you for taking my call, Jay. Under another administration, would this balloon act be considered an act of war? So great question there from Kim, Mike, as you would know because you were the Secretary of State and the Director of Intelligence, the Director of the CIA under the previous administration. Is it an act of war? Now, there's a legal definition to an act of war, and it does ramp things up, but how would you view this in the threat matrix? Kim's question is a really good one, and a thousand lawyers can give you a thousand answers to whether it be a legal act of war, but make no mistake about it. They intentionally knowingly violated American sovereignty with the intention to damage the United States of America. That is a hostile action, for sure, and requires a response, a defensive response, one we should have taken over the Aleutian Islands, not over the Atlantic, but more than that. And I hope President Biden will lay that out tomorrow. I hope he'll describe, these are the costs we're going to impose on the Chinese Communist Party if they continue these kinds of behaviors.

It is unacceptable just to say, gosh, we caught them after they stole our stuff, and aren't we great. That will only encourage more Chinese activity just like that. Yeah, so Kim, if you're still listening, let me tell you what this is. This would be deemed at a minimum an act of provocation.

That doesn't mean it's an act of war, it's an act of provocation, and those classifications mean something for international laws of armed conflict. We have lawyers that deal with that, and as the Secretary said, you could get a hundred lawyers, give me a different rationale and arguments, but what we do know is this was an act against the United States that was strategic in the Chinese Communist Party's mind. Mr. Secretary, as always, we appreciate you being part of the team and appreciate your insight.

Thanks for being with us. Yeah, check out ACLJ.org, see Secretary Pompeo's new piece, The Chinese Influence on American Higher Education is a Threat to All Americans. I mean, just that title alone, that he said every university that believes its engineering program would be able to exist without Chinese money right now. It's pretty scary. Let's go back, we'll take your phone calls when we come back for the break at 1-800-684-3110, full bank of calls. Yeah, let me say this also, I want you to get the scope and nature of the ACLJ, so we don't just come up with like on the top of our head, it's an act of provocation. I mean, Jordan and I have been to the International Criminal Court in The Hague litigating cases.

I mean, we've actually done it. We've been at the UN, at the General Assembly, at subcommittees dealing with these issues, representing our interests, you, the American people's interests. It's your American Center for Law and Justice that's front and center on so much of this. We're going to go take a break. When we come back, we'll take more of your calls.

We're going to look at the economic consequences of all this. We will take more calls at 800-684-3110, but let me encourage you to do something today, if you haven't done so already, and that is support the work of the ACLJ. Go to ACLJ.org and say I want to be part of the team. Just fill out the form, make a donation, and you become a member of the ACLJ.

And we want to encourage you to join with hundreds of thousands of other people who have done just that. And that's how you can support our own going work at the ACLJ. And you can also, at ACLJ.org, sign up for all of our news alerts, email alerts, and our social media platforms. And Jordan, we are on about every one of them.

Yeah, that's right. So, again, we encourage you to go to ACLJ.org if you can't support the work of the ACLJ. Financially, check out, whether it's the long form of the shows like Sekulow that are available on Grubble, YouTube, on Facebook, wherever you want to watch, or through a podcast, or through terrestrial radio, it's all there for you each day.

And go to ACLJ.org to see all the work that we're doing at the American Center for Law and Justice. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back to Sekulow.

Take your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. So the State of the Union is also tomorrow night, so it's happening at a unique time because, as Secretary Pompeo says, the President can try to, you know, just say, well, we blew it up, we took it down, and try and seize on the fact that most people don't go into the news, they're not following things very closely. But this one kind of broke through just regular news, and it became like, who could see the balloon?

And people taking pictures of it over their house. And so I think because of the amount of time, it's not going to be something he could just assume, well, people don't really care about this. So I'll just say, we did awesome because we blew it up. Yeah, and there's no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party was testing the United States militarily, no question about that. The question is, because they're multifaceted in their approach to all this, and Professor Hutchinson's joining us, is are they testing us economically, too? Because the fact is, here's why, even though I think that was an act of provocation, which has international law implications, an act of provocation is an international law doctrine that allows for particular responses. The question is, because of our economic ties to China are so deep, and our reliance on China is so deep, are they engaging also into seeing how far we'll push it because, hey, we're in a military, it certainly was testing our military, but it tests the economic relations as well.

I think you're precisely correct. So Biden is massively unprepared for his job, both in terms of economic affairs, but also in terms of national security. And he continues to demonstrate that day after day. So if you look at his recent history from Afghanistan to the southern border to inflation, Biden continues to remind the American people that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Keep in mind, he's also sending a message to the Chinese government. So President Biden refuses, for instance, to come up with, for lack of a better term, a Marshall Plan, so that we could demonstrate more and more economic independence from China.

Instead, we continue to be dependent on China for pharmaceuticals and for other important items. So I think at the end of the day, the American people increasingly are reaching one conclusion that President Biden is indeed unprepared for his job. I think Harry's got it exactly correct. But the problem is with our response, we're getting great questions on this, is it's a military test, too. It's an economic test. It's a leadership test.

It's all the above. We've got a lot of calls coming in at 800-684-3110. A lot of you watching on social media, share it with your friends. I'm sure a lot of you listening on radio, too. Let's go ahead and take a call. Yeah, let's go to Tim at North Carolina Online One. Hey, Tim.

Hey, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my call. At the risk of sounding like I'm out of my mind, my question is, knowing the implications to the Biden administration, based on what little we know about the classified documents, is this all a diversion tactic? What's happening to these documents while we've been watching a balloon float over our country for the last week?

Well, let me tell you what it did do, Tim. It took an issue off the news coverage, and that was Hunter Biden's laptop, and that admission that it was his laptop by his lawyers, and all of a sudden that was gone. No one was talking about that because everybody was talking about the surveillance balloon. I'd still say, though, a number two issue in the news right now is that, like, Pitts' house is about to be searched. Yeah, so for the whole way they're doing this, we're announcing we're about to search it. It's very bizarre. To me, it's very, very odd that that is the approach that it's taking right now.

It still hasn't happened since last week. I mean, what are they waiting for? Now, maybe Mike's lawyers are negotiating it out. They could be.

I don't blame them. But, you know, you do wonder about all this. Let me ask another economics question, then we'll take a call.

Harry, are, for instance, medicine, just antibiotics, Tylenol, I shouldn't just list the particular brands, but pain relievers, over-the-counter medicines, so much of it comes from China. Absolutely. They could just say, you know what, okay, we could use economics as a form of warfare.

Absolutely. So the United States has exposed itself over the last 20 to 30 years to economic blackmail. We are dependent on China and, to a lesser extent, India for many of our drugs, our semiconductors, our chips, you name it. And that basically underscores President Trump's initiatives. He wanted to put American interests first. But if you look at the composition of the United States House and Senate, those senators and members of the House, they are not terribly interested in putting America first.

And so I think what we need in 2024 is a candidate who will put forth an initiative and explain to the American people why it is indeed imperative that we regain our economic independence. And lastly, let me point out, what did Biden do essentially on the first day in office? He gave up U.S. energy independence.

He shut down the Keystone Pipeline. And so, again, this exposes us to economic blackmail, which we may not necessarily be able to recover from in the short run. Let's go ahead and take another call, Jordan. Yeah, let's go to Sienna at Maryland, Odd Light 2. Hey, Sienna.

Hi, thank you. I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, this is not just a test for our leaders. This is a test to watch what the American people, how much will we put up with? We let this, I'm sorry, I'm going to say it, fake election go through. I don't believe, you know, I'm not relitigating the election. So that is, there's about to be another election.

So, you know, relitigating the election is meaningless. I do think it's ironic that the administration starts saying, well, this happened under the Trump administration. They just didn't know what happened.

So when it went to the, it went to the, it went to the deep state bureaucrats who don't tell the secretary of state this has happened. But let me play what Gordon Chang said. He was on, I think it was Fox News or one of the broadcasts. He was an expert on China.

Take a listen. Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler was doing was saying, you don't control your own airspace. And what he was also saying to the rest of the world is that the United States is incapable of defending itself. That's exactly the problem.

That's what all this is. So relitigating an election, meaningless, pontificating about what we could have, should have. The fact is it showed we failed this test. I think when Mike Pompeo said we got an F, we got an F. Yeah.

I don't think there's anything about it. It shows that we're weak. I think we, it's not about the tech. We obviously have the military equipment to shoot down a huge balloon. It's not about the balloon. It's not about the balloon at all. It's not about the tech.

It's about your decisiveness, your willingness to take risk. Yeah. We had, we had no risk allocated here. They were too afraid to shoot it down over Eastern Montana.

I know. When people from Montana said, shoot it down over our state. They were willing to take the risk there.

The governor was willing to take the risk. The military was not. We have a military and when they don't take risk, they end up getting themselves killed.

Well, that's the thing I was going to say. It's a more dangerous spot. We say the thing about the economics, but the truth is the Chinese are dependent upon our economic trade with them as well. Absolutely. You take the US out of it. It hurts them. It bankrupt their government.

Absolutely. But the Chinese are also banking on their lobbying power in Washington DC, which will basically prevent the United States from reacting. So part of the issue that we have to think about is whether we have the will to act as opposed to simply talking about it.

I'll tell you one thing you got out of this broadcast. A lot of information you're not getting elsewhere. That's a good reason to support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. We've got our experts, whether it's at the UN, whether it's here, whatever it might be. Globally, Mike Pompeo is on our team. The former director of the CIA and the former secretary of state. So is Rick Connell, the former director of national intelligence.

That happens because of you. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. That's ACLJ.org.