CLAIM: President Joe Biden told Congress during his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday that his administration’s response to an invading Chinese surveillance balloon proved “we will act to protect our country – and we did.”
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. Biden approved shooting down the balloon – an unmanned vessel apparently equipped with advanced surveillance technology that China claimed was for exclusively “meteorological” purposes – on Saturday, but only after allowing it to cross nearly the entire country.
Late in his speech on Tuesday, Biden addressed the growing national security threat that the Communist Party of China represents to America. China regularly engages in a variety of espionage activities – from intellectual property theft to infiltration of American academia and the military. Biden claimed that he had stopped the unchecked rise of China and decline of the United States.
“Before I came to office, the story was about how the…
