Biden speaks on downed Chinese balloon and unidentified objects – live

From 55m ago

Biden to speak about Chinese spy balloons

Martin Pengelly

An update from the White House: at 2pm, Joe Biden will deliver remarks about the Chinese spy balloons/UFOs shot down over the US – or as the White House statement puts it, “the United States’ response to recent aerial objects”.

Republicans (and, to be fair, Democrats) have been pressuring the administration to say more.

In the meanwhile, here’s what China said about US balloons earlier today:

And here, in the interests of balance and/or reading about UFOs, is what the head of national investigations for the British UFO Research Association had to say this morning:

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Joe Biden says the intelligence services haven’t determined the purpose of the three objects American planes shot down in recent days, but there’s no sign they were used for surveillance or connected to China.

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“Our intelligence community is still assessing all three incidences. They’re reporting to me daily and will continue the urgent efforts to do so, and I will communicate that to the Congress,” Biden said in an address from the White House.

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“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program, or they were surveillance vehicles from other any other country. The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

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An update from the White House: at 2pm, Joe Biden will deliver remarks about the Chinese spy balloons/UFOs shot down over the US – or as the White House statement puts it, “the United States’ response to recent aerial objects”.

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Republicans (and, to be fair, Democrats) have been pressuring the administration to say more.

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In the meanwhile, here’s what China said about US balloons earlier today:

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And here, in the interests of balance and/or reading about UFOs, is what the head of national investigations for the British UFO Research Association had to say this morning:

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We’ve finally been able to see part of the Georgia special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign, which indicated jurors were worried about being lied to, but which did not reveal if they think the former president or his allies committed crimes. It’s now up to Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis to answer that question, since she’s using the report to determine her next steps as she uncovers details of the former president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

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Here’s what else has happened today so far:

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• Nikki Haley thinks Trump could pass one of the “mental competency tests” she wants to force politicians older than 75 to take.

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• Democrats are beginning to worry that Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election.

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• A bill to prevent police from using search warrants to access data from menstrual tracking apps failed in Virginia’s legislature, apparently due to interference from Republican governor Glenn Youngkin.

\n

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The special grand jury empaneled in the Georgia’s Fulton county worried that at least one of the 75 witnesses it heard from may have lied under oath, according to portions of their report released today.

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They also determined “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election,” the jurors wrote in the report’s introduction, which was released along with its conclusion and a brief chapter outlining the perjury concerns.

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The introduction outlines how the grand jurors were selected in May 2022 and began hearing testimony and reviewing physical and digital evidence at the start of the following month before concluding in December. The conclusion deals mostly with formalities, while the report’s eighth chapter consists of two sentences in which the jurors worry over the veracity of some of the testimony they heard.

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“A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it. The Grand Jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” the chapter reads.

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A portion of the special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign in Georgia has been released:

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🚨BREAKING: A Georgia judge has released parts of a Fulton County special purpose grand jury's final report examining efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Here's the first few pages⬇️: pic.twitter.com/AZTRvMbUEr

&mdash; Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 16, 2023

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The parts released today include the introduction, conclusion, and Section VIII, in which the grand jurors express concerns that witnesses lied under oath during their testimony. Here's the rest of the released portions: pic.twitter.com/0oBrubdLiO

&mdash; Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 16, 2023

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We’re reading the document now, and will let you know what it says.

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Good morning, US politics blog readers. Today, we may get a sense of which direction one of the many investigations into Donald Trump is heading, when parts of a special grand jury’s report into his attempt to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in Georgia are made public. A judge earlier this week ordered the release of the document’s introduction, conclusion and a chapter on jurors’ concerns that some witnesses were lying, while withholding the rest, at least for now. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Georgia’s Atlanta-area Fulton county, is expected to use the report to determine whether to bring charges in the investigations – and against who. This blog will dig into the document as soon as it’s released.

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Here’s what else is going on:

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• Joe Biden may as soon as today give a public address about the Chinese spy balloon and three UFOs shot down by American jets over North America, the Washington Post reports, in a response to pressure from lawmakers who want more transparency on the unusual events.

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• Barbara Lee, a progressive House Democrat known for her anti-war bona fides, has filed the paperwork to compete in the California Senate race, according to Politico.

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• Special counsel Jack Smith wants to hear from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff for his final days in the White House, CNN reports.

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Key events

Martin Pengelly

Some improving reading – alas, not about inflation – while we await Joe Biden’s remarks on balloons and UFOs. From our Washington bureau, Joan E Greve interviews Ro Khanna, the California progressive congressman, about the direction of Biden’s Democratic party…

For Ro Khanna, the best part of Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last Tuesday came within the first 10 minutes. Touting the creation of 800,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office, the president boasted that the revitalization of America’s middle class is already under way:

For decades, the middle class has been hollowed out … Too many good-paying manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Factories closed down. Now, thanks to what you’ve all done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”

Khanna, from California, interpreted the remark as somewhat of a vindication for his political philosophy. Like the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who appointed Khanna co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign, the congressman has long argued for a rebalancing of trade relationships.

By investing in US industry and ensuring fair pay and benefits for all workers, Khanna believes, Democrats can champion what he calls “a new economic patriotism”.

“I think [Biden’s] speech is a nod in that direction,” Khanna told the Guardian. “You’re having now the kind of moderate wing affirm the direction that Sanders and I want to take the party.”

Read on…

Biden to speak about Chinese spy balloons

Martin Pengelly

An update from the White House: at 2pm, Joe Biden will deliver remarks about the Chinese spy balloons/UFOs shot down over the US – or as the White House statement puts it, “the United States’ response to recent aerial objects”.

Republicans (and, to be fair, Democrats) have been pressuring the administration to say more.

In the meanwhile, here’s what China said about US balloons earlier today:

And here, in the interests of balance and/or reading about UFOs, is what the head of national investigations for the British UFO Research Association had to say this morning:

Martin Pengelly

Good news for Donald Trump in a new poll out today, from Quinnipiac University (#GoBobcats) in Connecticut.

The survey puts the former president six points ahead of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, in a notional 14-candidate field for the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump got 42% support and DeSantis 36%. DeSantis has not declared his candidacy but is widely expected to do so. The only Republican other than Trump to have thrown their hat into the ring, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, got 5% support in the Quinnipiac poll – in this case not quite enough to suggest DeSantis would beat Trump without her in the race.

But other candidates whose greatest selling point might be simply not being Trump – and therefore not being in legal jeopardy over election subversion, hush money payments, tax affairs, the retention of classified records and an allegation of rape – did attract small measures of support, pointing to the possibility that a divided field might again hand Trump the nomination without requiring him to win a majority, as was the case in 2016.

To wit: the former vice-president Mike Pence got 4% support and so did the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

No one else – Ted Cruz (who says he isn’t running), Chris Christie, even the anti-Trump Liz Cheney – managed to attract more than 2% support.

The poll also asked respondents to choose between a field of four: Trump, DeSantis, Haley and Pence. In that contest, Trump won 43%-41%, with 6% for Haley and 4% for Pence.

In nominal general election match-ups, Joe Biden beat Trump 48%-46% but lost 47%-46% to DeSantis.

Here, meanwhile, is what Sarah Palin thinks of DeSantis and why governors should stay governors, which she famously didn’t:

Martin Pengelly

Jonathan Martin of Politico is out with a fascinating look at Democrats’ current chief dilemma: the nagging feeling Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election in 2024 (he’s 80 now and would be 82 if sworn in for a second term), versus the competing sense they don’t want anyone else to run. Not, particularly, Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Citing an unnamed senator, Martin writes that “the party ha[s] to devise ‘an alignment of interest’ with the president to get him off the ‘narcotic’ of the office”.

An unnamed governor, Martin reports, “mused about just how little campaigning Biden would be able to do”.

A House member “after saying that, of course, Democrats should renominate the president told me to turn off my phone and then demanded to know who else was out there and said Harris wasn’t an option”.

Another lawmaker, who Martin says was his “favourite” source for the story, “recalled speaking to Jill Biden and, hoping to plant a seed about a one-term declaration of victory, told her how her husband should be celebrated for saving democracy. When I asked if I could use any of that on the record, the lawmaker shot back: ‘Absolutely not.’”

In sum, Martin reports that Democrats think Biden can beat Donald Trump again, if Trump is the Republican candidate, but they do not have such confidence against other candidates – or, particularly, in Harris. The politics of saying that, however, are tricky:

… To express their concerns about a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent touches, to put it mildly, on highly sensitive matters.

More to the point, Democrats have seen what happens when anyone in their party openly criticises Harris – they’re accused by activists and social-media critics of showing, at best, racial and gender insensitivity. This doesn’t stifle concerns about her prospects, of course, it just pushes them further underground or into the shadows of background quotes.

Such as this, from a House Democrat: “The Democrats who will need to speak out on her are from the Congressional Black Caucus, no white member is going to do it.”

Members of the CBC, however, are either supportive of Harris or no more willing to give public voice to their unease with the vice president than the above lawmaker.

Martin’s piece is a very good read, and it is here.

The Guardian