WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden plans to deliver his most extensive public comments yet as early as Thursday on unidentified objects the US military has been shooting down, three people familiar with the matter said.
Biden will explain how he has tasked his administration with setting parameters for how to deal with airborne balloons and other detected objects in the future.
The exact timing of Biden’s comments has not been established. The president will undergo a physical on Thursday that could last several hours.
With federal investigators analyzing the remains and many questions still unanswered, Biden has been sparing in his comments.
White House officials have been privately discussing whether he should deliver a speech about the military’s downing of a Chinese spy balloon and three other as-yet-unidentified objects, NBC News reported Tuesday.
Biden has faced increasing pressure to speak up. Amid an information vacuum, conspiracy theories have been surfacing, forcing White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to announce in a daily briefing that she could definitely tell which objects were downed. they were not alien spaceships.
«It was important for us to say that from here, because we’ve been hearing a lot about it,» he said this week.
Lawmakers who have received private briefings on the air objects have said they want to hear directly from Biden on whether the United States is under threat.
NBC News first reported on the existence of the Chinese spy balloon on February 2.
Dennis DeConcini, an Arizona Democrat who served with Biden in the Senate, said: “In today’s world, you can’t put things off like this. It might have made people feel more at ease that you’re in the know” if he had said, “I’m going to share as much as I can as soon as I can”.
Biden is expected to discuss how he wants the administration to draw up protocols for deciding whether to shoot down unknown objects floating overhead or instead let them pass if they are benign and pose no threat to civilian aircraft.
John Bolton, the Trump administration’s national security adviser, said in an interview that when Biden speaks, he «needs to tell not just the truth, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth.»