The Pentagon will give the full Senate a briefing on the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday after traversing the continental United States, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on Sunday. 

The Gang of Eight, which consists of eight Republican and Democrat leaders from both chambers of congress, will be briefed as soon as Tuesday. 

The Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment will conduct the briefing for the full Senate on Feb. 15. 

‘The briefing involves where we stand with respect to China on everything from surveillance capabilities to research and development, to advanced weapons systems and other critical platforms,’ Sen. Schumer said at a press conference on Sunday. 

‘It will determine which side, China or the United States, has the upper hand in toe-to-toe conflicts, both economic and geo-military.’

An F-22 fighter jet fired a missile at the balloon when it was several nautical miles off the Carolina coast on Saturday afternoon. It had first entered U.S. airspace north of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28 and was spotted on Wednesday above Montana, which has fields of nuclear missile silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base. 

Republicans have pilloried President Biden for waiting several days until the balloon was over the ocean to shoot it down. 

‘I think more damaging than any surveillance is assessing our response,’ Sen. Rand Paul, R-K.Y., told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’ 

‘Since we’ve entered into a nuclear age, there are responses that have to occur in seconds to minutes, and the fact that this administration would dither for days over a balloon I think gives pause to us about how well we’re protected and whether or not they have the ability to make decisions that would have to be made in seconds or minutes.’

Schumer hit back at that criticism on Sunday, accusing Republicans of ‘playing politics with U.S. intelligence.’

‘We sent a clear message to China that this is not acceptable. We protected civilians. We gained more intelligence while protecting our own sensitive information,’ Schumer said. ‘The bottom line here is that shooting down this surveillance balloon over water wasn’t just the safest option, but it was the one that maximized our intelligence payload.’

President Biden said that he wanted to shoot the balloon down on Wednesday, but intelligence officials wanted to wait until it was safe to do so. 

This may not have been the first time that China attempted to spy on the U.S. with a balloon. A senior administration official told Fox News Digital on Sunday that U.S. intelligence assesses that Chinese surveillance balloons ‘transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.’

Former President Trump and national security officials from his administration, meanwhile, denied that any balloons were detected over the U.S. while he was in office. 

‘This never happened. It would have never happened,’ Trump told Fox News Digital on Sunday.

‘It never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately.’ 

Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report. 

Information suggesting that Chinese spy balloons traveled over the continental United States during the Trump administration was ‘discovered after’ former President Donald Trump left office, a senior administration official told Fox News.

A defense official on Saturday said Chinese spy balloons briefly traveled over the United States at least three times during the Trump administration.

Trump and a number of his top national security and defense officials refuted the claim, telling Fox News Digital that it ‘never happened.’

But on Sunday, a senior administration official told Fox News Digital that ‘U.S. intelligence, not the Biden administration’ assesses that ‘PRC (People’s Republic of China) government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.’

The official told Fox News that ‘this information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left.’

‘They went undetected,’ the official told Fox News Digital.

The official explained that Chinese surveillance balloons are ‘part of a larger pattern.’

‘These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries,’ the official explained, adding that these activities are ‘often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army.’

The official said that over the past several years, Chinese balloons have been spotted over countries across five continents, including in East Asia, South Asia and Europe.

‘Two things can be true at once: this happened, and it wasn’t detected,’ the official told Fox News Digital.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials told Fox News on Sunday that a Chinese spy balloon crashed into the Pacific off the coast of Hawaii four months ago. Those officials said that at least one Chinese spy balloon flew over portions of Texas and Florida during the Trump administration.

Environmental groups that have led litigation targeting the lobster fishing industry have been heavily funded by various liberal dark money groups that don’t disclose their individual donors, a Fox News Digital review of tax filings found. 

The organizations — the Center For Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and Defenders Of Wildlife — first filed a joint federal lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in 2018, arguing a rule issued by the agency years earlier failed to properly protect the endangered North Atlantic right whales from lobster fishing equipment. In April 2020, a federal judge ruled in favor of the groups, ordering the NMFS to issue tighter restrictions.

‘Right whales have been getting tangled up and killed in lobster gear for far too long,’ Kristen Monsell, the oceans program litigation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said at the time. ‘This decision sends a clear signal that federal officials must protect these desperately endangered animals from more painful and deadly entanglements before it’s too late.’

As a result of the decision, the Biden administration moved forward with new regulations on lobster fishing equipment in May 2021. The coalition of environmental groups then filed another lawsuit challenging the new rule and, in July 2022, again received a favorable judgment from a federal court. CLF senior attorney Arica Fuller applauded the ruling, saying it made clear that ‘fishery managers must do more to protect’ right whales.

However, as a result of the litigation and tighter rules, Maine lawmakers and business leaders have argued that thousands of lobster fishing jobs are at risk. The updated NMFS restrictions stated that fixed gear fisheries like the Maine lobster fishery must reduce their risk to whales by a staggering 98%. The first restrictions were rolled out in May and more restrictions are planned for December 2024 and 2030.

‘Friendship, Maine, is the name of the town that I grew up in and that I live in now and where all the previous generations in my family fished and operated from,’ Dustin Delano, a fourth-generation lobsterman, told FOX Business in December. ‘Basically, the lobster industry is the backbone — that’s what everything was built around and that’s pretty much the only option we have here. Without it, I don’t think there would be much left.’

Overall, Maine’s lobster industry — which by state law is made up entirely of small business operators — provides the U.S. with about 90% of the nation’s lobster supply, making the industry a top economic driver in the state, and boosting other related industries as well. In 2021, Maine’s lobster fishery generated $724.9 million of revenue, the largest amount in state history.

The three groups that have led litigation pushing for greater restrictions on the industry have a long history accepting funding from left-wing groups with unknown wealthy donors, according to a Fox News Digital review of tax filings.

For example, the Center For Biological Diversity has received millions of dollars from left-wing dark money groups including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Patagonia Fund and Pew Charitable Trusts. The center has been the recipient of grants worth nearly $8 million from the Sandler Foundation, $1 million from the Wilburforce Foundation, $850,000 from Environment Now and another $815,000 from the Frankel Family Foundation, according to Influence Watch.

One of the Center for Biological Diversity’s earliest benefactors was the Wyss Foundation, an organization founded by liberal Swiss billionaire donor Hansjorg Wyss. The foundation has wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to the group and Wyss has pledged $10 million to it, The New York Times reported.

Over the last decade alone, the group’s annual revenue, which is mainy comprised of grants and contributions, has surged more than 300% to $27.3 million.

The CLF, meanwhile, has been awarded grants from the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Walton Family Foundation and dozens of other foundations. The Boston-based group has also accepted money from businesses and other organizations including Facebook, the Schwab Charitable Fund and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Foundation.

In 2017, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave the CLF $4.3 million.

And the Defenders Of Wildlife has received funding from the Wyss Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. In 2018, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation gave the group a $4 Million grant.

In addition, Defenders of Wildlife received $1.3 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which earmarked the grants for projects protected endangered species and pushing a moratorium on offshore fossil fuel drilling. 

The Center for Biological Diversity, CLF and Defenders of Wildlife didn’t respond to requests for comment.

All eyes are on China and President Biden’s handling of the spy balloon from the Communist state that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina ahead of his State of the Union speech Tuesday.

Republicans are voicing concerns that the administration has ignored or downplayed the growing threat of the Chinese Communist Party after a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to drift across the continental U.S. for several days before being taken down by the U.S. military.

The president only mentioned China three times during his last address on March 1, arguing that his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ‘put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st century that we face with the rest of the world, particularly China.’

‘But, folks, to compete for the jobs of the future, we also need to level the playing field with China and other competitors,’ he said at the time. ‘That’s why it’s so important to pass the bipartisan Innovation Act sitting in Congress that will make record investments in emerging technologies and American manufacturing. We used to invest almost 2% of our GDP in research and development.  We don’t now. Can’t — China is.’

News commentators have speculated that the president won’t mention the balloon incident, which many have criticized as a blunder, at all during his speech Tuesday evening. Whether he takes a tougher stance against China and Chinese President Xi Jinping, however, remains to be seen.

The Biden administration first announced on Thursday that it had been tracking the Chinese ballon after it first entered U.S. airspace in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands five days earlier.

Republicans have theorized that the Biden administration declined to tell the American public about the balloon’s existence sooner because they didn’t want it to interfere with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing. Some critics have suggested the administration wouldn’t haven mentioned it at all if the balloon hadn’t been spotted by civilians floating over Billings, Montana.

Blinken’s trip ended up being canceled anyway, while Republicans hammered Biden for failing to shoot down the balloon earlier.

The White House said that Biden followed the advice of the Pentagon and top military leaders not to shoot the craft down over the U.S. in case it caused civilian casualties and other collateral damage.

On Sunday, U.S. officials revealed that another Chinese spy balloon crashed into the Pacific off the coast of Hawaii four months ago, and at least one Chinese spy balloon flew over portions of Texas and Florida during the Trump administration, despite the former president’s insistence it never happened.

Former President Trump and a number of his top national security and defense officials pushed back against Biden admin claims that Chinese surveillance balloons briefly transited the continental United States during the Trump administration in statements to Fox News Digital.

Former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton told Fox News Digital that he never heard of anything like this under his tenure.

‘I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018,’ Bolton said. ‘I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.’

Robert O’Brien, who served as White House national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, told Fox News Digital that he had no knowledge of anything like this occurring.

‘Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue,’ O’Brien said, telling Fox News Digital that his team, which included Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser, and Allison Hooker, who served as senior adviser to Asia, also were not briefed on these activities.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed reporting.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie traded barbs with former President Donald Trump on Sunday after the former president called him ‘sloppy’ and a ‘failed’ governor. 

‘I’m the target of Donald Trump’s new tantrum,’ Christie wrote on Twitter. ‘None of his lies about me today bothered him when he asked me to prep him for every general election debate or offered me 3 different cabinet posts.’

‘He’s the only man to lose to Biden outside Delaware,’ he added. ‘That loss to Joe still stings.’

Christie’s tweet was in response to a post by Trump on his social media website, Truth Social, that slammed the former Republican governor’s failed 2016 presidential bid as a ‘complete disaster.’

”Sloppy’ Chris Christie, the failed former Governor of New Jersey, spent almost his entire last year in office campaigning in New Hampshire for the Republican Nomination for President,’ Trump said. 

‘Much like his term in office, where he left with an Approval Rating of just 9%, his Presidential campaign was a complete disaster,’ he continued. ‘He endorsed me the following day, later recommended Chris Wray for the FBI (how did that work out?), went down in flames, and then was SALVAGED by ABC FAKE NEWS. I never wanted him!’

Trump’s post came after Christie indicated earlier Sunday that he didn’t believe the former president couldn’t beat Biden in a 2024 presidential rematch.

‘I don’t think so,’ Christie responded when asked on ABC’s ‘This Week’ by co-anchor Jonathan Karl whether Trump could defeat Biden.

So far, Trump is the only candidate to formally announce his 2024 presidential bid, as Biden is expected to announce sometime after his State of the Union address Tuesday.

The Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the U.S. likely was able to send sensitive data to the Chinese Communist Party before it was shot down by the U.S. military Saturday, foreign policy experts told Fox News Digital.

Military officials decided to take out the balloon exactly one week after they first discovered it in Alaska. However, President Biden was not made aware of the balloon until Tuesday, when it was over Montana. Local news broke the story of its existence on Thursday. 

The Pentagon said Thursday it ‘acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information’ from the balloon. But geopolitical experts said there is little reason to believe those efforts were successful, as the balloon almost certainly transferred surveillance data over to China as it flew over several military bases.

Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space, said he believes China successfully gathered U.S. military and technological information through its spy balloon.

‘With all due respect to the Pentagon I think that’s B.S. — they’re saying that to protect their ego and image,’ Weichert told Fox News Digital. ‘This was a long-ranged surveillance mission prompted partly by comments from the Pentagon about the possibility of going to war.’

Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, said it is all but confirmed China’s mission was successful. The most scandalous aspect, he said, was that Biden was not briefed on the balloon until days after it was discovered by his military. 

‘If President Biden was not informed as he claims, then he has cause to dismiss the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff,’ Chang told Fox News Digital. ‘This failure could have grave consequences for the United States.’

The Pentagon said Saturday that three similar spy balloons from China flew over the U.S. under the Trump administration — a claim disputed by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo. A senior administration official told Fox News that the existence of the Chinese spy balloons over U.S. territory amid the Trump administration was not discovered until the Biden administration took over.

Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer specializing in foreign aerospace, said there is a ‘high probability that the Chinese government infiltrated sensitive US data’ through its spy balloon.

‘This brazen intelligence operation mounted by Beijing, targeting the US homeland, almost certainly enabled the Chinese military to glean critical insights into the Biden Administration’s policy and posture towards China, and President Biden’s ‘red lines,’ when it comes to foreign aerospace assets, breaching of US sovereign airspace,’ Koffler told Fox News Digital. ‘These insights are very useful for China in developing deterrence strategies for dissuading the United States from intervening in China’s future aggressive operations against Taiwan.’

The Pentagon said it waited to destroy the Chinese balloon over concerns the debris could harm civilians and destroy property. Weichert said there may be more at play, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was set to visit China on an official trip this week before it was suspended after media backlash over the balloon, leading to a public debacle that ‘made us look weak.’

‘This was a political decision — they didn’t want to upset China before the event,’ Weichert told Fox News Digital. ‘Biden is willing to sell out our national security to get a piece of paper with China on global warming.’

The U.S. is considering a plan to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon once it crosses over the Atlantic Ocean, where it could fall without causing harm to anyone below and potentially be recovered, a senior U.S. official told Fox News.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a ground stop at three airports and closed airspace in parts of North and South Carolina effective until 2:45 E.T., citing ‘national security initiatives’ in the area. 

Officials said it is unclear if President Biden has made a final decision on the plan, The Associated Press reported earlier. Biden addressed the balloon briefly Saturday in response to a reporter’s question, saying, ‘we’re going to take care of it.’ 

The surveillance balloon was most recently seen flying over the southeastern United States Saturday, spotted in parts of North and South Carolina as it made its way toward the Atlantic coast.

Biden was briefed on situation earlier this week and had asked for military options to take the balloon down. But Pentagon officials advised against shooting it down over the continental United States, cautioning that falling debris could put American civilians and infrastructure on the ground in danger.

Pentagon officials on Thursday disclosed that a surveillance balloon believed to be of Chinese origin had been tracked flying over Montana. China’s foreign ministry acknowledged the balloon was Chinese on Friday, claiming it was a civilian weather aircraft that had blown off course.

Senior State Department officials disputed that claim, identifying it as Chinese surveillance craft and calling its presence in U.S. airspace an ‘unacceptable’ violation of American sovereignty. Secretary of State Antony Blinken indefinitely postponed a planned trip to China to meet with President Xi Jinping because of the incident and called China’s actions ‘irresponsible’ in a phone call with his counterpart Wang Yi on Friday. 

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs downplayed Blinken’s decision to cancel the trip even as diplomatic relations have tensed after the incident.

‘In actuality, the U.S. and China have never announced any visit, the U.S. making any such announcement is their own business, and we respect that,’ China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Saturday morning.

The Pentagon also acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America. ‘We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,’ Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.

PRC officials have denied accusations of spying and asked the U.S. not to ‘smear’ it because of the balloon. 

Wang said China ‘has always strictly followed international law, we do not accept any groundless speculation and hype. Faced with unexpected situations, both parties need to keep calm, communicate in a timely manner, avoid misjudgments and manage differences.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report.