Source: United States Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
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BISMARCK – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Lori Hinz on BEK News to discuss the Fufeng Group’s purchase of Grand Forks land for a corn milling plant and the Chinese spy balloon. Excerpts and full video are below.
On the Fufeng Group Land Purchase:
“[Grand Forks residents] sounded the alarm. Even beyond that, the Air Force is a citizen of Grand Forks in many respects. They are partners with Grand Forks. They are a stakeholder. That’s their family in many respects, and they didn’t want to do anything that would embarrass the community of Grand Forks, and I think they gave city leaders multiple opportunities to back out of it gracefully, and eventually, they couldn’t any longer. They just had to put it on the line with this significant point, but they still didn’t provide anything ‘actionable.’ What [the Air Force] presented was their opinion, which wasn’t a new opinion.”
On the Chinese Spy Balloon:
“People should find assurances in knowing our intelligence community knew about the program, saw the balloon from its takeoff, and then our [Northern Command] military saw it as it was coming our way. What’s concerning is the intelligence community and the military weren’t communicating across political lines, and that’s something we’ve got to fix. We have got to work on that.
“The other thing, though – the biggest problem – was the poor reaction, politically, by the White House especially. The reputational harm that does to us on the global stage is far worse than any pictures the Chinese might have gotten of an ICBM silo, because there are 450 of them and they’re not exactly in secret locations. […The Chinese] likely didn’t get much intel. In fact, we’d likely get more from knowing [the balloon] was there. That said, the harm is to our reputation – which is not insignificant – because the deterrence of other nations is largely based on our reputation.”