Welcome, it is verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you as well.

And Senator, you just got out of classified briefings that deal with something the president

refused to bring up during the State of the Union.

And that is the Chinese government and their balloons and the fact that they went all the way

across our country.

And then finally, he said, all right, I'll deal with it after they pretty much got anything they wanted.

What did you learn today that the American people need to know about?

Well, I spent two hours today in a classified briefing in the skiff down in the basement of the Capitol.

And by the way, I'll point out that when I left the classified briefing,

I didn't bring any classified

materials with me because you can't bring it out of the skiff. And so I don't have any at home

with me. I don't have many anywhere else. That seems to be very unlike Joe Biden, who seems to have

classified materials everywhere he goes. But the two-hour briefing was entirely on the Chinese spy balloon, and it was a detailed briefing.

It included senior officials from the Department of Defense and the Department of State and the

intelligence community walking through what happened. And they revealed quite a lot. Because it was

classified, I'm not going to repeat anything that was said there.

But I can characterize the administration's position is they are spinning mightily.

Number one, they're trying to diminish the seriousness of the damage to national security

that happened from the espionage that

China was allowed to undertake in the United States. I did not find their spinning credible.

Number two, they were presenting highly legalistic arguments as to why they didn't shoot down the balloon when it first entered U.S. airspace.

And mind you, they did shoot down the balloon a week later, after it had spent a week in U.S. airspace,

...