Navy seeks detritus of spy balloon

Navy divers were working to locate portions of the debris from the Chinese spy balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down 6 miles off the coast of South Carolina, defense officials said Sunday.

The recovery effort, which is expected to take days, began not long after debris from the balloon hit the water, a defense official said. He added that a Navy ship arrived on the scene soon after the balloon was shot down, and that other Navy and Coast Guard ships, which had been put on alert, were also sent to the scene.

The shooting down of the balloon capped a remarkable week of highstakes international drama, played out over the skies of the continental United States. While China has insisted that the balloon was not for surveillance, but rather a weather balloon that drifted off course, the Biden administration has stood firm that the balloon's purpose was a somewhat hapless effort by China to spy on U.S. military installations.

On Saturday, President Joe Biden said that he had told Pentagon officials to shoot down the balloon, and that they “said to me, let's wait until the safest place to do it.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers questioned how the balloon was allowed to pass over the United States, with Republicans blaming Biden for not acting sooner.

“We should have shot this balloon down over the Aleutians instead of letting it float across middle America on its merry way,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who sits on the Intelligence Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The idea that we were going to let this go all across America, a spy balloon complete its spy mission, before we shot it down, I'm afraid is an embarrassment to the United States, not an embarrassment to the Chinese.”