Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo questioned if China’s spy balloon was able to bug a large swath of the United States before it was shot down over the weekend.

Bartiromo led Sunday Morning Futures with a recap of the spy balloon’s traversal through America before it was downed off of the U.S. east coast. President Joe Biden told reporters he knew of the balloon on Wednesday and wanted it shot down, but he deferred to the Pentagon’s advice to wait and avoid the potential damages from falling debris.

As Bartiromo complained about how long the balloon was able to float across America, she raised a number of questions “on the damage already done.”

What did the balloon capture? Was it sending data back live, as it traveled, back to Communist China? Did it drop and disperse surveillance products powered by solar energy to allow unlimited surveillance? And why did it take U.S. officials so long to shoot it down?

The Fox News anchor raised the prospect to John Ratcliffe — the former Trump Director of National Intelligence, who proceeded to lend the idea credence:

A lot of people have sort of minimized the balloon as an obsolete technology. You have to ask yourself why would the Chinese then even send obsolete technology over the United States if it wasn’t going to provide anything of value, as the Biden administration has tried to tell you?

Listen, the truth — without getting into anything classified — is the stratospheric balloons because of recent technologies can be maneuverable, can loop around, can hover and do things that low Earth orbit satellites can’t do. We know from public reporting — without getting into anything classified — that China, for at least six years, has been successfully deploying payloads, including drones, from stratospheric balloons.

And what publicly is known is that the U.S. Military and Department of Defense has a number of projects out there involving stratospheric balloons and different types of possible payloads that could be deployed as you talked about. Everything from cicada drones to very small electronic listening devices that could run on solar power and transmit data back interminably.

All of those things are possibilities. I’m not saying they took place here, but none of those terrible scenarios would be possible if this had been taken down, as it should have been before it crossed into U.S. air space and remained there for the better part of a week.

Watch above via Fox News.

The post WATCH: Maria Bartiromo Asks if Chinese Spy Balloon Dropped ‘Surveillance Products Powered By Solar Energy’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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