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Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) criticized White House national security spokesman John Kirby’s statement about the recent mysterious drone sightings on the East Coast, calling it “very misleading at best.”
“Well, I think it’s very misleading at best,” Smith said in an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill” Monday evening. “If he (Kirby) knows something, he should say.”
Smith, who represents New Jersey’s fourth congressional district, was reacting to Kirby’s comments on Fox News when he said there was no indication that the increase drone sightings in recent days they represent a major risk for public safety.
“We did the detection, then the analysis. We corroborated the sightings,” Kirby said. “And in every case we’ve looked at so far, we’ve seen nothing, nothing that indicates a risk to public safety.”
Kirby stated that unmanned drones in the skies of New Jersey, and elsewhere, they fly legally and pose no threat to Garden State residents.
“There are drones flying over the skies of the United States every night, every day, and we haven’t seen anything in this, in and around New Jersey, that should concern people on the ground for their safety, for this activity,” he said.
“And we’ve seen nothing, working with the Department of Defense as well, that indicates a foreign adversarial actor is involved or any kind of pernicious threat to national security,” Kirby added.
Smith, who has urged the Pentagon to shoot down the drones, said he recently spoke with a Coast Guard commander who said there were 12 to 30 drones near one of the rescue ships.
“To say that the sightings that people from the Navy Coast Guard and the United States Naval Air Station, Earl’s Weapons Station, which is in my district, have seen drones near this depot of ammunition,” Smith said. NewsNation’s Blake Burman.
“Many, many law enforcement officers have seen it. They’ve seen it in a way that suggests formations that are coming out of the ocean onto land,” the GOP lawmaker added. “Even with the Coast Guard, I talked to one of the commanders who said that one of our 47-foot rescue boats, right on its stern, had 12 to 30 drones following its proximity. I mean, no they had no idea who they were.”
His comments are the Biden administration’s response to growing public concern about drones has caused divisions on Capitol Hill, where some Democrats are defending the executive’s assurances that there is no threat and others are blasting the various agencies for failing to provide evidence to back up those claims.
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
