‘Give me a break, man’: Biden refuses to take questions over China after balloon statement

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

President Joe Biden wavered on whethe he would take questions from reporters after his statement on the recent takedowns by the US of three unidentified aerial objects.

He walked off intending to leave the podium but returned to the microphone as reporters shouted questions.

After being asked by a reporter, “are you compromised by your family’s business relationships?” Mr Biden said, “give me a break, man” and walked off without answering any questions.

During his brief speech, Mr Biden said the objects that were shot down were likely to be “balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions” and not connected to China’s espionage programme that launched a larger airship that flew through US airspace earlier this month.

Mr Biden said the US and Canada “acted in accordance with established parameters for determining how to deal with and fight aerial objects in US airspace” and that he was recommended to give the order that they be shot down, which he did, “due to hazards to civilian commercial air traffic, and because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities”.

“Our military and the Canadian military are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects. Our intelligence committee is still assessing all three incidents. They’re reporting to me daily and will continue the urgent efforts to do so and I will communicate that to the Congress. We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were. But nothing right now suggests they were related to China‘s spy balloon programme, or they were surveillance vehicles from other any other country,” he said.

After the remarks, Peter Alexander of NBC News attempted to ask Mr Biden if the takedowns of the objects were an “overreaction” prompted by “political pressure”.

As another reporter shouted over Mr Alexander, Mr Biden said, “you can come to my office and ask a question when you have more polite people”.

He then left the room, stopping to listen to further questions but choosing not to respond before exiting.

“Following his remarks on the aerial objects, @POTUS called my cellphone to answer my questions that he could not hear because other reporters were shouting,” Mr Alexander tweeted after the remarks.

Mr Biden often stops and engages with reporters after public statements and remarks, something his former Press Secretary Jen Psaki advised against.

“That is not something we recommend,” Ms Psaki said on the CNN podcast The Axe Files with former Obama adviser David Axelrod in 2021. “In fact, a lot of times we say ‘Don’t take questions.’”

But she added that “he’s going to do what he wants to do because he’s the president of the United States”.