Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes on Sunday shared his frustration over the lack of information on recent drone sightings in New Jersey, but he also emphasized that he doesn’t believe there is reason to worry.
"There's a lot of us that are pretty frustrated right now. The answer 'We don't know' is not a good enough answer,” Himes (D-Conn.) told “Fox News Sunday” guest host Jacqui Heinrich.
At a White House press briefing on Thursday, national security communications adviser John Kirby said there is no evidence that the drones come from foreign adversaries or pose a national security threat, but did not have a conclusive answer to their origins.
Himes specifically called out the Federal Aviation Administration for not taking responsibility to assuage concerns.
“The FAA in particular, which is the agency of jurisdiction through the domestic skies, ought to be out Saturday morning saying, ‘Let's show you a picture at the number of aircraft, commercial and private and military, that go over New Jersey in any 24-hour period,’” he said, adding that “just putting information out there to fill that vacuum would be helpful.”
Some lawmakers have taken matters into their own hands; for instance, New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim drove around the state with local police to watch the drones himself, posting updates on his social media. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, called for “more transparency” and said “we need a briefing for the members of the Senate to figure out what's going on here.”
Others, like Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), accused the Pentagon of lying and claimed that the drones came from an Iranian “mothership.”
Himes dispelled Van Drew’s mothership claim as a conspiracy theory used to fill the vacuum in the absence of information, stating “with confidence” that it’s not the Iranians or the Chinese.
“I've spent all of my time as the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee watching what the Iranians and the Chinese do,” Himes said. “And you know what they don't do is but a bunch of drones that we could easily recover over the continental United States. The Chinese learned that lesson with their spy balloon.”
He added: "The military is amazing at what they do. An aircraft carrier has 6,000 amazing people on it who will defeat the Iranians. What they're not very good at is identifying if there's 12 teenage boys in Montclair, New Jersey, flying Walmart drones. The military is not very good at dealing with that."
The lack of certainty has led President-elect Donald Trump to take to social media, calling for the government to shoot the drones down if they don’t know what they are.
Himes accepted that security is essential: “It's absolutely the federal government's job to make sure that nobody is flying a drone over Edwards Air Force base and the CIA headquarters in Virginia to take to new surveillance or worse.”
But he emphasized that drones are easy for anyone, American or adversary, to purchase at a local Walmart and that sorts of recreational usage is “probably not going to be a Department of Homeland Security problem to solve.”
When asked if he has any concern that the drones might be a state actor preparing for a future attack, Himes said he felt there was no threat.
"Frankly, Jacqui," he said, "our adversaries that would wish us harm have billion-dollar satellites over our heads right now that are capable of doing what we do to them, which is observing. You know what they're not going to do? They're not going to put technology over Newark, New Jersey, that can fall out of the sky and we would capture it."
