To deflect blame for how Joe Biden’s administration handled the Chinese spy balloon incident, a Pentagon official has told the press that similar incursions into US airspace took place on three occasions during the Donald Trump administration. But Trump and key members of his national security leadership team declared that to be false.
“This never happened. It would have never happened … [Beijing] respected us greatly … [I]f it did, we would have shot it down immediately. It’s disinformation … [T]hey look so bad as usual … They are incompetent,” the former president explained in a conversation with Fox News Digital. It wasn’t just Trump who declared the narrative pushed by the nameless Pentagon bureaucrat to be false. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, denied ever hearing about CCP balloons penetrating US airspace during his time on the Trump national security team. Robert O’Brien, national security adviser after Bolton; Richard Grenell, director of national intelligence; and Mark Esper, secretary of defense, all strongly denied any People’s Republic of China (PRC) surveillance balloons entered US sovereign airspace during the Trump administration’s watch.
Mainstream Media Silent on the Beijing Balloons in Trump’s Time?
The mainstream media’s failure to report on any PRC balloon overflight during Trump’s time lends greater credence to assertions that such incursions never occurred. If the Pentagon official’s claims had any grounding in fact, the mainstream media would have pushed Congress to charge Trump with another impeachable offense.
In an example of classic bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, the New York Post quoted a Pentagon “official” source:
“PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental US briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time. This information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left. They went undetected. Two things can be true at once: This happened, and it wasn’t detected.”
The real brainteaser is the last statement. The three CCP ghost balloon incursions went undetected during Trump’s administration, but when Biden took office, they were detected. If there was no evidence of balloons under Trump, why did they magically manifest now?
Pentagon Doubles Down on Implausible Balloons Story
(Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Nevertheless, the Pentagon is doubling down. “My office has been briefed by the office of the Secretary of Defense of the current Pentagon that it happened over Florida, it happened over Texas, and that it happened before,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) told Stuart Varney in a Fox Business interview Feb. 6. But why didn’t the secretary of defense brief the rest of the national security team at the time? The way the National Security Council works with its agencies makes it unlikely the Pentagon’s explanation is accurate.
Let’s pretend it is true that Chinese surveillance balloons were sighted during the previous administration. That would have required an extensive cabal in Trump’s Pentagon — including the undersecretary for policy, the undersecretary for intelligence and security, the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, even Canadian authorities — to scheme covertly to withhold the information from the president and the director of National Intelligence. Such a conspiracy would be nearly impossible to achieve. More likely, the Defense Department briefing to Waltz merely echoed the White House’s self-serving talking points.
As more information is revealed, we may find out what was behind the reluctance of the Biden administration to shoot down the Beijing balloon. But the Pentagon’s attempt to take the narrative in a different direction is implausible. This story is not over.
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.
