Biden officials have looked to cover themselves by saying that Chinese balloons were over the United States during the Trump years. But Trump officials are adamant that they were never told this.
Byron York has more on what looks like unconvincing and/or outright deceptive spin:
“Those previous balloon flights were much shorter in duration, possibly explaining why some went undetected at the time,” the Wall Street Journalreported, citing “senior administration officials.” “One official said that much of the information on the flights was pieced together later.”
“They went undetected,” a senior administration official told Fox News. “This information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left.” Only then, the official said, did the Biden administration piece it all together and realize that the Chinese had been sending massive balloons over the U.S., and nobody, citizen or military intelligence, noticed.
A slightly different story emerged in the Washington Post, which reported that the Pentagon knew of “past Chinese surveillance balloons near Florida and Texas.” Wait a minute: Near Florida and Texas? What does near mean? Were the balloons over those states? Were they offshore but over U.S. territorial waters? The Washington Post suggested the Pentagon was not being entirely clear. “The Defense Department was not specific about where in each state the previous incursions occurred,” the paper reported, citing Rep. Michael Waltz, a Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. “[Waltz] added that officials did not say whether the balloons made it into U.S. airspace, which extends 12 nautical miles from the shore, or over U.S. territory, too.” That’s an important distinction, isn’t it? Were the previously undiscovered balloons over U.S. territory or not?
At this point, nothing is clear. In a text exchange, one Capitol Hill Republican, eager to question the administration on events, saw three possible explanations. One, the Defense Department is “conflating wildly different incidents, that is, balloons around Hawaii or Key West vs. crossing middle America,” a conflation he called “partisan spin.” Two, the Pentagon really did only figure out that the Chinese were flying over the continental U.S. after the fact, which he called “a huge military intelligence failure.” Or three, the military actually tracked the flights at the time but failed to inform civilian leadership of what was happening, which he called “a huge civilian-military scandal if so.”