The Biden administration is planning to brief key officials from the Trump administration regarding last week’s Chinese spy balloon incursion and previous ones as well.
National Security Council coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Monday that they have “reached out to key officials and have offered a briefing,” though he didn’t specify which officials received those invitations.
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A number of Trump officials, including the former president, have said they were unaware of any instances where a Chinese surveillance balloon impinged on U.S. airspace after a current senior defense official told reporters on Saturday that “PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.”
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he was “surprised” by the department’s assertion, while his successor, former acting Secretary Christopher Miller, told the Washington Examiner, “I can say definitively that I was not aware of that ever happening,” among other Trump administration officials.
“The Chinese Balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “They are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the ‘heat’ off the slow moving Biden fools. China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!”
Kirby explained that the previous spy balloons that crossed into U.S. airspace were only discovered “after we came into office.”
Regarding the previous apparent incidents, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner in a statement, “Currently, we understand there were incursions near Florida and Texas, but we don’t have clarity on what kind of systems were on these balloons or if these incursions occurred in territorial waters or overflew land,” while he told CNN that those incidents occurred under the previous administration.
The balloon that floated across the continental United States last week first entered U.S. airspace over the Alaskan Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28 before it entered Canadian airspace and eventually made its way over northern Idaho. The balloon traveled across the country before the U.S. military shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Carolinas on Saturday afternoon.
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U.S. Naval and Coast Guard troops are working to gather the remnants of the spy balloon. A senior military official said on Saturday the debris is in water about 47 feet deep and spread over a seven-mile radius.
“This is not the only PRC surveillance balloon operating in the Western Hemisphere,” a senior defense official explained. “We assess that a balloon was observed transiting Central and South America, and that that is another PRC surveillance balloon. These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries.”
