Trump Officials Cast Doubt on White House Claim That Chinese Balloons Hovered over U.S. during Last Administration
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A host of former high-ranking Trump officials are pushing back on the Biden administration’s recent claim that at least three Chinese spy balloons flew over the United States during the previous administration.
After the Air Force downed the suspected Chinese spy balloon on Saturday, Pentagon officials claimed that three similar incidents occurred during the Trump administration but went unknown to the public.
Chinese “government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration,” a senior Defense Department spokesman told reporters during a background briefing on Saturday.
A host of former senior Trump administration officials immediately pushed back on the claim, insisting they are unaware of any Chinese incursions into U.S. airspace occurring under President Trump.
“I unequivocally can tell you I was not made aware of any flights over U.S. territory, nor was my staff, including those who were at the National Security Council all four years of the Trump administration,” Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser between 2019 and 2021 told the Washington Examiner.
O’Brien’s predecessor, John Bolton, echoed his comments.
“I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018. I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left, either. I can say with 100% certainty, not during my tenure,” Bolton said during an interview with Fox News.
The pushbacks prompted a clarification from an unnamed Pentagon source who told the Wall Street Journal that evidence of the balloon flights wasn’t discovered until Trump left office.
Since the announcement was made, Trump himself, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia Heino Klinck, former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell, and former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe have either rejected the claim outright or expressed skepticism that Beijing could have violated U.S. airspace without their knowledge.
“I can’t rule out that things occurred that I was unaware of, but I do think something like this, I would have been aware of,” Klinck told Fox News.
Former defense secretary Esper was similarly careful with his words. “I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” Esper said during an appearance on CNN. “I would remember that for sure.”
However, Trump, Grenell, Ratcliffe, and Miller remained steadfast that no Chinese surveillance craft breached U.S. airspace under their watch.
“It never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. “It’s disinformation.”
“It never came up,” Grenell told Fox. “If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president.”
“It’s not true. I can refute it,” Ratcliffe said on Sunday Morning Futures. “The American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see, even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn’t reporting?”
“Never heard a whisper, and I have to think if anything like that happened that would have been a huge issue,” Miller told Fox News. “No. Absolutely never heard of anything like that while I was in government or at the Pentagon.”
Several Republican lawmakers cast the claim that a similar incident occurred under Trump as an attempt to distract Americans from the Biden administration’s mishandling of the situation.
“This administration didn’t just fail here. They failed to prepare after the first time this happened during this administration,” chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Turner (R., Ohio), told Meet the Press. President Biden “allowed this to go across our most sensitive sites,” Turned added.
During a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Senator Marco Rubio allowed that Chinese balloons may have entered U.S. airspace previously, but insisted that there was “no comparison” between those events and the recent incursion, due to the sensitive sites the most recent balloon was allowed to surveil.
“Have we seen the Chinese fly these balloons in the past? Yes,” Rubio began. “What we’ve never seen, what is unprecedented and whoever the source is at the Department of Defense would have to acknowledge this, what is unprecedented is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho, over Montana, over all these sensitive military installations, Air Force bases, ICBM fields, right across the middle of the country, that has never happened before, that’s unprecedented.”
