As I reported earlier, the Biden team’s story about prior Chinese balloons just wasn’t adding up. And it keeps evolving.
There was a report on Saturday from a Biden defense official that three balloon incursions on the U.S. occurred under President Donald Trump, as well as a prior one under Joe Biden – albeit not like the length of time that the spy balloon this past week was observed – that was immediately seized on by some on the left to give cover to Joe Biden’s lack of action for a week before shooting it down. Trump and his people then shot down the report claiming they had never been told of any such thing by the Pentagon.
Now as I pointed out this claim had some problems: anonymous source, and no description of the nature of the incursions.
Then on Sunday, that claim evolved to say that the prior incursions had been “undetected” and that it wasn’t the Biden DOD saying it, but the intelligence community, according to a “senior Biden administration official.” But as I noted that raised even more questions. How could a slow-moving balloon be “undetected”? The military should be able to pick up such things. Were these real “incursions” if they say this wasn’t like what happened in the past week? How could the IC be detecting this now, if the military didn’t detect it back then? Upon what are they basing that assessment?
Perhaps most important, if this was true and not just gaslighting, is that it raises concerns for national security if there are incursions not being detected. Trump can only respond if it’s detected and he’s told by the military. But if this was true, it suggested a huge hole in our defense.
Now the narrative has been updated again, to the Biden team claiming “this information was discovered after the [Trump] administration left.”
So now this adds another wrinkle to the story. How was this “discovered” if it wasn’t detected previously? Assuming this wasn’t just all gaslighting by the Biden official, what we may have here is something leaking information that they shouldn’t be leaking. Are they saying they picked this up based on spying they did on the Chinese? If so, whoops, the Biden team just revealed that.
On top of that, why are we telling the Chinese that these incursions weren’t detected? Unless they’ve plugged whatever hole there was here, why would you be advertising that and spilling this, just to help dampen the week’s backlash against Joe Biden?
It should also now be noted that the “official” said that the incursion that happened four months ago near Hawaii was also “undetected.” Officials indicated prior incursions during the Trump involved Florida and Texas. But you can’t react if you aren’t told.
So we have either we have a case of gaslighting, and/or someone potentially leaking what has to be sensitive information and big problems with our ability to detect incursions.
Congress needs to haul everyone involved in and get answers about what is going on here.