- Bolton is the most noteworthy because he is very adversarial with Trump. It’s unlikely he would be covering for the President. (LIBERTY DAILY)
EPOCH TIMES has this:
Former President Donald Trump responded to claims that Chinese regime spy balloons entered U.S. airspace during his administration, saying such alleged events “never happened.”
An anonymous U.S. Defense Department official said over the weekend that spy balloons transited over U.S. territory under the Trump administration. But Trump, in a Fox News interview on Sunday, pushed back.
“This never happened. It would have never happened,” Trump told the outlet, adding that the Chinese regime “respected us greatly” under his leadership. “It never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately,” added Trump. “It’s disinformation.”
Before the balloon was shot down, Trump on his social media platform Truth Social had called for the U.S. military to shoot down the balloon last week after it was spotted near Billings, Montana.
“Now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the ‘heat’ off” the Biden administration, Trump wrote Sunday. “China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did.”
Other Officials Respond
Mark Esper, who served under Trump as secretary of defense, refuted claims about balloons flying over the United States under the previous administration.
“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” he told CNN. “I would remember that for sure.”
John Bolton, a former U.S. national security adviser under Trump, said that he never heard of any spy balloons entering U.S. airspace or hovering over U.S. territory while Trump was in office. Bolton, also a Bush administration official when he was in office, also said that he never heard of anything like this happening before he joined the Trump administration in 2018.
“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,” Bolton told Fox News on Sunday. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either.”
Responding to claims made over the weekend, Bolton said that the current administration needs to “tell Congress” about any “specific examples.” He added that “I can say with 100 percent certainty not during my tenure.”
“Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue,” added Robert O’Brien, who served as White House national security adviser under Trump. “It never came up,” he said. “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,” former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell told Fox.
“It’s not true. I can refute it,” former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe also said. “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?”…………
UPDATED ARTICLES
HOT AIR joins the fray:
….Biden partisans pushed the story hard, claiming that Slow Joe was Maverick from Top Gun, while Trump meekly took it when China did the same thing during his administration.
The story appeared in the MSM, of course, and Biden toadies were all over Twitter with posts like these endlessly repeated:
Of course, we all knew the story would turn out to be a fabrication, and indeed it is. The goal was to implant the idea in people’s heads that Biden was a strong leader, even stronger than Trump. More importantly, it muddied the waters.
Now that the idea is out there, the story is starting to change. Not a little, but a lot.
[….]
If the media had any integrity they should reveal the names of the liars when the truth comes out. Instead, they encourage government officials to lie, reward them with fake stories, and impose no cost for lying. Rinse, repeat.
Honest reporters would only reward honest leakers. It should be part of the deal. If you are lying, it will be exposed.
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER opines on a very important point:
THE CHINESE BALLOON STORY IS EVEN BIGGER THAN IT SEEMS. The Chinese spy balloon matter has become far more serious in recent hours — and it was serious enough to begin with.
Of course, there are lots of questions in the aftermath of the U.S. Air Force shootdown of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday. Questions such as what, specifically, was it spying on? What information had it gathered? When was the United States aware of its existence? Will experts be able to secure enough of the wreckage from the ocean floor to answer those and other questions?
But there are perhaps more troubling questions raised by the conduct of top Biden administration officials. First, they sought political cover by claiming that Chinese spy balloons had overflown the U.S. three times during the Trump administration, and nobody did anything about them at the time. Then, when a chorus of high-ranking officials of the Trump years said with one voice that simply did not happen, the Biden team responded with an explanation that strains credulity. That’s where we are now…….