Biden administration to brief former Trump adviser Bolton on Chinese spy balloon
Rachel Schilke
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Former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton will receive a briefing from the Biden administration about suspected Chinese spy balloons entering U.S. airspace.
The briefing follows defense officials claiming similar objects entered the United States under former President Donald Trump. Bolton and other Trump officials have said they were not aware of any incursions by China while they were in office. The White House confirmed on Feb. 6 that briefings would occur between the Trump and Biden administrations but did not specify which officials from the Trump administration received the invitations.
US SHOOTS DOWN THIRD UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT THIS WEEKEND
A spokesperson for Bolton told the Hill on Monday that he would hear about the balloon incursions, becoming the first official to confirm the briefing publicly, and will release a statement shortly after.
Bolton said he has “even more questions now than when they first got in touch with me” on NBC Monday morning.
Incursions reportedly occurred “at least three times” during the Trump administration and one additional time at the beginning of the Biden administration. However, the reported incidents under Trump were for shorter periods of time than the balloon that entered North American airspace on Jan. 28 over the Alaskan Aleutian Islands before being shot down on the afternoon of Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina.
The time it took before the balloon was shot down has become a hot-button topic for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said President Joe Biden’s leadership incompetency was on full display with the delayed response.
“Every foreign policy or every military decision he has made is always too late,” McCarthy said.
Kirby slighted Trump officials on Monday for failing to detect the balloons that entered U.S. airspace under their administration, stating that China operated its surveillance program under the People’s Liberation Army in the years before Biden took office.
“We detected it, we tracked it, and we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” Kirby said.
Bolton and other Trump officials are insistent that they were never informed about the balloons.
“I can say definitively that I was not aware of that ever happening,” former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller told the Washington Examiner.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung pushed back against the claims, saying that Biden officials are “peddling disinformation” to “deflect from their own weakness and failures.”
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The military has shot down four objects in the span of eight days. On Feb. 10, a second object was shot down over Alaska, a third on Feb. 11 over Yukon in Canada, and a fourth shot down over Michigan on Feb. 12.
Kirby told reporters on Tuesday there is no indication that the three objects shot down by the military are part of the Chinese spy program but that the debris has not been recovered.