The Biden administration sought to hide the Chinese spy balloon crossing the continental United States from the public last January, according to an NBC News report.
Joe Biden and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley knew the Chinese surveillance balloon had crossed into Alaska on January 28 but kept it hidden from the public until a newspaper spotted it over Montana a week later.
“Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it,” said a former senior U.S. official briefed on the balloon incident told NBC News.
U.S. intelligence officials even began tracking the CCP balloon well before it entered U.S. airspace, CBS reported last February.
Biden administration officials pushed back, claiming any efforts to hide the Chinese spy balloon were to protect intelligence-gathering methods.
“To the extent any of this was kept quiet at all, that was in large part to protect intel equities related to finding and tracking” a senior Biden official told NBC News, referring to intelligence gathering on the balloon. “There was no intention to keep this from Congress at any point.”
But members of the House Homeland Security Committee claimed Biden also kept them in the dark about the Chinese spy balloon as it was traversing across the continental U.S.
“We never got alerted to this. It’s a crying shame when the Chairman of Homeland Security finds out about a Chinese spy balloon flying over the United States, it’s just — it’s really unconscionable,” said Committee chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) last February.
“They recognize that this is weakness on the global stage. But they seem to think that that’s what’s best. Don’t poke Xi Jinping, we don’t want to make Xi Jinping mad at us. Look, the guy has got a spy balloon over our country. This is unacceptable. And I don’t really understand why this thing was allowed to come into the United States’ airspace.”
The Chinese spy balloon was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites during its voyage across the country before the Biden regime shot it down over the coast of South Carolina.
NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck warned the Chinese spy balloon program is still operational and U.S. countermeasures were not adequate.
“It exposed significant gaps, long range gaps, for us to be able to see potential threats to the homeland.” VanHerck told NBC News. “I think that opened the eyes of a lot of people.”
“Time is the opportunity to create deterrence options or, if required, defeat options,” he said, adding that the U.S. is still “not where we need to be.”
