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A balloon can be a remarkably steady platform, especially if it can be steered and controlled. Using modern optics, hyperspectral and multispectral imaging, and other sensing systems (and you can pack a lot on a truss that size), you would be amazed at the data that can be collected. Especially if you have nuclear thermocouples or other systems for the real power hogs so that solar can go to other systems including steering.
An amazing amount of data. Data that was collected and transmitted back to China.
Note that neither balloon was shot down right then either over ocean or in a remote area, despite the violation of American airspace and international law. Instead, they were allowed to continue on and complete their mission. If the key people involved in this had been acting in the best interest of the United States of America, in full honor of the oath sworn to the Constitution and the Republic, this would not have happened. That it did happen makes it rather clear that one or more people in positions of power were not working for or in the best interest of the United States. If they are not working for us, then for whom are they working?
Well, not exactly blaming Trump. They claimed that several Chinese spy balloons flew over the US when Trump was president. So, he is to blame that the Chinese think this is an okay thing to do.
I have to think that it was a knee-jerk response to blame Trump, and they spoke before they thought. It may be that the military and intelligence bunch kept the fact of spy balloons from the Trump administration, and since the Dems knew about it, they blundered into blaming Trump.
This may blow up in their faces. I heard that questions will be asked by Sen. Thom Tillis about that very likelihood, and if found to be so…then people will be fired.
Its an embarrassment that they allowed the balloon to get anywhere within our airspace, much less travel over the entire country. And then shoot it down after the fact. What a clown show.
That rumor about Chinese balloons on Trump’s watch has not only been denied by Trump himself, but also by members of his administration.
Childish “whataboutism” accounts for the accusation, nothing more.
But let us say that there were such balloons in Trump’s time. If it had been wrong in his time not to have them shot down, it is wrong in Biden’s time not to shoot the things down.
People will be fired? In this age of Biden? That would be a novelty!
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The [next] claim was literally incredible — literally unbelievable — and even the Biden crowd had to know it couldn’t last and the new spin started: That the Chinese balloon incursions had taken place during the Trump years, but weren’t detected until Biden’s presidency.
And where did it turn to get out a story that was even less likely than Trump letting China walk all over him? To CNN, among other places, where it just happened to be written up by the same reporter who, while she was with Politico, brought Americans the notorious story of the 51 former intelligence officials who claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” in the days before the 2020 election. Now at CNN, Natasha Bertrand is out with the story that “Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office".
(How “discovered”? Sucked out of a Chinese-owned Pentagon liar’s thumb.)
Not only are they pathological liars, they can’t even make their lies believeable. The whole “Russia” hoax was ludicrous, and so is this one.
Just like the farce that our election was the “safest in history”, or that Trump is a “danger to our democracy”, or that Jan. 6 was an “insurrection”, or that mutilating children is “health care”, etc, etc…
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Under the gun to explain themselves, Biden and his team belatedly says “three Chinese balloons” were over the U.S. under Trump. Almost every highly cleared Trump intelligence and national security appointee (more than a dozen) flatly deny that.
This leads to the next hard-to-believe deflection. Biden’s team says the Chinese balloons Trump did not shoot down were only discovered after he left office. What?
Yes, they say it happened then but was only “discovered after” Trump left, which is probably why no one had heard about it. This is hard to credit. Are we to believe that NORAD’s 24/7 operations center was asleep – that China dared cross Trump, and we only saw the spy balloons after reviewing the tape?
First, if any spy balloon from China really floated over the United States during Trump’s time and not one appointee was briefed, do we have an “intelligence deep state” – which is either pro-China or which so feared Trump’s penchant for action that they withheld that? Exactly who knew what, when, and said nothing.
Second, if the balloons were over the U.S. under Trump, and NORAD or the intelligence community did not see them in real time, why not? That is a major intelligence failure. How did that happen?
Third, either way – and regardless of which scandal is worse – the Chinese spy balloon in U.S. airspace should have immediately been brought down.
Exactly. It’s not hard to believe at all that there were, in fact, balloons that Trump wasn’t told about, because we know that his administration was full of traitors like General Milley, who admitted himself that he would warn his CCP counterparts if the U.S. was planning to attack them.
So yes, whether they lied to Trump or they’re lying now, or they were incompetent and didn’t know, they can’t escape blame for whatever the facts turn out to be.
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The Pentagon wouldn’t name the official who provided misleading information about three supposed Chinese spy balloons during President Donald Trump’s administration. [Misleading because it is] a bunch of hogwash.
It’s serious business if our military did not discover Chinese spy balloons, or [if they did discover them] no one told Trump or his senior administration officials.
How did they go undetected [until years later?]? What happened? But the Pentagon won’t address or explain the misleading statements. They won’t identify the person or persons who issued all those statements. A Pentagon spokesperson denied the Washington Free Beacon’s request to identify the senior official, or say whether the individual is a political appointee or career employee.
No, the intelligence agencies did not at any time “discover” that Chinese balloons flew over America during Trump’s presidency:
“I can refute it. It didn’t happen,” [Trump’s Director of National Intelligence John] Ratcliffe said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures. “Every time something goes wrong in the Biden administration, there’s one of two responses. They either find a way to blame the Trump administration, or they try and find a way to say the Trump administration did it too.”
I know well about the denials from many different people in Trump’s administration.
What I am saying is that if the news was kept from Trump’s administration, but known by the Left, in an attempt to “whatabout” Trump, they knee-jerked their way into a bad blunder. They admitted that they knew when Trump was kept in the dark.
That is serious stuff, which would blow up in their faces, and Biden’s team could not save those who committed such treasonous actions.
Yes. They are obviously lying about their late discovery of balloons flying over America in Trump’s time. But the lie self-accuses them, as you say, of keeping Trump - and America - in the dark, which they did and should not have done even if he was no longer president. But their astonishingly lucky discovery (wink, wink) also kept the Biden administration in the dark until now! Oh dear! They didn’t think of that, didn’t mean to do that? Not a good lie for them after all.
Remember the old rhyme?
“What a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.”
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The 2020 election, characterized by massive voting irregularities, displaced Trump and delivered Joe Biden as U.S. President. What most voters didn’t know, but Xi Jinping did know, was that Biden was a compromised president. The Biden family had received, in years leading up to the election, tens of millions of dollars from Chinese business deals, and the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania had received $70 million from sources in China. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, described the Biden Family as being “owned by the Chinese Communist Party” and Joe Biden himself as being “in partnership with the Chinese Communist Party”.
The weakness Biden signaled as President, characterized by his inexplicable decision to abruptly withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving behind some $80 billion of advanced U.S. military equipment and abandoning the strategically located Bagram Air Base was naturally encouraging for Xi. Biden’s top military generals, Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chief General Mark Milley, who were involved in the Afghanistan decision-making fiasco, have also originated other harmful leadership initiatives, such as universal mandatory Covid-19 vaccination requirements and obligatory Critical Race Theory indoctrination for the officer corps and the enlistees in all military branches—both of which policies significantly added to the demoralization of the militaryresulting in recruiting shortfalls—with all of it being observed and digested by the Chinese leadership. Xi’s authorization of launching a spy balloon and have it fly over a broad swath of the United States, and hover over sensitive areas to collect intelligence data where nuclear warheads are siloed, was also intended to accomplish several important objectives for the Chinese [including this]: Xi wanted to reconfirm Milley’s deference to China, which Milley had previously demonstrated twice in communicating critical national security information to Chinese leaders in December and January 2020-2021, without President Trump’s knowledge or consent.
The Pentagon’s #1 threat to American security was and forever shall be Donald J. Trump. Not Russia, nor China, Iran, North Korea, militant Islam. Not any foreign force. Donald J. Trump.
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Not only did the briefing fail to provide adequate information on the spy balloon that was shot down, but no evidence of Chinese spy balloons taking place during the Trump administration was presented.
While the briefing failed to provide any evidence that spy balloons entered U.S. airspace under Trump, it did confirm that the Biden administration had not taken the opportunity to shoot it down over the water.
“U.S. officials have acknowledged they were monitoring this balloon since it flew over the Aleutian Islands – where it could have easily been shot down over water,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said. “This balloon should have never been allowed to enter U.S. airspace.”
