Yes, Chinese Spy Balloons Flew Over the US While President Trump Was in Office Too

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A Chinese spy balloon flies above Charlotte, North Carolina on February 04, 2023. The Pentagon … [+] announced earlier that it had tracked a suspected Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental US. A Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said the balloon was a civilian airship used for research, mainly for meteorological purposes.” (Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Cable TV heads were talking about the Chinese spy balloon floating across the continental US, before it was shot down on Saturday afternoon. Conservative commentators assert that President Joe Biden should have ordered the balloon down earlier and that a foreign balloon flying over US territory would never have happened under President Donald Trump. But it happened under Trump, according to some new reports.

The Chinese government claims the balloon, which was first spotted by civilians on Wednesday in Billings, Montana, was just a weather balloon blown off course. But the Pentagon said it was definitely a surveillance balloon and that China was capable of maneuvering the aircraft.

I can almost guarantee you that balloon wouldn’t be flying if we were still there, Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State under Trump, told Sean Hannity on Friday.

But is Pompeo telling the truth? The Pentagon was quick to point out Thursday that this sort of thing has happened, though it didn’t go into specifics.

Instances of this type of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said in a statement published online.

But several reports have been published in the past two days that give us a better sense of when spy balloons operated by New Cold War adversaries sailed into US airspace. Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Chinese balloons flew over the US as President Trump occupied the White House.

The balloon spotted this week in Montana is not the first time the US has detected Chinese balloons on its territory with previous incursions occurring during the Trump Administration, Bloomberg reported.

But an unnamed source from the Trump administration insisted to Bloomberg in the same article that it’s not a big deal.

A top national security official from former President Donald Trump’s administration said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appeared to be carrying, Bloomberg continued.

And if you can’t trust an unnamed official who worked for Trump, who can you trust, right?

The Associated Press also has a new report quoting a defense expert who says Chinese spy balloons have been spotted near sensitive sites in Hawaii, home to a large US military presence, over the past five years.

Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been spotted on numerous occasions over the past five years in various parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive military installations of the US in Hawaii, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.

President Biden has been in office for two years, leaving three years of Trump’s presidency in that five-year window.

The Wall Street Journal also independently reported that Chinese spy balloons had flown over the US before, though the time was not specified.

China has sent surveillance balloons over the continental US on at least a few occasions, US officials said, the Journal reported on Friday.

In this photo provided by Brian Branch, a large balloon flies over the Kingston, NC area, with … [+] an airplane and its contrail seen below it. The United States says it was a Chinese spy balloon moving east over America at an altitude of about 60,000 feet (18,600 meters), but China insists the balloon was just an errant civilian airship in use primarily for meteorological research that went off course due to wind and had only limited self-steering capabilities. (Brian Branch via AP)

Branch of Brian

And all this still leaves open the possibility that other enemy aircraft will fly over the US in the Trump years, apart from balloons. We still don’t know why swarms of drones were flying over Colorado and Nebraska in December 2019 and January 2020. If you remember, President Trump was president at the time and we got no answers as to who was behind it.

Trump himself posted a video on Twitter yesterday, speculating about how the University of Pennsylvania could be compromised by Chinese spies, an accusation for which he provided no evidence. Trump, a notorious liar and constant threat to the safety and security of the United States, also called on the US government to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon.

Ignoring Trump’s nonsensical ramblings for a moment, the Chinese spy balloon situation still leaves many valid questions about what should be done and when. Pentagon officials reportedly considered shooting the balloon earlier this week, but didn’t want the remains on the ground. But the US is a huge place with a lot of farmland. It doesn’t seem reasonable that there isn’t even one stretch of land where the military can safely bring down the balloon.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the waiting game chosen by the Biden administration is the right course of action. But the question of whether something similar happened under Trump appears to have been answered. It did.

Update, 3:20 pm ET: The balloon was shot down around 2:40 pm ET by the US military in the Atlantic Ocean. Local TV news in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina captured the moment on a YouTube livestream. This story has been updated with that information.

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