Biden White House Shades Trump Administration on Chinese Spy Balloon Program: ‘They Did Not Detect It, We Did’
Biden White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby briefed the press on Monday on the ongoing response to various high-altitude aircraft entering U.S. and Canadian airspace and threw some shade at the Trump administration which he claimed did not detect these aircraft despite their flying over the U.S. at the time.
Fox News anchor John Roberts summed up the press secretary’s brief remarks before Kirby spoke, noting, “Karine Jean-Pierre there say that there is absolutely no evidence that extraterrestrials are any type of aliens from off-world are responsible for this. So let’s hear what Kirby has to say.”
Kibry began noting he would offer “quite a few comments” to begin, before taking questions in what would amount to an over 45-minute briefing.
“So I’d like to begin today by updating you on our efforts to recover the debris of several objects that the United States Air Force shot down over the last few days, as well as that of the spy balloon belonging to the People’s Republic of China,” Kirby began, adding:
And I’d like to put into some context for you how we have worked and are still working to better understand the issue of high-altitude, low-speed craft.
And let me start with the Chinese program. When President Biden came into office, he directed the U.S. intelligence community to do a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities and ensure and to ensure that we were working to detect and to protect against them. I think for reasons that you will all understand, we cannot publicly go into many details about how we discover and counteract foreign intelligence collection efforts because much of what we have done and are doing is, of course, sensitive.
“But we were able to determine that China has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection that’s connected to the People’s Liberation Army. It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it,” Kirby noted.
“We detected it, we tracked it and we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” he continued, adding:
We know that these PRC surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners. We assessed that at this time these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC, other intelligence platforms used over the United States.
But in the future, if the PRC continues to advance this technology, it certainly could become more valuable to them. The president also instructed the intelligence community to take a broad look at the phenomenon of unidentified aerial objects.
“Indeed, President Biden conducted the first ever daily intelligence briefing session devoted to this phenomenon, back in June of 2021. He was briefed that this is not just an issue for the United States, but one for the rest of the world. And as I said, our friends and our partners are dealing with this as well,” Kirby concluded, noting that the Biden administration has been monitoring the Chinese spy balloon program since the summer of 2021.
Watch the full clip above via Fox News
