Chinese spy balloons under Trump?

What did Trump not know and why didn't he know it?

CNN reports that “after the Biden administration disclosed that a suspected Chinese spy balloon was hovering over Montana, the Pentagon said that similar balloon incidents had occurred during the Trump administration.” However, top Trump administration officials say they have no knowledge of such incidents.

Mark Esper, Trump’s last secretary of defense, says he never heard anything about Chinese spy balloons coming here. John Bolton, who served for a while as Trump’s national security adviser, says the same thing. So does Robert O’Brien, who also held that position and was on the national security council during the entirety of the administration. So does Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA and then was Trump’s Secretary of State.

If we take the Biden administration’s statement and the Esper-Bolton-etc. denials as true, we’re invited to conclude that Pentagon personnel knew that Chinese spy balloons were in U.S. air space during the Trump administration, but did not inform the president and key administration officials.

Is scenario plausible? Yes.

One possibility, put forth by a “senior U.S. defense official,” is that the incursions were considered too insignificant to report up the chain because the balloons hovered off-shore or right on our coast line. But I don’t see how even that level of violation could be deemed insufficient to warrant the attention of the president, or at least key members of his national security team.

The other possibility builds on the first, but takes a more nefarious turn. It may be that because of the way some viewed Trump, Defense Department personnel chose to keep Chinese intrusions secret for fear that the president would overreact to what they viewed as a relatively minor violation. According to this report — make of it what you will — Rep. Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican, says he’s been told that then-Secretary of Defense Mattis decided not to inform Trump because he considered the president “too provocative and aggressive.”

However, the Pentagon’s position has been that although spy balloons entered our air space under Trump, this was not discovered until Biden took office. In this scenario, information about the intrusions was not withheld from Trump or his team.

But the scenario seems implausible. How would the Pentagon learn long after the fact about incursions they didn’t know about in real time?

Perhaps House Republicans will investigate this matter.

In any event, there seems to be no dispute that Chinese spy balloons have entered our air space in the past and that, at some point prior to the latest episode, the Pentagon learned of this,. Therefore, it’s fair to ask why the Biden administration didn’t handle last week’s incursion better. As Bolton says:

The very fact, if it is a fact, that the Chinese tried this before, should have alerted us and should have caused us to take action before the balloon crossed into American sovereign territory.

Biden says he ordered that the balloon be shot down last Wednesday, when he was first briefed about the matter. However, he deferred to his military team’s advice that he wait until the balloon was over water. The military wanted to minimize the risk a shootdown posed to civilians and infrastructure and maximize the possibility of recovering the balloon’s payload for examination.

The problem is that waiting for the balloon to traverse America maximized China’s ability to obtain whatever information the balloon was intended to transmit. There’s also the matter of what the delay signaled to the Chinese government about our current president’s resolve to defend our airspace and his ability to act with urgency to threats and violations.

Nothing good, in my estimation.