During a press briefing Tuesday, the top spokesperson for the National Security Council (NSC) doubled down on the Biden regime’s claim that three spy balloons entered United States airspace during Donald Trump’s presidency without being detected.
China’s high altitude balloon spy program “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it, we detected it. We tracked it,” the NSC’s John Kirby told reporters without providing any evidence.
Multiple former Trump officials have denied that the incursions happened on their watch because no one on Trump’s civilian national security team was ever apprised.
Former Trump NSC advisor John Bolton was the latest to dispute the claim during an interview Monday on NBC’s on “Meet the Press NOW.”
“I think that’s another political shot,” Bolton said of the accusations.
“The administration has now changed its story on precisely that point multiple times. First, they said it happened, but it wasn’t detected. Then they said it happened, but it was assessed to be a weather phenomenon. Those are all things that go on at the NORAD level, perfectly understandably, and if there were failures then indeed they were failures that occurred that were not reported up,” he said.
“All we’re doing is speak the truth,” Kirby said Tuesday when asked to respond to Bolton’s comments.
Unfortunately, the veteran military/national security spokesman does not have a reliable track record of an arbiter of the truth.
As the Pentagon’s press secretary from December 2013 to February 2015 and the Department of State’s spokesman from May 13, 2015 to January 20, 2017, Kirby perfected the art of dissembling, confidently helping the Obama regime weather multiple foreign policies blunders. From his perches at the Pentagon, and State Dept., Kirby talked his way through the Bowe Bergdahl scandal, Benghazi scandal, and fake ISIS intel scandal, in which the Obama administration cooked the books to give the false impression that the U.S. was winning the battle against the Islamic State.
In December of 2015, Kirby also proudly touted the Obama White House’s appalling summit on “Countering Violent Extremism”—which focused on alleged Christian terrorism and so-called white supremacy instead of the Islamic terrorism that was menacing the world at the time—as one of the regime’s “most pivotal foreign policy moments.”
Kirby told reporters on Tuesday that Biden’s National Security team has been “carefully studying” the Chinese spy balloon “to learn as much as we can.”
“We know these PRC surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners,” he said. “We assessed that at this time, these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s 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.”
John Kirby: "Chinese balloon program]was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it, we detected it. We tracked it." pic.twitter.com/s0XYhutkBf
— Public News DC (@PublicNewsDC) February 14, 2023
As for the three unidentified objects shot down over the weekend, Kirby said there were no indications they were tied to external espionage efforts.
The NSC spox added that the objects may have been “benign” and “tied to commercial or research entities.”
Kirby touted Biden’s “decisions in the past week to ten days” as proof that America’s borders are secure.
Top Biden spokesman John Kirby says you don't "need to look any further, quite frankly, than the decisions [Biden] made in just the last week to ten days" to know America's borders are "secure." 🤔 pic.twitter.com/E8DM0dyuey
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 13, 2023
Biden allowed the Chinese spy balloon to traverse across North America over a “number of sensitive sites” from Alaska past the Carolinas, likely collecting information on US communication systems and radars, before he had it shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. After he was criticized for the inaction, he had the probably benign mystery balloons shot down with $439,000 missiles.