Donald Trump went ballistics, screaming FAKE DISINFORMATION in all caps when it was reported that three, count ’em three, Chinese spy balloons traversed portions of the United States when he was in office. Now CNN is reporting
The American military had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental United States undetected under the Trump administration, the Pentagon general responsible for providing air and missile defense over North America said on Monday.
“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command said when asked about the three other balloons.
“And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”
This prompted John Bolton to exclaim, “Did the Biden administration invent a time machine?” No, they didn’t and they didn’t have to. The Trump administration was not exactly known for being on the ball, shall we say? The most logical explanation is that the Trump staffers simply didn’t pick up the baton from the Obama administration and if they had, they would have known about this.
Another possibility, and this may end up being the crux of the story here, although I admit up front it’s a bit far fetched, is that Pentagon people picked up on the spy balloons and either tried to talk to members of the Trump administration or were told not to bother.
This is pure speculation and conjecture on my part, but let’s be realistic about all this. During the Trump administration the military was fully aware, as were we all, that Trump might go off his rocker at any time and decide to nuke San Francisco or declare war on Iceland or God alone knows what. This is the man who wanted to celebrate the 4th of July with a military parade with tanks going down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I don’t think it’s too far fetched to say that some military commander, high up in rank, might have made a judgement call to not inform the Idiot In Chief of spy balloons, for fear of sparking some kind of international incident that could escalate out of control.
Raw Story is quoting CNN as reporting tonight “According to statements over the weekend, the Trump Pentagon never informed the president or other White House officials about the spy balloons.” Wow. Speculating it is one thing, seeing it in black and white is another.
And maybe the White House is speculating and conjecturing as well. Take a look at this.
“[B]ecause the intelligence community made this a priority at the direction of President Biden, we enhanced our surveillance of our territorial airspace, we enhanced our capacity to be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect,” Sullivan said at a Monday event with the US Global Leadership Coalition. “And were also able to go back and look at the historical patterns. And that led us to come to understand that during the Trump administration, as you said, there were multiple instances where the surveillance balloons traversed American airspace and American territory.”
In plain English that tells me that Biden knew that the Trump administration didn’t pick up the baton from the Obama administration and he better get security back up to speed.
That’s a common sense explanation but you can see where this is going. This could become the next cause célèbre of the right wing, that Biden is making things up about Trump so he won’t look bad, that sort of thing. Logically, all Biden is probably really doing is backtracking and seeing what processes and procedures fell apart during Trump’s reign and attempting to get a proper rein on things again.
Simply put, we may be in for an exposé of how utterly inept the Trump White House was with respect to national security. Nothing and I mean nothing would surprise me.
In any event, the intelligence community is prepared to offer briefings to key Trump administration officials about the Chinese surveillance program, which, as stated, the Biden administration believes has been deployed in countries across five continents over the last several years. The most likely explanation for Mark Esper and John Bolton being surprised may simply be that they didn’t take the information gathered by the Obama administration and analyze it, and if they had, they could have concluded what the Biden White House has, that Chinese surveillance has been widespread for quite some time.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that the information was there but that Trump’s people simply didn’t catch it. And of course that begs the obvious question: what else did the Trump administration not catch? “Domain awareness gap” has an ominous sound to me, like “mineshaft gap” at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Nevertheless, here we are. Be thankful things aren’t much worse, considering who was in the White House for four years. Not just Trump but the Trojan horse of subversive characters that came in with him.
I think the military did pick up the balloons during the former guy’s maladministration, but decided it was better not to tell the WH, because the reaction was so unpredictable.
OR the info was in his daily briefings but he was too smart to need to read those remember ? So even if they reported it to him in those papers he was not reading them anyway !!!
Wow, so it appears that the Trump administration was incompetent, inept, and ineffective in areas of National Defense?
I’m shocked, shocked I say!
He was too busy grifting to bother with reality.
George W. Bush’s administration ignored warnings from their predecessors about terrorist threats, something they were told was the most important thing they had to pay attention to. Nine months later we had planes flying into buildings. Now we see how unprotected we were by this most recent repug administration. I see a trend here. WE CAN’T TRUST REPUGS TO PROTECT OUR COUNTRY! They get too busy emptying out the treasury to pay attention to actual threats, too busy grifting, thieving, lying, undermining democracy to bother with preventing terrorist attacks or spying. Their priorities are skewed. And we get screwed when they get put into power (either by election or Russian or Supreme Court selection).