Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Follow him @DeanObeidallah@masto.ai. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies quickly went into outrage mode last week, slamming President Joe Biden for allowing a suspected Chinese spy balloon to travel over the United States for seven days until the US military finally shot it down Saturday over the ocean.
Biden initially wanted to have the balloon shot down, CNN reported, but military leaders recommended waiting until the large device was over the ocean to avoid falling debris injuring people and property. (Insisting the balloon was a “civilian research vessel,” China expressed “strong dissatisfaction and protest” about Washington’s move to take down the balloon over the Atlantic Ocean near the Carolinas.)
Before then, Trump was true to form, posting Friday on his social media platform, Truth Social, in all caps: “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — former Trump officials who are likely running against the former President for the 2024 GOP nomination — also joined in the outrage games.
Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted that Biden was “letting China walk all over us,” while Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state under Trump, went so far as to declare on Fox News on Friday, “I can nearly guarantee you that that balloon would not still be flying if we were still there.”
But now come facts that confuse the situation and make it harder for Trump and his allies — including US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who claimed that Trump would have shot down such a balloon “before it entered the US” — to criticize the current administration.
The Department of Defense said that China briefly flew a surveillance balloon over the continental United States at least three times during Trump’s presidency. CNN, Bloomberg News and The Associated Press reported the same, although the latter two noted that the length of time those balloons remained over US airspace was not as long as this latest episode. (A previous incident also occurred during the Biden administration, a senior US defense official said during a weekend briefing.)
Muddling the situation further, on Sunday, a senior administration official told CNN that the transiting of the balloons over the US during Trump’s time in office wasn’t discovered until after Biden became president. If true, this raises concerns about why the Trump administration did not detect the incursions into US airspace.
Trump and former officials from his administration denied the Pentagon’s report of earlier balloons. “It never happened with us under the Trump administration, and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately,” Trump told Fox News Digital on Sunday. “It’s disinformation.”
However, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio seemed to confirm earlier cases of Chinese surveillance balloons briefly flying into US airspace but said there was no comparison with this latest incident.
“What is unprecedented is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho and flew over Montana, over all these sensitive military installations, air force bases, ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) fields, right across the middle of the country,” Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “That has never happened before. … That it flew briefly over some part of the US or the continental US, that’s one thing. But what we saw this week is unprecedented.”
These new revelations prompt a few questions that must be asked — preferably by Congress. Were there earlier cases of suspected Chinese spy balloons? If so, what were the circumstances, and why wasn’t this information revealed to the public?
We deserve to know when other nations may be spying on us — especially when doing so by violating our airspace.
Could the news have been kept from the public to avoid the type of attacks Republicans are making against Biden of being weak or China “walking all over us”?
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We can’t be sure. We do know that when the presence of the suspected Chinese spy balloon was revealed last week, conservatives such as Haley put pressure on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel an upcoming trip to Beijing to meet his Chinese counterpart. Blinken did call off the meeting, slamming the “surveillance balloon in US airspace,” which he noted was “detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have.”
In the face of the GOP’s uproar this past week, we need to know if the Trump administration failed to reveal that at least three times a suspected Chinese spy balloon invaded our airspace. The public deserves to know that information — especially given that Trump is running for President again.
This article has been updated to reflect the latest news.