Apparently, you peasants just don’t need to know what your political masters are doing
The secret U.S. effort to track, hide and surveil the Chinese spy balloon
On a Friday evening last January, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the Air Force commander in charge of defending American airspace from intrusion, called President Joe Biden’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark Milley.
U.S. intelligence officials had just notified the general that for roughly 10 days they had been tracking a mysterious — and enormous — object flying over the Asia-Pacific, VanHerck told Milley. The object had crossed into U.S. airspace over Alaska and VanHerck said he planned to dispatch military jets to fly alongside it and attempt to assess what it was.
The previously unreported Jan. 27 phone call between Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and VanHerck, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, set off an eight-day scramble inside the Biden administration to respond to a Chinese spy balloon the size of three school buses floating over the U.S.
The spy balloon exposed an increasingly brazen China’s competitive advances miles above the Earth and brought the most critical relationship in the world to one of its lowest points in recent history.
Here’s where it gets really fun
Administration officials at first hoped to conceal the balloon’s existence from the public, and from Congress, according to multiple former and current administration and congressional officials.
“Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it,” said a former senior U.S. official briefed on the balloon incident.
Heck of a Friday before Christmas news dump, NBC News. Now, just imagine how this story would go if it had been the Trump admin attempting to conceal it from Congress and the citizens?
Biden first learned of the balloon on Jan. 31, three days after VanHerck’s phone call to Milley. Top aides told him it appeared headed for the continental U.S., and Biden asked for options from the military for how to deal with it.
Yeah, why should the POTUS know ASAP about a Chinese spy balloon heading towards the US?
Read: Biden Regime Looked To Hide Spy Balloon From Citizens »