Just last week, a respected, liberal journalism industry publication slammed the mainstream media for its Trump-Russia collusion hoax narrative, in large part because reporters at elite media outlets overused and relied too heavily on anonymous sources to trash former President Donald Trump.
Apparently, it was a lesson not learned.
After the recent Chinese spy balloon was downed on Saturday, the media ran with the narrative from President Joe Biden’s Pentagon that the Chinese had done this before on Trump’s watch.
The transcript of the briefing, given by an unidentified “senior defense official,” claimed, “surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.”
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The media opted not to out this “senior defense official,” throwing Trump and his former team on the defensive.
A financial news website compiled some of those responses.
“This never happened. It would have never happened,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. “It never happened with us under the Trump administration, and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately. It’s disinformation.”
On his social media platform, Trump added, “The Chinese balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden administration.”
“They are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration in order to take the ‘heat’ off the slow-moving Biden fools. China had too much respect for “TRUMP” for this to have happened, and it never did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!”
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John Ratcliffe, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, also said on Sunday that China did no such thing under Trump. “It’s not true,” Ratcliffe told Fox News. “It didn’t happen. This was unprecedented.”
Ric Grennell, who also served as national intelligence director under Trump, denied the allegation. “If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president,” Grenell told Fox News.
On Twitter, he added, “Biden’s DoD is shamelessly using an anonymous source to say that Chinese balloons flew over the US under Trump – and the Trump team allowed it. It is a lie. We never heard this – ever,” he tweeted on Sunday. “Congress should demand @SecDef [Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin] tell the truth.”
John Bolton, no fan of Trump and his former national security adviser, said, “I don’t know of any balloon flights by any power over the United States during my tenure, and I’d never heard of any of that occurring before I joined in 2018. “I haven’t heard of anything that occurred after I left either. I can say with 100% certainty not during my tenure.”
Mark Esper, who served under Trump as defense secretary, told CNN, “I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States. I would remember that for sure.”
Robert O’Brien, another of Trump’s national security advisers, said, “Unequivocally, I have never been briefed on the issue. It never came up.”
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On Sunday, conservative journalist Mollie Hemingway summed up the Biden administration’s account, and noted that, if true, it actually gives the Pentagon a black eye, not Trump.
“So if these anonymous reports are legit,” she tweeted, “the woke military generals’ version of events is that they have 100% allowed Red China spy balloons to traverse the US for years, not even bothering to inform political leadership, and only shot down this one because the public noticed? OK.”
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