Brunswick Beacon, 02.16.23
Desperate to score political points, Trump attacked President Biden’s handling of the Chinese balloon claiming "It never happened with us.” That backfired when we learned “at least three” Chinese balloons entered U.S. airspace without Trump’s administration detecting them!
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Trump’s balloons were discovered because Biden directed the intelligence community “to increase both our vigilance and the assets we were deploying to detect Chinese efforts to spy against the United States.”
“Because 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,” said Sullivan.
President Biden used U-2 spy planes flying above the balloon to intercept and jam its signals, then downed it safely. Retrieving its payload is a windfall for U.S. intelligence.
Trump’s misguided attack highlighted his own China dealings. In 2020, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton described a meeting he attended with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi and Trump: “He, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.”
Adam Kinzinger corroborated Bolton’s story: “I was in a meeting where Donald Trump asked a group of us to lay off Xi and China telecom ZTE because he promised Xi, and he doesn’t want to disappoint him. Bolton wrote about this, I can confirm.”
William Evanina, Trump’s top counterintelligence official, said China used ZTE’s phones to spy on America. Trump tweeted: “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”
Trump tried to Make China Great Again to make himself president again.
Laura McGann
Leland