The Grind:
As we reported earlier, current and former officials did report intelligence was collected from several sensitive military sites, despite what the Biden team told us.
Two current and one former senior US administration officials told NBC News that the Chinese were able to collect information from some key locations. They even said the balloon was able to make multiple passes over some of the sites, at times flying figure-eight formations, and sending the information back to Beijing in real-time, without being stopped by the Biden administration.
The Details:
But as we noted, the Biden administration claimed that they had blocked the Chinese from collecting intelligence and the media lapdogs were happy to spew out the lie.
Here’s CNN’s Jim Sciutto just happy to sling the talking points.
Then there’s this Yahoo columnist.
Yeah, it’s the Republicans who are dumb. How’d that tweet age?
And sometimes it’s not.
Then there were the Democrats doing their best to claim this was a nothing-burger, like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT).
Maybe you might want to rethink that, Sen. Murphy.
I noted earlier the preposterous comments that Joe Biden made at the time, that it wasn’t a “major breach” and essentially dismissing it with the general comment that amounted to “everyone spies.” Yes, Joe, it’s so cool when you let them fly over our country and allow them to do figure-eights over several of our sensitive military locations, potentially hear critical conversations and get weapons information. I’m thinking that’s just a little bit different than what you can get from a satellite. So did those officials who leaked this information or they wouldn’t have told us about it. Read more…