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Former Trump administration officials have expressed frustration and confusion in recent days over revelations that Chinese surveillance balloons hovered over U.S. airspace during their time in office.
As more information has emerged about the extent of China’s use of balloons to surveil the U.S. and other countries — another object was shot down over waters near Alaska on Friday afternoon, though it is unclear where it came from — it has fueled questions about why officials from the Trump administration were unaware of previous incursions and spurred frustration among some of those officials.
“I was in the administration for every single day that Trump was in office on the national security team,” said Keith Kellogg, who served on the Trump White House National Security Council before taking over as national security adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2018.
“During that time this never ever came up,” he added. “So for them to say it happened during the Trump administration, we weren’t aware of it and we would’ve taken immediate action. If it did happen under President Trump and he was not told, that’s more than just egregious, that’s a dereliction of duty.”
A senior Pentagon official told reporters last week that Chinese government surveillance balloons hovered over the continental U.S. “at least three times” during the Trump administration, and one additional time at the beginning of the Biden administration.
Those three incursions were for shorter periods of time than the balloon that caused a major international incident last week after it was spotted over Montana before floating across parts of the country and ultimately being shot down near the South Carolina coast.
Since that disclosure, a slew of former Trump administration officials who worked in the intelligence community have uniformly said they were unaware of Chinese spy balloons hovering over the U.S. at any point during the last administration.
