Former national security adviser John Bolton has reportedly accepted the Biden administration’s offer to provide details on the Chinese spy balloon incident that occurred during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Bolton’s representative confirmed to The Hill that Bolton will issue a statement after the briefing, set for Wednesday. He will be briefed by the office of the director of national intelligence, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
President Joe Biden’s administration said in the uproar that followed this month’s announcement that a Chinese spy balloon had flown over the country that at least three more Chinese surveillance balloons had flown over the US during Trump’s presidency. Another one floated in the US earlier in the Biden administration, the Pentagon said.
Bolton and other former Trump officials claimed they had no knowledge of the previous incident. Biden’s team offered to brief Trump officials on the balloon and Bolton accepted.
Bolton said he has a “long list of questions.”
“We have barely scratched the surface on the Chinese balloon,” Bolton wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post Sunday.
The US, which shot down a spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, has also shot down three high-flying objects in the past week over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron.
John Kirby, the National Security Council’s strategic communications coordinator, said the White House has uncovered a broader surveillance program by the Chinese military using high-altitude balloons.
“It was an operation during the previous administration, but it went undetected,” Kirby told reporters at a White House briefing Monday. “We detect. We track. And we have studied carefully to learn as much as possible.
Kirby also sought to explain why the U.S. was so quick to pick up the still-unidentified small object, but waited longer to pick up the balloon.
We determined “that the height is lower than the Chinese high-altitude balloon and poses a threat to civilian commercial air traffic,” Kirby said. “And while we don’t have any particular reason to suspect that they’re doing any surveillance, we can’t rule it out.”