Monday morning, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) joined Stu Varney on FOX Business to discuss the recent craze in Washington and the country: the Chinese spy balloon.
Waltz said current Pentagon officials briefed him over the weekend and told him that Chinese spy balloons crossed over Texas and Florida during the Trump years.
He then dropped a stunning claim from his source, saying that General Jim Mattis, Secretary of Defense at the time, apparently decided not to inform President Trump because the Pentagon thought Trump was “too provocative and aggressive.”
However, General Mattis spoke this afternoon at an event in Vero Beach, Florida, shooting down the claims, which the left-wing media have quickly turned into a negative story for Trump.
Responding to a question about the balloon, Mattis said neither he nor any other member of the past administration had knowledge of a Chinese spy balloon in American airspace:
Question: We’ve all been reading about the balloon. We’ve been watching its path.
General Mattis: I don’t mean to make light of it. But don’t worry that it suddenly was able to find things out that satellites up in lower orbit weren’t spotting already. You’ve gotta wonder was it stupidity or the left hand not knowing what the right hand were doing. Why did the Chinese have time to do it. I’m going to tell frankly young guys who want to make 4-star general… bucket of rocks. But in this case, I would still say it’s serious. And that I wouldn’t get overly worried about it. But there are some questions that we all as Americans need answers to. Did it really happen during past administrations? Because there isn’t anybody from the past administration who is aware of it. I’m not for the first two years of that administration. Now it’s possible that there are old radar tapes that show things. Now if you go back and you know what they look like. Now if you go back and look that isn’t an ice storm over the Aleutians, that was a balloon. But there are some answers that the American people are owed. And could we not have taken it down sooner? I mean NORAD has a lot of Canadian fighters up there intercepting Russian planes routinely.
Watch via Fran Henig.
Mattis served in President Trump’s administration for nearly two years before abruptly resigning after Trump’s decision to pull 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria.
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