This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
A new report reveals Joe Biden had wanted to conceal from Congress and the public the fact that a Chinese spy balloon was hovering over America's countryside, including military installations, taking whatever information it could.
The report from NBC said, "Administration officials at first hoped to conceal the balloon's existence from the public, and from Congress, according to multiple former and current administration and congressional officials."
The report quoted a former senior U.S. official who said, "Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it."
The statement was contradicted, NBC said, by a "senior Biden administration" official who "denied" that.
The issue is the spy balloon that China sent over the United States a year ago.
"The spy balloon exposed an increasingly brazen China's competitive advances miles above the Earth and brought the most critical relationship in the world to one of its lowest points in recent history," NBC commented.
"Nearly a year later, U.S. relations with China have not fully recovered…"
A commentary at CharlieKirk.com said, "A previously undisclosed phone conversation on January 27 between Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck and Gen. Mark Milley uncovered an eight-day-long internal struggle within the Biden White House on how to handle the balloon. It was only after this phone call that the US military officially confirmed the balloon as a Chinese spy device equipped with surveillance equipment."
It explained Biden reportedly was informed on January 31.
"The news of the balloon caused frustration among Republican lawmakers who were not briefed on the incident until after reports surfaced. This occurred just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was preparing to visit Beijing," the report explained.
"China eventually issued an apology, claiming the balloon was a civilian weather vessel that had drifted off course due to force majeure. The incident raised concerns as the balloon managed to collect and transmit information back to China before the U.S. took action to intercept it, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to prevent such activities."
NBC reported a year later, that there are charges from military officials that the Biden administration had done too little to monitor such spy activity.
And it reported Biden officials are fretting that "China was so angered and humiliated, the damage done to the relationship between Washington and Beijing was a far graver threat to the U.S. than the balloon itself."
The report noted that China's claim it was a weather balloon was "dismissed as insufficient and dishonest."
