Fact check: Pence falsely claims opponents admitted there weren’t Chinese spy balloons over the US while he was VP

Pence’s explanation

CNN asked Pence’s team on Wednesday what he was talking about when he claimed an unnamed “crowd” had “admitted” that Chinese balloons didn’t float over the US while he was vice president.

A Pence spokesperson responded Thursday by saying that Pence was noting that although the Biden administration had tried to distract from its own poor handling of the new balloon incident by claiming “spy balloons entered the United States during the Trump administration,” such claims “were debunked when NORAD and other national security officials admitted these detections were not made by their agencies until after the Trump administration left office.”

But if Trump-era balloon incidents were not discovered until after Trump left office, as Biden officials and the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command have indeed said, this belated discovery clearly does not “debunk” the fact that the incidents happened in the first place.