Regarding slander against President Donald Trump, there’s a concept I may have addressed previously.

It’s called the 48-hour rule. Wait 48 hours before you buy into whatever it is, since just like God made small green apples, it starts to come apart throughout the interval.

On Saturday, word leaked that three times under the Trump administration, Chinese balloons allegedly entered American airspace. This claim came while Joe Biden was facing criticism for being sluggish to respond, and it came with no actual specifics, supposedly from an unidentified Biden military official. Apart from that, there were no specifics other than that none of the invasions were on the scale of the one this week in terms of time spent over US territory. As we previously reported, the Trump administration, including President Donald Trump, promptly dismissed the allegation.

Now there are more details of this story. According to a “senior administration official,” it’s apparently “U.S. intelligence, not the Biden administration” assessing that “PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.”

The official said this is “part of a larger pattern.”

“These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries,” the official explained, adding that these activities are “often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army.”

The official said that over the past several years, Chinese balloons have been spotted over countries across five continents, including in East Asia, South Asia, and Europe.

“Two things can be true at once: this happened and it wasn’t detected,” the official told Fox News Digital.

According to officials, the previous incident under Biden occurred around four months ago, when the balloon fell near Hawaii.

Let us begin with the reality that if the balloons were not recognized, how could anybody respond? If the information is genuine, it appears to clear the Trump team and explain why none of them were aware of it.

Then there’s the matter of how they didn’t get caught. Our military systems are intended to detect such things, and if they don’t, it raises even greater concerns. If they are able to penetrate our airspace without being detected, this might endanger our national security. It would imply that our detection defense has a significant flaw.

But the tale has “evolved,” according to a “unnamed senior official.” A “senior official” now claims that this information originated from “US intelligence.” Were these the same 51 former CIA officers who said Hunter Biden’s laptop contained Russian disinformation? But, truly, on what are they basing their conclusion? If the military was unable to identify it previously, how are these IC personnel “detecting” it now? What are their evaluations based on? Is it true that the military can’t pick up a slow-moving balloon?

The number of people who have stated they have never heard of such a thing has increased – practically every significant Trump figure has said they have never heard of such a thing. I wrote about Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Add to that the intelligence community, which includes two former National Intelligence Directors, Ric Grenell and John Ratcliffe.

Former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who led the intelligence community at the onset of COVID, told Fox News Digital that he did “one of the biggest intelligence deep dives on China, their spying and the origins of COVID” during his tenure.

“It never came up,” he said. “If a balloon had come up, we would have known. Someone in the intelligence community would have known, and it would have bubbled up to me to brief the president.”

And former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who lead ODNI after Grenell and through the end of the Trump administration, also refuted the claim.

“It’s not true. I can refute it,” Ratcliffe said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “The American people can refute it for themselves. Do you remember during the Trump administration, when photographers on the ground and commercial airline pilots were talking about a spy balloon over the United States that people could look up and see, even with the naked eye, and that a media that hated Donald Trump wasn’t reporting?”

He added: “I don’t remember that either, because it didn’t happen.”

In addition, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Heino Klinck, and interim Defense Secretary Chris Miller, who formerly served as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, have been named.

So, if former intel people claim they were not informed, how are these claimed “IC people” making this decision now?

So I think it’s reasonable to say something stinks in this narrative, but members of Congress need to investigate what’s going on; is there a real risk that isn’t being noticed, or is it simply the Biden team attempting to dupe us all again?