CNN’s Dana Bash Reveals Biden Official Texted Her Debunking Trump Drone Rant From Press Conference
CNN anchor Dana Bash revealed that a senior Biden official texted her information that debunked President-elect Donald Trump’s rant about drones during a press conference.
Trump spoke to reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son on Monday and took questions for almost an hour in a wild press conference chock full of provocative moments. — including a rant about drones in which he suggested President Joe Biden is concealing the truth about them.
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, Bash played some of the comments and told correspondents Alayna Treene and Daniel Dale that a “senior administration official” texted her the day before with information that debunked the claims:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: The government knows what is happening. Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is. Our military knows and our president knows.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TREENE: Now, Dana, I know where Daniel Dale standing by to fact-check some of this. But I will argue that what Donald Trump said there is very much not the same from what we have heard from these exact government officials over this week.
And we did hear from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this weekend addressing this. We also heard from many FBI officials and those at DOJ. All of them kind of trying to assuage the concerns of voters who are seeing these drones, while also arguing that they have a right to be concerned.
Mayorkas said this weekend that there’s no question. People are seeing these drones that they have promised the federal government will give more assistance to New Jersey state police, but also said that they’re still trying to find answers on this. They don’t believe that this is a major national security concern, something Donald Trump also just argued in that sound that you heard. But that, again, they still need to get to the bottom of this.
And so, this is something that I find, you know, very interesting to see whether or not, as we continue reporting this out, whether Donald Trump is actually getting his own updates on this. Some other big areas that he went into. TikTok, I think he addressed, you know, really publicly for the first time, his stance on TikTok. He had wavered on this over the campaign trail.
We know in the past Donald Trump had threatened to ban TikTok. That has since changed. Donald Trump said today that he has warmed up to TikTok because he believes many young people voted for him. So, they will be looking into it, but seemed, you know, less inclined to do so. That’s just two things that he said in a number of topics that he addressed today at that press conference. Dana?
DANA BASH: Thanks, Alayna.
I just want to go back before I get to you, Daniel. I’m going to do a little Daniel Dale right now and say that while the president-elect was speaking and saying what you just played, alleging that the government knows, suggesting that there is something nefarious going on and that he knows that.
I was texting with a senior administration official who said that they did an interagency briefing on this yesterday, and they were told that it is a mix of fixed-wing aircraft with pilots, commercial drones, law enforcement replacing old police choppers, and recreational. Nothing anomalous found, 1 million registered drones in the U.S., 8,000 in the sky every day.
So that is what the administration is saying on the drones. There’s so much more to talk about, but because he weighed in and leaned into and explicitly said that President Biden knows what’s going on here and that he suggested he wasn’t even interested in going to Bedminster, his club in New Jersey, because that’s where most of them were, it’s important to say what the current administration, who has the active people looking at this, are saying.
Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.
