President Joe Biden said this week that there’s a “possibility” that communist Chinese leader Xi Jinping didn’t know the spy balloon was flying over the continental U.S.

The Pentagon first detected the Chinese spy balloon over U.S. airspace on January 28, but Biden allowed it to travel across the U.S. for a week before finally having it shot down in early February off the coast of South Carolina.

“Let me just ask you this first, do we know definitively yet whether or not that spy balloon was flying over the continental U.S. intentionally?” ABC News host David Muir asked.

“It is almost not relevant once it was over the United States,” Biden responded.

“So there’s a possibility President Xi didn’t know?” Muir asked.

“There is a possibility of that,” Biden claimed.

"Do we know definitively yet whether or not that [Chinese] spy balloon was flying over the continental U.S. intentionally?"

BIDEN (who watched it fly over the entire U.S. before shooting it down): "It is almost not relevant once it was over the United States" pic.twitter.com/fc9m5Yv5R2

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 24, 2023

When Biden finally gave the order to shoot it down over the Atlantic Ocean, the U.S. military used a single air-to-air AIM-9X Sidewinder missile fired from an F-22 Raptor to carry out the task.

Glen David VanHerck, Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), said that the balloon was up to 200 feet tall and weighed “in excess of a couple thousand pounds.”

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After the spy balloon was shot down, the U.S. subsequently downed three more unidentified objects over Alaska, Lake Huron, and Canada.

“It is also common for U.S. balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin claimed without evidence. “Since last year, U.S. high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of Chinese authorities.”

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said that the communist nation’s claims were a lie and that China was trying to deflect from the embarrassing situation they have caused.

“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, connected to the People’s Liberation Army, that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the United States and over 40 countries across five continents,” Watson tweeted.

“This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control,” she continued. “It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the United States was a weather balloon and to this day has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace and the airspace of others.”

President Joe Biden claimed this week that the federal criminal investigation into him is different than the case into former President Donald Trump because there are different “degrees of irresponsibility.”

Biden made the remarks during an ABC News interview with David Muir that aired on Friday.

“You and the former president are both now under investigation by the Justice Department for the discovery of these classified documents,” Muir said. “I know that you believe these two cases are very different. But I do remember something you said after the discovery at Mar-a-Lago, you said, ‘I thought data that was in there may compromise sources and methods and names of people who help and it’s just totally irresponsible.’”

“Can you assure the American people that none of the documents discovered in your garage, or your old office, compromised sources or methods or U.S. intelligence?” Muir asked.

“I’ve been advised by the council, let the Justice Department make that decision, to not try to alter the case in any way, there have been very few documents that have been confiscated, found, in my possession that are in, other than, in my possession, meaning in my ho–, all the stuff that was moved out of my Senate office over the years, I’m told there are a couple things that were from 1973 or 74, the documents were marked classified,” Biden responded. “I don’t know of anything, maybe. I don’t know if anything that is marked like it was, you know, top secret, highly class–, etc. But I am told not to comment on that, because I don’t even know what they are able, what they confiscated.”

Muir then highlighted Biden’s reaction to the news last year that federal officials had found classified material in Trump’s possession.

“One word you used, when you hear about boxes in your garage or in your old office, you called the Trump discovery ‘irresponsible,’” Muir said. “Is there something irresponsible here though, too?”

“You know, you’re a good lawyer, but you’re trying to make a comparison. What, there’s degrees of irresponsibility, that are, they can be significant degrees of responsibility,” Biden claimed. “What, the way in which the boxes were packed up from my office, apparently, not everything was gone through as meticulously as it should have.”

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“But there was no intention,” Biden claimed. “I opened up my home, all my homes. My homes, my home at the beach and the home, my permanent home. And they spent hours and hours going through everything, personal, everything I had. And that’s a fundamentally different thing. There’s nothing for me to hide.”

Pres. Biden tells @DavidMuir that "there's degrees of irresponsibility" when it comes to the DOJ's investigations into both him and former Pres. Trump over the discovery of classified documents. "There's nothing for me to hide." he adds. https://t.co/wIixdvC4aq pic.twitter.com/j1euQZY9Pr

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) February 25, 2023