Biden admin’s closed-door briefing on Chinese spying blasted by top Republican as ‘unspecific, insufficient’

EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., blasted the Biden administration shortly after receiving a closed-door briefing Monday from senior officials regarding the Chinese spy flight crisis.

The classified briefing was “unspecific, insufficient and backward-looking,” failing to adequately address the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. last week, according to Issa’s office. During the briefing, which was held in a sensitive compartmented information facility, officials also didn’t provide evidence of similar flights taking place during the Trump administration.

“What I took away from this briefing confirmed that this administration and not the previous one had plenty of advance warning of an escalating Chinese espionage program, failed to act, and has now humiliated this country on the world stage,” Issa, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News Digital.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.

On Thursday, the Pentagon acknowledged that a Chinese spy balloon carrying intelligence-gathering sensors and equipment had been detected flying above Montana. Officials said the device had first been detected five days earlier off the western coast of Alaska before flying across the state, into Canada and entering the continental United States in Idaho.

REPUBLICAN DEMANDS JOE BIDEN, KAMALA HARRIS RESIGN AFTER ‘CATASTROPHIC CHINESE SPY BALLOON SPECTACLE’

Then, on Saturday, after the balloon continued its flight through several Midwestern and southeastern states, a U.S. fighter jet shot it down off the coast of South Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean. The unmanned surveillance aircraft had ultimately gone seven days from the time it was first detected over the Pacific Ocean to the moment it was taken down.

One day later, a senior Biden administration official said Chinese spy flights occurred during the Trump administration, but such information was discovered after former President Donald Trump left office. However, Trump and several top Trump administration officials refuted the claim, saying it “never happened.”

WHITE HOUSE WON’T SAY IF BIDEN IS CONCERNED ABOUT POTENTIAL SPY FLIGHT INTEL IN BEIJING’S HANDS

While President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained the delayed response was to protect Americans who may have…