In Friday's White House press briefing, the National Security Council's John Kirby faced questions about what the U.S. government knew — and when it knew — about the fate of the submersible lost off in the North Atlantic on its way to the wreck of the Titanic. As Vespa noted earlier Friday from a Wall Street Journal scoop that the Navy had detected the implosion on Sunday:
A top secret military acoustic detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard what the U.S. Navy suspected was the Titan submersible implosion hours after the submersible began its voyage, officials involved in the search said.
The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after the submersible’s disappearance Sunday, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the Coast Guard commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.
So, the Navy detected the implosion and figured it was the submersible, yet that information wasn't passed outside the Biden administration? The New York Post's Miranda Devine connected the dots: the Biden admin waited until to make its knowledge public, making for a "[c]onvenient smokescreen" for the House Ways & Means committee's "release of IRS whistleblower testimony of DOJ sabotage of the Hunter Biden investigation."
So, what did the White House have to say about its apparent decision to withhold knowledge of the detected implosion for days? When asked whether the acoustic data collected by the Navy had been shared with or communicated to all parties involved in search and recovery efforts, Kirby seemed to admit that the information was held within the Biden administration and not shared.
"The Navy did pass on to the incident commander the acoustic data that they had received, but they were also quick to make clear that they couldn't be definitive about what that data meant and they couldn't be clear that that data was connected to the Titan, to the submersible," Kirby reasoned. One would be right to assume that it's difficult to be "definitive" about the source of any sounds detected in the North Atlantic. But why not say that the Navy had data it assumed was an implosion when it was detected? We still don't know anything and are left to make assumptions that, like Devine's, make sense for the Biden administration.
KIRBY: "The acoustic data that they [the U.S. Navy] had received...They couldn't be definitive about what that data meant..."
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 23, 2023
REPORTER: "Are you concerned that resources were wasted in searching the area the size of Connecticut?"
KIRBY: "No." pic.twitter.com/Pko0TuBWX1
Kirby continued in Friday's briefing, saying he was "sure that [the acoustic data] was factored into the search plan in some way," but it doesn't seem that the data was put to much use as search and recovery efforts continued in vain for days after the Navy had picked up the sound of what it surmised was the submersible imploding.
In a natural follow-up question, Kirby was asked whether the Biden administration was "concerned that resources were wasted in searching the area the size of Connecticut." Kirby answered without hesitating: "no."
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