That Drone Skirmish With China? It Was Over Before Donald Trump’s First Mean Tweet.

President-elect Donald Trump arrives at his victory rally in Mobile, Ala., Saturday. That morning’s tweet expressing outrage that China had taken a U.S. Navy submersible was sent hours after the Chinese Navy had agreed to return it. WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump launched his Twitter campaign against China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy research submersible last week to great fanfare ― and, as it turns out, hours after the crisis had already been defused. It’s unclear whether the president-elect or his aides knew that fact ― it would have been included in the intelligence briefing available to him each morning ― before he sent out his misspelled missive of outrage at 7:30 a.m. Saturday. “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters ― rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act,” Trump wrote. He deleted that version and replaced it with “unprecedented” spelled correctly at 8:57 a.m. But even his first version came four hours after U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus was informed that the Chinese navy had agreed to return the “underwater unmanned vehicle,” The Huffington Post has learned. That information would have been known to Trump had he taken the “Presidential Daily Brief” prior to posting his first tweet. Whether he did that Saturday, or whether he or his staff even bothered to check with the State Department or the Pentagon about the status of the matter before weighing in, is unknown. Officials in Trump’s transition office did not respond to queries from The Huffington Post. Trump has said that he finds the brief repetitive and that he does not need a daily briefing because he is smart. His staff has said Trump is receiving the briefing about three times a week. In any case, Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller was quick to take credit for his boss when news broke that China had agreed to return the device. At 11:54 a.m., he tweeted: “@realdonaldtrump gets it done,” and attached a link to an article in The Hill about the resolution of the incident. At 6:52 p.m., Miller tweeted a link to another story in The Hill, this one about his earlier tweet taking credit for Trump’s initial tweet. And Trump himself capped off the day with a final tweet sent during the short motorcade from Palm Beach International Airport back across the Intracoastal Waterway to his Mar-a-Lago resort following a rally in Alabama: “We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back.― let them keep it!” The encounter’s resolution, though, resulted not from Trump’s 140-character snippets of anger, but days of traditional diplomacy. The Chinese vessel had taken the submersible on Thursday just as the USNS Bowditch was preparing to retrieve it about 60 miles northwest of the Philippines’ Subic Bay in the South China Sea. Baucus, a former Democratic senator from Montana, lodged his first protest that day, as did U.S. military representatives to their Chinese counterparts. Late Saturday afternoon Beijing time ― pre-dawn […]

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