There is abundant reason to doubt this face-saving statement.

Now that the infamous Chinese spy balloon has finally been shot down after it had traversed the United States and thus apparently completed its mission, Old Joe Biden and the people who are really running this regime are in furious damage-control mode. It’s easy to see why: in one move, Biden’s handlers have managed simultaneously to enrage the Chinese and look weak and dithering, and so Biden’s Defense Department has now issued a statement attempting to downplay the whole thing and throw some shade upon Old Joe’s bête noire, Donald Trump. The DOD is claiming that not one, not two, but three Chinese spy balloons flew over the U.S. during his administration, and President America First neither told the American people nor did anything about them. See, Old Joe doesn’t look so bad now, right? The only problem is that the DoD’s story raises more questions than it answers.

Trump, as you might have expected, denied this, declaring on Sunday morning: “The Chinese Balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden Administration. They are only good at cheating in elections, and disinformation — and now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the ‘heat’ off the slow moving Biden fools. China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!” Many, of course, will dismiss Trump’s denial, just as they dismissed his denials of the Russian collusion hoax and a thousand other charges against him that turned out to be false all along, but there is more also that casts doubt upon the Defense Department’s assertion.

Mark Esper was a top Trump administration official, serving as Secretary of the Army from November 2017 to July 2019 and Secretary of Defense from July 2019 to November 2020. He recounts: “I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States. I would remember that for sure.” That raises several possibilities. Esper himself may not be telling the truth, in an attempt to cover for his old boss. The second possibility is that there were no Chinese spy balloons flying over the U.S. during the Trump administration, and the Defense Department is the one that’s lying, in an attempt to cover for President Dementia and his China-linked son.

A third possibility is that three Chinese spy balloons did indeed conduct high-altitude surveillance over the United States during the Trump administration, and the Defense Department knew about it but didn’t alert Esper or Trump. Inconceivable? Not in the slightest degree. DefenseOne reported back in November 2020 that Jim Jeffrey, who had served as Trump’s special envoy for Syria, boasted that he circumvented Trump’s orders to withdraw American troops from Syria by lying to the President.

Jeffrey, according to DefenseOne, acknowledged that “his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.” Jeffrey explained: “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” and said that “the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is ‘a lot more than’ the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.’”

Jeffrey decided to thwart the will of the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces because, he said, the order to withdraw from Syria was “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.” Jeffrey even boasted about his defiance: “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal. When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.” Cool story, bro. And not in the least implausible. We discovered the existence of the Deep State during the Trump administration because of its boasts about thwarting his agenda while inside the government. Jeffrey was just another Deep Stater.

Even now, Old Joe claimed Saturday that he had wanted the balloon shot down on Wednesday, but was overruled by the Pentagon. So Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley is now the Commander-In-Chief? Who elected him? Of course, that question could be asked about a lot of people these days. But given the Deep State’s hatred of Trump and long record of deception, there is abundant reason to doubt the Biden Defense Department’s face-saving statement and not a whole lot of reason to believe it.

Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer