"When I was director of intelligence for the Indo-Pacific Command, for example, I watched as numerous requests to publicize Chinese malign activities were disapproved by Washington," US Navy Rear Admiral Mike Studeman recently warned.
The former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence had served between 2022 and 2023, and during that time one of the suppressed stories about China's attacks involved "Beijing's use of high-altitude surveillance balloons over the sovereign airspaces of the US," which came "many months before the shooting down of a Chinese balloon flying over the US."
After the spy balloon was exposed, Biden administration officials had claimed that there had been multiple spy balloon overflights under Trump and only one under Biden, which went unnoticed at the time, but the US Navy was clearly aware and had been ordered to keep quiet by D.C. about the multiple incursions by Chinese spy balloons under Biden.
When the spy balloon was first detected, the initial response by the Biden administration had been to suppress news about it and then to deny that the administration had been aware of it.
"Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it," an administration official admitted.
But when a Montana resident's footage of the spy balloon went viral, the Biden cover-up fell apart. Once it was exposed, the official complained that "It caused so many problems."
While the Biden administration was publicly criticizing China, the State Department was privately sidelining sanctions and any actions against the People's Republic of China. A month later, a top State Department official dealing with China was already looking to "move on"
By May, Biden had resumed relations with China and was dismissing the whole thing as a "silly balloon". In June, he claimed that the spying was "more embarrassing" for Beijing "than it was intentional." Over a year later, an FBI report on the balloon is still being kept secret.
With Secretary of State Antony Blinken trying to wrangle an invitation to China, the Biden administration fully committed to covering up "difficult subjects".
One of those difficult subjects was China's spy base in Cuba. After the Wall Street Journal reported that China had agreed to pay Cuba billions to build a spy base, the Biden administration denied it.
And then it had to admit it anyway.
To quote NBC News:
"As for why the White House, Pentagon and others all flatly denied the Journal's reporting despite knowing that China has been spying from Cuba for years, the official said the Journal story was inaccurate because it called the eavesdropping a new development."
After the initial denials, the Biden administration backpedaled and admitted that China had been spying on America from Cuba since 2019. Much as with the spy balloon story, after a China espionage cover up fell apart, the Biden administration tried to pass the blame on to Trump.
Cover-ups of enemy activity had become the default mode for the Biden administration.
While Russia developed a space weapon, the Biden administration covered it up because it was "worried that if the program became more widely known in Congress or in the public, that might scuttle the nascent efforts to get Russia to abort those tests."
What began with Biden's abandonment of the China Initiative in 2022 escalated into coverups.
The Justice Department had argued that "the 'China Initiative' fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias" and that the "rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents" made it urgent to shut down the effort to stop PRC spies. The assaults on Asian-Americans in San Francisco and New York City by minority street thugs had nothing to do with catching spies. It was a cover-up.
The cover-ups, in the name of anti-racism or diplomacy, allowed China's Communist regime a clear field for spying on the United States while suppressing the story, so Biden wouldn't get blamed.
By the fall of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Chinese infiltrators trying to access American military bases "as many as 100 times in recent years". Chinese nationals pretending to be tourists did everything from trying to force their way into a base in Alaska to scuba diving to spy on a Florida rocket-launch site. The increasing brazenness of the Chinese efforts reflected the extent to which the Biden administration was covering up for the spy campaign.
Over the last year, Chinese spies have been accused of looting everything from AI secrets to tech used to detect nuclear missile launches.
And there is every reason to believe that the situation may be worse than we realize.
The Biden administration has developed a consistent track record of suppressing damaging information about Communist China. What we know about the PRC's operations against us come from leaked material and court cases. Without viral videos, like the one out of Montana, and intelligence reports leaked to the media, we would know even less than we do now.
Governments normally conceal information about enemy activities so as not to tip off foreign spies, but the Biden administration's consistent pattern has been to hide the information from Americans rather than from Russia and China. Instead of trying to deceive our enemies, the Biden administration instead deceives and lies to Americans.
The Biden administration has misleadingly denied reports for no purpose other than to conceal information about enemy activities from Americans. China knew it was spying on the United States from Cuba. And they certainly knew that we knew it. Russia knew it was building a space weapon and was talking about it with the Biden administration. But Biden didn't want us to know.
After the spy balloon, the Biden administration told Americans one thing and China another.
Whom did it tell the truth to? China. The Biden administration put on a fake show of outrage for Americans while quietly telling Chinese Communist officials that all of this would soon pass.
When the United States government lies to Americans, but tells the truth to an enemy dictatorship, something is very wrong. China can trust the White House, but we can't.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Brian D McMorris