“So those balloons, so every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats.”

That was Air Force General and NORAD Commander Glen VanHerck at a press briefing yesterday on the Chinese spy balloon we shot down Saturday. VanHerck was responding to a media question about the three balloons that the Lying Biden Administration™ insists flew over the U.S. during Donald Trump’s term in office. His response should be the definitive word on the matter.

Definitive, that is, except for the Trump-hating Biden dead-enders, who need to cling to a sense that their enfeebled and pathologically dishonest president doesn’t stand alone as the most feckless commander-in-chief in our nation’s history.

Think about how pathetic and improbable this particular Biden lie is. General VanHerck says this balloon “was up to 200 feet tall” with a payload of “jet airliner-type of size” and weighing “in excess of a couple thousand pounds.” Are we really to believe that such a massive contraption, which was sighted last Wednesday by civilians in Billings, Montana, could’ve floated lazily over Texas and Florida, as the Biden administration claims, without having been detected by anyone, either military or civilian? Or was it only detected but not reported up the Trump chain of command? Or was it not detected at all during the Trump years, but only magically years later by the ever-vigilant Biden administration? Or were these not balloons at all that visited us during the Trump years, but some other type of craft that was smaller and faster and only visited our airspace ever so briefly? It’s hard to say because the Biden administration’s Big Balloon Lie keeps changing.

Yeah, yeah, briefly! That’s the ticket!

“I’ve seen the stories that said this happened on our watch,” said former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday. “I can speak to this. I never knew about it, and a balloon the size of three buses slowly making its way against our heartland for days. I’m pretty confident the CIA director or the secretary of State would have been told about it. President Trump says he wasn’t told. Two national security advisers said they didn’t know. I await anxiously to find out what happened.”

The secretary might have a long wait. “I can tell you that we discovered these flights after we came into office, and I’m not going to get into the specifics of how we did the forensics,” said White House flack John Kirby. How convenient.

Heck, here’s a question: Had the Red Zeppelin not been seen and reported to the Biden Department of Defense by everyday Montanans, would the Biden administration have tried to keep it under wraps for the entirety of its intelligence-gathering mission across the country — past our ICBM siloes, past our strategic bomber command, past our Oak Ridge nuclear facilities, and finally past our Mid-Atlantic naval bases? Would Team Biden have allowed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to go on his pre-planned weekend grovel-fest to China?

It’s a question worth pondering, especially given how weak and thoroughly compromised this president is, how deferential he is to the lying, thieving, murdering communist Chinese.

And how unserious is the Biden administration’s defense of its Trump-Tooist “three balloons” yarn? Take White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday, for example. She couldn’t even piece together a coherent lie. During the White House press briefing, a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “How is it possible that this administration discovered at least three previous balloons that flew over the U.S. under the previous administration, but Trump officials didn’t know it was happening?”

Jean-Pierre’s response could serve as a How-Not-To manual for White House communications:

Yeah, so, look, I think that — and we have talked about this before, about how the — when it — when the PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times, as you just mentioned, during the president’s — the prior administration and once that we know of the beginning of this administration’s. But never for this duration of time, as we know.

REPORTER: “How is it possible that this administration discovered at least three previous balloons that flew over the US under the previous administration, but Trump officials didn’t know it was happening?”

KJP: “Yeah, so, look, I think that uh, and we have talked about this…” pic.twitter.com/QE3tQK0TAi

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 6, 2023

Got that? What could be clearer?

“What a load of crap,” declared former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who could teach Jean-Pierre a thing or two about concision.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has a great idea: Let’s investigate. “If it’s true the Pentagon purposely did NOT tell President Trump of Chinese Spy Balloons during his administration,” Greene said,“ then we had a serious breach in command during the Trump admin.”

If there really were three Chinese balloons that floated across the U.S. during the Trump years, but no one in the Trump administration was made aware of it — not Pompeo, not Defense Secretaries James Mattis or Mark Esper, not Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, not National Security Advisor John Bolton — then we’ve got another deep state conspiracy on our hands, and a constitutional crisis with massive national security implications.

So, yeah, by all means, let’s investigate these three “Trump” balloons. Let’s call witnesses before Congress, and let’s get their testimony under oath.

Otherwise, this administration will just keep on lying.

UPDATE: What to make of all this balloon back-and-forth? The always-reliable, always-balanced Washington Post offers this historical revisionism:

“U.S. intelligence analysts have retroactively identified as spy balloons objects that were previously deemed unidentified, according to U.S. officials. … The retroactive discovery of the Chinese balloons helps explain why senior defense officials serving in the Trump administration were not aware of the incursions during their time in office, officials said.”

“The retroactive discovery”? Forgive us if we’re loath to accept the Post’s effort to push Joe Biden’s dubious “Trump too” narrative, which, as our Mark Alexander notes, smells suspiciously like bovine excrement.