The story about Chinese spy balloons surveilling the U.S. during the Trump administration has been roundly shot down, if you’ll pardon the pun, by all of Trump’s top National Security team.

But here comes The Hill to tell us, and them, why and how they’re wrong.  And it is absolutely comic.  Here are some of the highlights.

Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, told reporters on a conference call on Monday that the balloons went undetected, calling it a “domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

So, it would seem, these balloons were only ‘detected’ long after the fact.  No one from The Hill was curious enough to ask Gen. VanHerck how that worked.  If you didn’t detect them then, how exactly, were you now able to retroactively detect them?  Curious minds want to know, just not any at The Hill.

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to President Biden, on Monday said the Biden administration had improved the government’s capacity to “be able to detect things that the Trump administration was unable to detect.”

Now that is impressive!  The Biden administration can now not only detect what’s over our airspace now, that our same national security apparatus under Trump could not, but also anything that’s been over it since he (Trump) was inaugurated.

The balloons from the Trump administration also were not over U.S. airspace for a very long time, officials said in recent days, shortening the window to identify them and take action.

Again, they went undetected in real time during Trump’s tenure but now not only has the miracle-working Biden administration detected them, but even know how long they were over U.S. airspace.  I would love to see “the science” behind how this works but I’m sure it’s a very highly classified state secret.

And as if The Hill didn’t think their readership were stupid enough already, they gaslight them with this “nothing to see here” tidbit:

James Andrew Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued balloons are fairly low on the totem pole of potential spying techniques that could be deployed by China or other adversaries.

Don’t believe your lying eyes.

Perhaps The Hill should change their name to The Shill.