State Dept. Leak Exposes Blinken — Emails Show He Protected China During Spy Balloon Debacle

A new report detailing a series of leaked emails and comments from protected sources within the State Department has revealed that the agency "held back human rights-related sanctions, export controls, and other sensitive actions to try to limit damage to the U.S.-China relationship," according to Reuters. Making matter worse, it happened while a Chinese balloon designed for intelligence gathering floated unimpeded across the country.

At another time, words like 'treason,' and 'disloyalty' would be used to describe what the American people have seen from the Biden administration and particularly the Biden State Department. But today in the U.S., that's just business as usual it seems.

According to Reuters, officials within the State Department were "alarmed" to discover that several delays were applied to the department's schedule of "competitive actions," a secret list of diplomatic maneuvers the Biden administration had planned in relation to China. A divide formed in the government between those who advocated a hard-line stance against Beijing versus those who fostered a softer response.

The outlet reported that the guidance came from the top, straight from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. While U.S. diplomats voiced displeasure about the spy balloon and delayed an official visit by Blinken, an internal message leaked to Reuters told of senior officials delaying the pre-planned actions designed to counter the Chinese Communist Government.

Reuters reported that Rick Waters the deputy assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan and leader of the China House policy division wrote in a Feb. 6th email, "Guidance from S (Secretary of State) is to push non-balloon actions to the right so we can focus on symmetric and calibrated response. We can revisit other actions in a few weeks."

The sources told the newswire that many of the measures designed to counter the CCP still haven't been rescheduled. They cite the examples of "decision(s) to postpone export licensing rules for telecom equipment maker Huawei and sanctions against Chinese officials for abuses of Uyghurs" as being particularly damaging to morale at the State Department's China House.

Bonchie, writing for Red State, took notice of another alarming development. While Blinken is clearly playing softball with the CCP, he's delegated much of the work to a very friendly face for our global adversary: his second-in-command, Wendy Sherman.

He wrote, "Who is Wendy Sherman? She’s the China-loving official who led the lobbying effort against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021. So not only is Blinken derelict in his duties by passing off the biggest US foreign policy issue in existence to an underling, but he gave those duties to someone with a long history of being suspiciously soft on the Chinese."

As Bonchi observed, Sherman is also known for her work at the forefront of Biden's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and infamously said the "Taliban seek legitimacy."

Reportedly the Biden administration has been more concerned with preventing further deterioration of relations between D.C. and Beijing, instead of countering China's provocative actions in the skies above the U.S., and the waters of the South China Sea and Straits of Taiwan.