OUR LYING GOVERNMENT. Holman Jenkins: A Balloon Pops D.C.’s Myth Bubble: Federal agencies have become too comfortable using disinformation.

For those who couldn’t figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why. It became clear that, whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn’t want us to see. That something, it has slowly dribbled out since last May, was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace. Suspected Chinese drones have been a sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more. We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too.

The fluffing of the UFO misdirection, despite what government officials have been telling the New York Times, was not a spontaneous public misunderstanding. Read the inquiries by Reason magazine, the New Yorker and the Times itself. Ask any of the blogging academics who assigned new merit to the alien visitation hypothesis.

As this column pointed out, foreign adversaries were also seeing the UFO snow job. To the extent that the Chinese deliberately sailed their balloon across the continental U.S., they did so in full knowledge that Chinese aerial spying was already being progressively stripteased for the American people by U.S. intelligence-community leakage. The Biden administration had apparently decided the UFO smokescreen was no longer compatible with the heightened geopolitical moment.

It should be obvious now why it was always a mistake. The Chinese profess puzzlement over what they portray as an overreaction to their known incursions. Why the fuss now? Only because the American people had been kept in the dark about China’s actions, jollied along with the UFO distraction.

The story has two parts. The U.S. government has become bad at investigating, apparently—i.e., finding and sharing truths relevant to its domain.

The Supreme Court, with the help of U.S. marshals, can’t get to the bottom of who stole and leaked a draft opinion. The IRS hasn’t solved who stole and leaked a decade of tax data on more than 10,000 U.S. taxpayers. The FBI never examined the Democratic National Committee server allegedly hacked by the Russians. It was “forensically precluded” from recovering Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. It remained even fairly oblivious to their disappearance while under a congressional subpoena.

The list goes on. Multiple leaks of highly classified intelligence related to both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations remain unsolved. Though possessing for years video of Hunter Biden using illegal drugs when he claimed otherwise on a federal gun application, a Justice Department investigation proceeds inconclusively. Even the Mueller investigation of Russian election meddling was only a triumph until one of the Russian subjects showed up unexpectedly in a U.S. court. Then Team Mueller folded rather than prove its case.

We come to the second part. As its truth-finding skills apparently atrophy, the federal government has become increasingly adept at using false information to solve problems.

The FBI used “objectively false” Russian intelligence, the Justice Department’s inspector general tells us, to justify its improper acts in the Clinton email matter. It used false Steele dossier evidence to obtain a warrant on a minor Trump campaign associate. It used the same false information to stir the media’s collusion pot.

U.S. officials again promoted false information about the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020. In the latest chapter, father and son now are at odds, the dad having told voters it was a Russian job, the son claiming his authentic data was stolen by domestic partisans whom his father should prosecute.

The possibility of federal fact-finding being politicized is unmentionable until it’s not.

We are governed by crooks, liars, and incompetents, and the worst of them aren’t even the ones who have to stand for election.