The classified documents that Jack Teixeira released to try to impress his gamer friends continue to reveal more information that was withheld from the public on a wide variety of topics.  The suspect was charged in court yesterday, but all of the documents are in the wild now and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. The latest revelations making the rounds deal with the now-infamous Chinese spy balloon that took a leisurely tour across North America earlier this year. But it wasn’t just that one balloon that our government was tracking. It turns out that there were others, and American officials had cute codenames for all of them. (NY Post)

Classified documents allegedly leaked by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira reveal that US intelligence officials were aware of as many as four other Chinese spy balloons apart from the one that floated across the country earlier this year.

One of the previously undisclosed balloons flew over a US carrier strike group in the Pacific, according to the Washington Post.

Another Chinese craft, code-named Bulger-21 by US officials, circumnavigated the Earth from December 2021 until May 2022, according to top-secret documents reviewed by the news outlet.

You may be old enough to remember way back on February 1st when we were told that Joe Biden had only just been briefed on the balloon and he wanted to shoot it down then. The newly leaked documents confirm that the “official” story at the time was a bunch of malarkey. They had known about the balloon since the time it launched. And on top of that, they knew about several others.

The balloon that was shot down off the coast of the Carolinas on February 4th was code-named Killeen-23. Another one named Bulger-21 circumnavigated the entire globe from December of 2021 through May of last year. We were apparently tracking that one without mentioning it either. But it almost certainly had to have passed over some portion of North or South America, if not the United States specifically.

A balloon named Accardo-21 flew over an American carrier strike group in the Pacific before crashing in the South China Sea. It’s not entirely clear whether Bulger and Accardo were two different balloons or simply two names for the same one. But it’s clear that this balloon activity has been taking place for years without much being done about it.

In case those code names look familiar to you, it’s because the balloons were all named after infamous mafia figures. (Tony Accardo, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Donald Killeen.) If the numbers after the names only signify the year when the balloon was spotted, there might not have been that many of them, at least that we know of. That pattern fits since Killeen was spotted this year and Bulger was identified late in 2021. But if the code names were applied in a serial fashion, perhaps there were more than twenty.

I rather doubt we’ll have confirmation of any of this from the White House. The entire balloon affair has turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the Biden administration and for good reason. I’m sure the less time they have to spend talking about it, the happier they will be.