Foreign spies likely knew of Biden’s age-related decline, former NSA counterspy says

Intelligence operatives from China, Russia and Iran are targeting White House secrets on President Biden’s health and likely informed their governments on his apparent declining mental acuity, according to a former National Security Agency counterintelligence official.

John Schindler, who spent nearly a decade with NSA as a counterintelligence officer and intelligence analyst, stated in an online post that a multi-year White House silence on Mr. Biden’s physical and mental condition did not fool either hostile spies in Washington or U.S. allies.

Washington is home to more intelligence officers than any city in the world and finding out what’s going on inside the White House is the top intelligence priority for many of them, Mr. Schindler stated on his newsletter Top Secret Umbra.

Mr. Schindler said the Biden White House could be penetrated with foreign agents, as he said occurred as far back as during the Nixon administration.

Moscow’s KGB spy service ran “multiple agents” in the White House who supplied secrets on the Nixon campaign operation to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate in 1974 – before the story broke in the Washington Post, Mr. Schindler said.

“Certainly, any counterintelligence veteran has obvious questions about Hunter Biden’s handsomely rewarded relations with Chinese intelligence just a few years ago,” he said.

Hunter Biden and James Biden, the president’s brother, received several million dollars from Chinese Communist Party-linked companies in China, according to congressional investigators.

In addition to agents, foreign intelligence services can learn information from electronic intelligence gathering, including intercepting phone calls, text messages, emails and online chat group content, Mr. Schindler said.

Any chats by White House officials and close U.S. allies about Mr. Biden’s condition in vulnerable communications over the past four years were  “about 100%” were intercepted by foreign spies, he said.

 “Which means that our enemies, especially Russia, China and Iran, have been aware of Joe Biden’s age-related decline long before the American public was informed,” Mr. Schindler said.

Mr. Biden and his aides insist he is physically up to the job, and have resisted all calls he drop his re-election bid after his widely-panned performance at a debate with GOP rival Donald Trump last month. Worrisome public examples of Mr. Biden’s stability are not secret, including falls climbing up the steps of Air Force One and a tumble on stage at a speaking event.

Mr. Schindler said the news media failed to focus on what he said were the president’s repeated gaffes, misstatements and occasionally  incoherent remarks that could indicate deeper physical or mental problems.

“The Democrat-aligned media kept up the charade [Mr. Biden was well] for a long time, as the Biden White House wished,” Mr. Schindler said. “We should assume that Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran weren’t so easily fooled.”

The decline, he said, raises troubling questions about Mr. Biden’s foreign policies, including the troubled American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure to head off the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and stepped-up Chinese aggression in Asia.

“After the Kabul debacle, Russia, China, and Iran all became more aggressive in their efforts to subvert American hegemony,” Mr. Schindler said, noting the Ukraine wars and the attack on Israel by Iran-backed Hamas.

Chinese President Xi Jinping could be calculating that an impaired U.S. president will not respond forcefully to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, he speculated.

The spies from Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, again, “surely know more about what’s happening with Joe Biden, about his real condition, than the American people do,” Mr. Schindler said.

Allied leaders are getting an opportunity to assess Mr. Biden’s condition during this week’s NATO summit in Washington.