On Friday, Communist China ordered the closing of the U.S. consulate in the western Chinese city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. This is in retaliation for the closure of their now-revealed Houston, Texas spy center.

“#China’s Houston consulate is a massive spy center, forcing it to close is long overdue,” said Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), saying it was a “central node” of the Chinese Communist Party’s spy operations in the United States.

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Fellow lawmaker Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) echoed Rubio’s remarks: “What we know is that the Chinese have used consulates like this one, and this one might have been their primary hub, to engage in intellectual property [theft], hacking, influence operations, all of the above.”

Rep. Crenshaw praised the State Department for “taking action” and said that “the burning of documents is what occurs after the fact. Once you decide to close an embassy or a consulate like that, they’re going to burn all the evidence and that’s exactly what they did.”

“You could just smell the paper burning,” a live witness to the bug out told the media. “But, all the firefighters were just surrounding the building. They couldn’t go inside.”

Crenshaw is not taken in by Chinese protests of clean hands, saying, “It’s pretty obvious that they’re not innocent in all this…the Chinese are not good actors, they haven’t been for a long time and America and the world are really just waking up to this after well over a decade of hoping for the best. We need to wake up to it and we need to realize that they do not have the same values as most people across the world… They don’t have the same values of freedom, respect for human rights, democracy, free trade…they’re acting completely irresponsibly and against all the values we hold dear.”

Though no one above the age of five believed them, the Chinese said this in response: “The measure taken by China is a legitimate and necessary response to the unjustified act by the United States. The current situation in Chinese-U.S. relations is not what China desires to see. The United States is responsible for all this. We once again urge the United States to immediately retract its wrong decision and create necessary conditions for bringing the bilateral relationship back on track.”

After the decision to shutter the Houston spy center, a State Department spokesperson said the U.S. “will not tolerate the PRC’s violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs, and other egregious behavior. President Trump insists on fairness and reciprocity in U.S.-China relations.”

In a speech just before Chinese spies were given their walking papers, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “If we want to have a free 21st century and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done.”