Remember that pesky Chinese weather spy balloon? The one that entered our airspace near Alaska on January 28, then flew unobstructed across the entire continental U.S. to gather intelligence from some of our most sensitive military sites?

Remember how Team Brandon refused to even officially acknowledge the balloon until four days later, on the following Wednesday, when it was seen by civilians over Billings, Montana — the same Montana which is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base and 150 or so of our nation’s intercontinental ballistic missile silos?

Remember how the mainstream media dutifully swallowed the ChiComs’ talking points and reported that the mostly peaceful balloon “was merely a weather research ‘airship’ that had been blown off course” and “that it was not being used for surveillance and had only limited navigational ability”?

Remember how the Biden administration dithered endlessly, watching as the Red Zeppelin made its way past our strategic bomber command, past our Oak Ridge nuclear facilities, and finally past our Mid-Atlantic naval bases? Remember how our commander-in-chief waited for the spy balloon to complete its mission before finally dispatching one of our F-22s to shoot it down just six miles off the coast of the Carolinas? You know, because shooting it down over rural, expansive, mountainous Montana — which is our nation’s fourth-largest state by land mass but only its 43rd most populous — might’ve hit “a cow, a prairie dog, or an antelope,” as Senator Steve Daines put it?

Right. We remember it too. But the Biden administration hopes the American people will soon forget about it. Why? Because the president and his team flat-out lied to us about the spy balloon’s surveillance capabilities, and about our ability to counteract those capabilities.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s NBC News:

The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.

China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said. The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said.

As we noted in early February, this was a shot across Joe Biden’s bow, and a disastrous projection of weakness in response. What might the ChiComs glean of this response regarding, say, an invasion of Taiwan?

But now we know it was even worse than a bungling of our national security priorities. Now we know why, as implausible as it would’ve seemed just two years ago, the rest of the world is coming to see that the Communist Chinese, under Xi Jinping, are a more reliable international partner than the United States under Joe Biden. Anyone who doesn’t believe this need only look at the recent example of Chinese statecraft in the Middle East, where they’ve knitted together an agreement between two mortal enemies: the Iranians and the Saudis.

Beyond the foreign policy fecklessness, though, this was also a Soviet-style campaign of falsehoods meant to protect what can only be called a willfully incompetent administration. Remember how Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder reassured us, “Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information”? Remember that? Remember the litany of lies that followed about how despite the balloon’s massive and highly sophisticated surveillance payload, and despite it having flown all the way across the North American continent, the ChiComs didn’t gain so much as a scintilla of useful intelligence from it?

If not, let’s refresh our memories:

Today, we learned the Chinese spy balloon did, in fact, collect sensitive intelligence from U.S. military sites.

The Biden administration lied about it for weeks.

WATCH: pic.twitter.com/LWtSHrnSaA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 3, 2023

“We tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities, and we learned more about how it operates,” Biden said on February 16. “And because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection.”

As the editors at The Wall Street Journal noted, “This is the same rhetorical jiu jitsu that tried to spin the chaotic U.S. surrender in Afghanistan as a triumph of logistics.”

They continued: “The Biden Administration may insist that the intelligence Beijing gleaned wasn’t that valuable, but voters can fairly conclude the President isn’t leveling with them. This has become a pattern with Team Biden, and it’s undermining the bipartisan support the President needs to conduct foreign policy in an increasingly dangerous world.”

Weakness is provocative abroad. And dishonesty is corrosive at home.