Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Biden administration misled the American people about a major foreign policy issue. 

According to a new report, the claim that the infamous Chinese spy balloon was blocked from transmitting data as it flew across the mainland United States was false. Astonishingly, the balloon was allowed to connect to a domestic telecommunications service. That connection was then used to send "burst transmissions" back to China, and it's unlikely it was transmitting take-out orders.

The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.

Gen. Mark Milley, who himself has a long history of defending China, was serving as Biden's Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. He claimed that all communications from the satellite were blocked, making whatever intelligence was gathered over the United States irrelevant. That was not true. 

On 9/17, Gen. Milley insisted the spy balloon didn’t collect any intel.

Biden admin officials have said the same.

Now, nearly a year after the incident, NBC learns that the balloon used a U.S. telecom network to “send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data…

— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) December 29, 2023

Milley's claim, which was repeated by other White House officials, came after an attempt to hide the existence of the spy balloon from the public failed. The original plan apparently was to never tell anyone about it, but that was ruined when people on the ground noticed it, leading to the story being reported in the press. 

At that point, the strategy shifted to saying that the balloon was harmless and that all outgoing transmissions from it had been blocked. It would seem improbable that Milley simply wasn't aware that all transmissions weren't being blocked, which would mean he and the administration lied about the matter to save face. 

Defense and intelligence officials have said the U.S. assessment is that the balloon was not able to transmit intelligence back to China while it was over the U.S. 

Of course, none of this would have been an issue had Biden had the guts to shoot the spy balloon down when it was still over the Pacific Ocean. As RedState previously reported, it was detected long before it reached the U.S. mainland. Biden let it transit across anyway, not making the call to blow it out of the sky until it got off the South Carolina coast. The public finding out about it is what ruined his plan to let the thing pass over unmolested. 

How can anybody trust anything that the Biden administration says at this point? They've been caught in numerous falsehoods just surrounding this incident, and if they'll mislead about something like this, there's nothing they won't mislead about.