That's my point. The original poster is trying to draw a line between statements that the balloon was a spying device and later statements that it did not collect intelligence while it transited over US territory as evidence that it wasn't a spying device and that the former of those statements is therefore inherently a lie. My take, without assessing the truthfulness of the claims, is that the linked articles do not support such a conclusion. One can claim the device was for spying and that it also didn't collect intelligence without contradiction because the claim is that it failed to collect intelligence, not that it did not intend to do so in the first place.

Umm, source on an official US statement calling it a weather balloon and denying it was a spy balloon? China's alleged failure to collect data due to mitigations and countermeasures doesn't mean it's a weather balloon.

You have no facts to backup "US spreading lies". No evidence whatsoever. You have the US' story, China's story, and millions of photos of a absurdly large apparatus floating across the US that looks nothing like a weather balloon.