Kirby Denies Allegation U.S. Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby explicitly denied a report alleging that the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany on Sunday, telling Fox News’s Shannon Bream that “there is no truth to it — not a shred of it.”

In a highly controversial story published to his substack earlier this month, journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that the U.S. planted explosives on the pipelines in March 2022 before detonating them several months later in an operation that Hersh says had been planned for since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Kirby said on Sunday that “the United States and no proxies of the United States had anything to do” with the sabotage of the pipelines. “There was no U.S. involvement in this. None. Zero,” continued Kirby, who called Hersh’s article “a completely false story.”

Before being accused of conducting a military operation to sabotage the Nord Stream pipelines, President Joe Biden waived sanctions on Nord Stream 2 in May 2021, reversing the decision of his predecessor, Donald Trump. Since the commencement of the Russian invasion, however, the U.S. has provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in aid that has have allowed the Ukrainian military to repel the invading force.

Hersh, who first rose to prominence with his reporting on the My Lai massacre, has been accused of shoddy journalistic practices — and especially an overreliance on anonymous sources — in the past. His story on the Nord Stream bombing is based on the word of a single anonymous source, described only as having “direct knowledge of the operational planning.”

Hersh has disputed that the U.S. operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was carried out after U.S. intelligence agencies tracked bin Laden down and that he was shot after refusing to surrender. According to Hersh, a very-ill bin Laden had been a prisoner of the Pakistani Government for years and was turned in by an ex-Pakistani official. Hersh has said he doesn’t “necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.”

He has also disputed that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is responsible for gas attacks on his own people despite overwhelming evidence of Assad’s guilt.

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