White House rushes to deny report of US Nord Stream sabotage after Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's expose

On Wednesday, the White House denied a report from journalist Seymour Hersh that claimed the September 26, 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline pumping natural gas from Russia to Europe was a deliberate act of sabotage orchestrated by the United States overseen and approved by Joe Biden.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, said, "This is utterly false and complete fiction," Reuters reports.

The denial came in response to a report Hersh published to his substack revealing that Biden's National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, introduced the plan to take out two of the Nord Stream pipelines and that the administration committed themselves to destroy the pipelines as of December 2021. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, months after the White House planned the sabotage, Hersh reports.

After the blasts in September Joe Biden said, "Let me say this, it was a deliberate act of sabotage and now the Russians are pumping out disinformation and lies."

The Daily Mail reports, "Investigators from Sweden and Denmark have confirmed explosives were found at the blast sites in the Baltic Sea, but no nation or entity has been formally named a suspect in the attack."

According to Hersh, the plan that was finally settled on involved deep-sea Navy divers planting charges who trained in Panama City, Florida for the operation.

Those divers, according to Hersh, operated "under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning."

The operation was staged out of Norway and in collaboration with the Norwegian Navy and Secret Service

The White House denied reports of involvement in the sabotage back in September. Reporters at the time brought up that Biden in February had said that the pipelines would "not move forward" if Russia invaded Ukraine.