National Security Council spokesman John Kirby made another unequivocal rejection of Seymour Hersh's report "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline."
"It's a completely false story," Kirby told "Fox News Sunday" host Shannon Bream. "There is no truth to it, Shannon. Not a shred of it. It is not true. The United States, and no proxies of the United States had anything to do with that, nothing."
Bream pointed out that President Joe Biden had promised he would take out Nord Stream 2.
"There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2," Biden said last February. "We will bring an end to it. We will – I promise you, we'll be able to do that."
Bream asked Kirby if congressional approval would be needed to conduct such a strike.
"We did not take any such operation, Shannon, and obviously, we keep Congress informed appropriately of things both classified and unclassified," Kirby added. "But I can tell you now, regardless of the notification process, there was no U.S. involvement in this — none, zero. It's completely false."
The White House also flatly rejected Hersh's report earlier this month.
Hersh wrote U.S. Navy divers helped by Norway had planted explosives on the pipelines running under the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany last June and detonated them three months later.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson described the Hersh report, published on his page on the Substack web service, as "complete fiction."
A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson echoed the White House denial, calling the report "completely and utterly false."
The September explosions were blamed by Western countries on Russia, adding to the anger against Moscow in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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