The Nord Stream farce continues

A cover-up that refuses to die

The great Nord Stream cover-up has a new participant – Donald Trump.

Early this month, Zero Hedge, a rightwing financial website that was all but banned under the Biden administration, finally got a face-to-face with the new commander-in-chief at a White House press conference.

“I’ve been dying to ask this question for a long time,” the ZH reporter began, “which is that, two and a half years ago, the Nord Stream pipeline blew up and, despite what people like John Brennan and all the hawks said, you were one person who said that Russia probably did not blow up its own pipeline.” Then the reporter cut to the chase: “And so I’m wondering, now that you’re president, would you consider launching a formal investigation into what happened there and who actually did blow it up?”

Trump’s answer was remarkable:

“Well probably if I asked certain people I’d be able to tell you without having to waste a lot of money on an investigation. But I think a lot of people know who blew it up.

A very Trumpian discourse ensued about how he had opposed the pipeline from the beginning, how the ever-incompetent Joe Biden gave it the go-ahead, why Vladimir Putin is hungry for a settlement in the Ukraine – complete nonsense since Putin is not the least bit interested in negotiations at this point – and so on. Nonetheless, the response begged any number of questions.

Which people, for instance, does Trump have in mind? If he knows who knows, then why not pose the question rather than dropping coy hints here and there? The internet is filled with rightwing nut cases demanding an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex island or whether Hunter Biden was the guy who left a bag of cocaine in the White House.

But aren’t such matters a bit less important than who engaged in an act of war against a NATO ally? Nord Stream is owned by a group of German, Dutch, and French companies in addition to Russia’s Gazprom, so whoever blew it up on Sept. 26, 2022, not only harmed local business interests, but a key component of European energy infrastructure. This is why German prosecutors labeled the explosion an act of “anti-constitutional sabotage.” Not only did it destroy an important facility, but a crucial aspect of the German state.

So why not tell Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, to round up the usual suspects, give them a good going-over, and then prepare a proper report? After all, it’s important not just to know who did it but which agencies were involved, who approved the operation, and whether the Germans received advance warning? Seven months prior to the explosion, Biden declared at a joint White House press conference:

“If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it ... I promise you we’ll be able to do that.”

Since then-chancellor Olaf Scholz was standing right beside him, was he in on the plot as well? His statement at the same conference - “we are acting together, we are absolutely united, and we will be taking the same steps” - certainly suggests that he was. But confirmation is still important. It’s not only the American public that needs to know, but the German public too.

The Nord Stream cover-up is as curious as the other great cover-up of our age, that of the Biden senility crisis. What makes both so odd is that the only people they fooled were the insiders themselves. Otherwise, everyone knew the score. Just two months after Biden’s inauguration, for instance, I wrote an article describing him as America’s answer to Konstantin Chernenko, the ailing Soviet leader who took office in February 1984 only to die 13 months later of a combination of emphysema, heart disease, and cirrhosis of the liver at age 73. A friend told me I was jumping the gun and that my diagnosis was premature, but others disagreed. A few months later, a Harvard/Harris poll found that Americans thought Biden was “too old to be president” by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. In November, a poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that respondents thought he was no longer mentally fit by a margin of 48 to 46.

This was around the time when CNN host Jake Tapper was rapping Trump daughter-in-law Lara for daring to suggest that Biden was in “cognitive decline.” Now this ultimate insider has co-written a bestseller, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, suggesting that he knew all along.

The Nord Stream cover-up is equally farcical. Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster article, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline,” published in February 2023, is still the best thing on the attack. It has its faults. It’s anonymously sourced, lacking in corroborative evidence, and guilty of one or two elementary mistakes, e.g. describing then-NATO general secretary Jens Stoltenberg as a US intelligence asset since Vietnam when in fact Stoltenberg, barely in his teens at the time, was a member of the Workers’ Youth League, a stalwart of the Norwegian antiwar movement. But Hersh’s account of how US and Norwegian naval personnel placed charges around the two double-pipelines in Baltic waters is far more plausible than anything else that has come along, including the ludicrous tale of a handful of Ukrainian saboteurs using a rented 50-foot sailing yacht to transport the heavy equipment needed to operate at depths of some 260 feet.

Last June, Germany went so far as to issue an arrest warrant for an unnamed Ukrainian participant, but Polish authorities were so unimpressed that they refused to execute it even though he had fled over their borders. The story dropped out of the news. Sweden and Denmark wound up their own desultory investigations in February 2024 without identifying a suspect, while the German investigation, nominally still open, is clearly going nowhere fast.

So no one cares, at least no one in any official capacity. Friedrich Merz, Scholz’s successor as German chancellor, made this clear this week when he vowed that Nord Stream will never reopen while promising to step up aid to the Ukraine, the country whose intelligence agencies may have been helped destroy his own energy facilities. Either Merz doesn’t believe his own police, or he thinks that keeping the Ukrainian war going is more important, however unwinnable it may be.

Why is Trump also refusing to investigate? One possibility is that he cares more about the Ukraine than he cares to admit, especially now that the Russian offensive is accelerating. Since a Nord Stream investigation would embarrass Merz’s shaky ruling coalition at a dangerous moment, he’s not inclined to throw a monkey wrench into the works. But another reason is that he doesn’t want to interfere with liquified natural gas exports that Europeans are relying to make up for the shortfall. US LNG is more expensive than Nord Stream gas and more environmentally costly since it must be shipped thousands of miles. So while one might think that investigation would come first since it could conceivably result in Biden’s criminal indictment, Trump, his eye on the bottom line, doesn’t want to do anything that might adversely affect foreign trade. The conspiracy of silence will endure so that LNG can continue to flow and the Texas oil-and-gas men who contributed to his campaign fund can continue raking in profits.

Still think we live in a democracy?

Notes:

My article on Konstan Chernenko is available at https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1340/americas-chernenko/.

For more on the Harvard/Harris and Politico/Morning Consult polls, see https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/17/poll-biden-mental-fitness-job-approval-522785 and https://freebeacon.com/politics/joe-biden-mentally-unfit/.

For information on the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League, see https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/73469/1/LuuHuyenLe_Thesis.pdf.