In an interview on Tuesday night, a top U.S. official explicitly declared that the country was not responsible for the attack on two Russian pipelines late last month.
The interview comes after "extraordinary" damage was caused to three lines in Russia's Nord Stream natural gas pipeline system last Monday. The CIA had previously warned that the pipeline would be targeted for sabotage because of Russian President Vladimir Putin's conflict in Ukraine.
When asked about it by Fox News anchor Bret Baier, John Kirby, the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic communications, said that the United States "had nothing to do with it."
“That’s just Russian propaganda and disinformation,” Kirby claimed. “Now, we know it was an act of sabotage, but there’s an investigation going on right now. I don’t think we’re going to get into credentialing that in terms of who was responsible. We’re going to let the investigators take a look at that. But, clearly, this was an act of sabotage.”
After playing a clip of Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that the pipeline's destruction was "a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs," Baier pressed Kirby once more on the subject.
Bret Baier grills the National Security Council's John Kirby over whether the US or a proxy had anything to do with the Nord Stream pipeline attack:
"The United States had nothing to do with it. That's just Russian propaganda and disinformation." pic.twitter.com/8LGK6sbwpN
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 4, 2022
Kirby once again declared that the Biden administration was not responsible for the attack.
“Not to belabor this, but for the people who look at this and say, ‘why would Russia attack its own pipeline that creates leverage over Europe and perhaps the West,’ what do you say to them?” Baier asked.
“Again, I can’t speak to specific accountability for this act of sabotage,” Kirby responded. “I can just assure you the United States had nothing to do with it, of course. That’s just Russian propaganda. And look, we’re — again, without — without crediting it to anybody right now, what I would say is, just look at what Russia has done in the past since the last seven months of this war and when it began, and that is to weaponize energy.”
