Hersh made additional accusations in an interview with the China Daily newspaper that was published on Friday after making his initial accusations in a piece published in February.
The [US] president feared that Scholz would refuse to send further weapons and weapons forward for Kiev. Just that. I'm not sure if it was out of retaliation or fury, but the end result was the cutting off of a significant power source in Western Europe, according to Hersh.
Despite US efforts to downplay its role in the Nord Stream attack, the journalist claimed that "Europe is in trouble now" and that Biden will face "a lot of criticism for what he did" in the coming months.
The Pulitzer Prize winner claimed that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan contacted "the folks that were initially requested to execute the job" of destroying the pipes near the end of 2021.
According to Hersh, the original intent of Nord Stream 1 and 2, which were constructed to transport Russian gas to Europe through Germany, was "to provide the [US] president an option to say to [Russian] President Putin, 'If you go to war [in Ukraine], we're going to destroy the pipelines.'"
Yet, "sadly, those people in the Western press seemed to have forgotten," the journalist said. Biden himself had openly affirmed that stance.
In a press conference on February 7, just two days before Moscow's military action in Ukraine began, Biden stated that "if Russia invades... there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2." We'll put a stop to it.
According to Hersh, the US president made the decision to order the mines to be set off at the bottom of the Baltic Sea last September because, in the US's opinion, the conflict in Ukraine "wasn't going great." In what Hersh called "the American war that President Biden was so ready to embrace," there was "at best a stalemate" throughout that time.
