Donald Trump has given no indication that he knows anything the rest of us don’t already know about the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines. Despite this, he and Fox News host Tucker Carlson would very much like you to believe that the Biden administration was responsible.
In an interview Tuesday night, the former president made his strongest insinuation to date that the United States sabotaged the pipelines. This is a theory the Biden administration has explicitly and repeatedly rejected and for which Trump and adherents like Carlson have provided no real evidence.
Speaking with Carlson, who has advocated for the idea using less-than-convincing evidence, Trump leaned in.
“Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?” Carlson asked.
Trump responded, coyly: “I don’t want to get our country in trouble, so I won’t answer it. But I can tell you who it wasn’t, was Russia.”
Carlson hailed this as something amounting to proof of his theory that the Biden administration was responsible. He teased the clip before a commercial by saying, “We asked Trump. He would know. And he does.” In the lead-in to the clip, Carlson falsely claimed that the Biden administration “promised to blow up” the pipeline. (It did not.)
Just to take a step back, this is a cable news host and a former president leading viewers to believe that the United States was responsible for what would be an extremely provocative act — not just provocative regarding the Russia-Ukraine war, but also regarding our relationships with European allies. And they have provided no actual evidence for this.
The pipeline has long been a controversial subject because it was built to bring natural gas from Russia to Europe. This led to concerns that it would make Europe too reliant on Russian energy. The situation came to a head when Russia invaded Ukraine last year, with Germany soon freezing the project. But actually destroying the pipelines would take things to another level. (The European Union has called an intentional attack “utterly unacceptable” and said it would be met with the “strongest possible response.”)
Despite Carlson’s claim that Trump was telegraphing that he knew the truth, Trump himself suggested recently that he doesn’t.
Appearing on Glenn Beck’s show in late February, Trump responded to a similar question by saying, “It could have been us, and it could have been Ukraine, and it could’ve been some third-party country that wants to see trouble. The one group it wasn’t is Russia.”
Trump previously nibbled around the edges of this theory as well.
Shortly after the explosions in late September, Carlson was advancing a rather shoddily constructed case for U.S. responsibility. The totality of the case was essentially that President Biden had promised to “bring an end to” the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine and that a State Department official had said, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Carlson cast this both then and today as tantamount to admissions of plans to sabotage the pipeline, even though there are readily available alternative explanations. It wasn’t at all clear how the United States would prevent Europe from relying on the pipeline, and the situation involved very delicate diplomacy. It should have been no surprise that the administration was being oblique about how it planned to halt it.
But this nuance wasn’t welcome. Two days after the explosions, Trump on his Truth Social platform played up those old comments from the Biden administration while saying, “Wow, what a statement. World War III anyone?”
(Left unsaid: Trump’s own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, once offered comments similar to the ones offered by the Biden administration, saying the United States would “do everything we can” to stop the pipeline. So this was a talking point that united the two administrations.)
We still have little concrete evidence of what happened. The Biden administration quickly called it an “act of sabotage” and has repeatedly offered assurance that the United States wasn’t responsible.
When longtime journalist Seymour Hersh in early February cited a single anonymous source blaming U.S. Navy divers, the administration called it “utterly false and complete fiction.” Since then, The Washington Post has reported that intelligence officials have focused on the idea that the explosion was the work of pro-Ukraine saboteurs.
It’s quite possible we will never know what happened. But let’s consider for a second Carlson’s suggestion that Trump does know the truth.
It’s not at all clear how Trump would have obtained such information. Biden announced a month after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that his administration would not give Trump the intelligence briefings traditionally given to former presidents.
But even if Trump knew something, this would amount to his essentially broadcasting highly sensitive information on national TV. It would be information that would stoke tensions with allies, and it would come from a former president who’s already in legal trouble for mishandling classified information.
Much more likely is that this is part of Trump’s long-standing effort to suggest the Biden administration is at fault for the war in Ukraine, especially given the comments a month and a half ago, which suggested he truly didn’t know.
Either way, it’s a remarkable thing for a former president to be speaking about so cavalierly — and for a cable TV host to suggest is some kind of smoking gun.