Free Republic

In May, an American investor tried to sell top German economic officials on an audacious plan to buy a Russian undersea pipeline. Despite years of international friction over the pipeline, he proposed to eventually activate it and deliver natural gas to Germany. The investor, Stephen P. Lynch, had already made the pitch to the Trump administration, which he was betting would want U.S. control over a pivotal piece of energy infrastructure. Now the Germans wanted to hear for themselves about Mr. Lynch’s proposal to lead a takeover of the much-criticized pipeline on the floor of the Baltic Sea, called Nord...

WASHINGTON — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has alleged US Navy divers laid bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, drawing a denial from the Pentagon Wednesday. Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968, cited an unnamed source in reporting on Substack that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe. Hersh, 85, went on to claim that the Navy...

"In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion. It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back...