A few short years ago, US intelligence under the Biden administration targeted ZeroHedge, accusing us of ‘mis-/mal-/dis-information’ for what was in reality us merely taking an independent, critical view of Washington policy regarding the Russia-Ukraine war and the Covid-19 pandemic. We were promptly smeared, de-monetized by Google, briefly banned on Twitter (now X) and generally sneered at by the mainstream media, with accompanying ill-informed hit pieces.
We took this as a badge of honor, given we simply asked questions which the majority of non-DC beltway commemorati, i.e.: normal middle Americans, wanted to know. Fast-forward to President Trump taking the White House, and times have drastically changed, especially seen in the fact that America’s Commander-in-Chief actually regularly and openly engages with the press – something which was missing in action during four years of sleepy Joe Biden. Major events and the obvious questions and angles which most of the American public naturally thought should be subject of frank open debate and inquiry were not even asked, as the State Dept and White House press pool MSM members were regularly rewarded for posing ‘safe’ questions on which there was ‘establishment consensus’. This is how “access” typically works in the beltway swamp after all.
Again, times have changed and with that welcome shift comes your very own ZeroHedge correspondent, recently admitted into the White House press pool under the administration’s new media policy. Finally the people can have a voice, outside the domineering ‘gatekeeping’ of the likes of CNN, NBC, ABC, Washington Post, and the list goes on.
Exhibit A: on Monday “Tyler Durden” engaged directly with the president, first expressing appreciation that Trump broke the MSM gatekeeping stranglehold over who is allowed into government briefing rooms, and then asking the kind of question high on ZH readers’ minds. Watch:
🚨 NEW: ZeroHedge @zerohedge gets to ask Trump a question!
ZH: “Two and a half years ago the Nord Stream pipeline blew up. You said Russia did not blow up its own pipeline. Will you launch a formal investigation into who blew it up?”
TRUMP: “If I asked certain people I could… pic.twitter.com/3fKLljrVwD
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) May 5, 2025
“If you can believe it they said Russia blew it up,” Trump initially acknowledged in response to our question on whether two-and-half years after the Nord Stream pipeline bombings, the US administration would open up a formal investigation into whodunnit.
“Well probably if I asked certain people they would be able to tell you without having to waste a lot of money on an investigation,” the president said. “But I think a lot of people know who blew it up, but I was the one who blew it up originally because I wouldn’t let it be built, and then when Biden got in he allowed it to be built.”
Here, President strongly suggested that based on classified intelligence he knows exactly who was behind the September 26, 2022 covert operation which ended in the Baltic Sea explosions and major leaks which took the vital Russia to Germany natural gas pipelines permanently offline. Of course, with no investigation whatsoever (a serious European inquiry didn’t even begin till the following year), Western mainstream press coalesced around the dubious “Russia bombed their own pipeline!” narrative.
That’s when Trump as an aside tipped his hand related to his strategy for leveraging the price of oil to bring Moscow to the negotiating table. “But I think Russia with the price of oil right now, oil’s gone down, I think we’re in a good position to settle – they want to settle, Ukraine wants to settle. If I weren’t president nobody would be settling,” he explained.
“They’re losing 5,000 people,.. think of it here we’re talking about football… they’re losing 5,000 people on average a week,” he continued. “Mostly Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers… not including people that are killed by missiles going to areas they shouldn’t be. It’s a very terrible thing and I’ve think we’ve come a long way.”
Whodunnit?
In early 2023, famed journalist and Pulitzer price winner Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report which concluded that the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.
Hersh, relying on unnamed national security sources, describes months of discussions and back-and-forth involving the Biden White House, CIA, and Pentagon. The report says planning was in the works all the way back to December 2021, with a special task force formed under the aegis of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report, entitled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline reads. “The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022,” it continues.
In parallel, an interesting Ukrainian ‘rogue ops’ narrative emerged, reported in the Wall Street Journal and some other outlets long after the explosions. In that version the scheme was dubbed a Ukrainian “public-private” partnership as it involved military officers reportedly being financed from these private sector sources. Some top Ukrainian special-operations officers were recruited, and the crew set out “armed only with diving equipment, satellite navigation, a portable sonar and open-source maps of the seabed charting the position of the pipelines.”
The Ukrainian ‘rogue’ covert sabotage and CIA narratives aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. But Trump’s response to ZH should put the ‘Russia destroyed its own vital and economically lucrative pipeline’ storyline to rest.
View President Trump’s full response to ZeroHedge pressing him on an independent US Nord Stream investigation here:
Meanwhile, Trump characterized Putin’s WW2 Victory Day unilateral 3-day ceasefire proposal as a positive initial step toward peace – despite Zelensky this weekend rejecting it as but “theatrics”…
“President Putin just announced a three-day ceasefire, which doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot if you knew where we started from.” He concluded: “We had a president that for three years didn’t speak to Putin and it all shouldn’t have happened – this is a war that should have never happened.”
“And you are going to be very disappointed when you find out the real number of people that were killed – it’s far greater, many times greater… it’s very very deadly horrible war,” the president added.
Question 2: Anthrax
We also asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr today about the 2001 Anthrax attacks, an event he has long-discussed as possibly being a false flag staged by the Bush-Cheney admin:
Bravo @zerohedge asking about the anthrax attacks pic.twitter.com/APPkXfioVw
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) May 5, 2025
Prior remarks by Kennedy outlining the anthrax attacks… (in-depth dive into the attacks to follow soon on ZH):
Robert Kennedy Jr tells Jimmy Dore that anthrax was mailed to the two senators trying to block the Patriot Act in 2001, and the FBI discovered that the anthrax came from the CIA lab in Fort Detrick: pic.twitter.com/CxxPQSnric
— Epstein’s Sheet. 🧻 (@meantweeting1) June 23, 2023
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/05/2025 – 23:30
