Tucker Carlson said Monday that the National Security Agency is "spying on him" and planned to leak his communications in efforts to cancel his show.
Tucker said, “It's not just political protesters the government is spying on, yesterday, we heard from a whistleblower within the US government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”
And he went on to elaborate:
Now, that's a shocking claim and ordinarily would be skeptical of it. It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. It's a crime. It's not a third-world country. Things like that should not happen in America. But unfortunately, they do happen, and in this case, they did happen. The whistleblower who is in a position to know repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails. There's no other possible source for that information, period.
The NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that. This morning we filed an FOIA request of Freedom of Information Act request asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show. We did it mostly as a formality. We've also contacted the press office at both NSA and the FBI. We don't expect to hear much back. That's the way that usually goes.
When I worked with members of the NSA staff during the Capitol Hill leg of my career, I would have been skeptical if not downright hostile to that suggestion, but that was before the Obama-era politicization of the intelligence agencies became so obvious and proof of their perfidy so very public.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the Trump years, it is that nothing is beyond the Pale for these tyrannical Leftists, including using the vast power and tools of the federal government to illegally spy on journalists and any other citizen who gets in the way of their political agenda.
And Tucker Carlson is not the first or only journalist to be spied upon for getting in the way of the Progressive Left’s agenda.
Independent journalist Sharyl Attkisson was spied upon, her computer was hacked, and the hack led back to the Obama FBI.
Ms. Attkisson was subjected to illegal surveillance while covering Obama administration failures such as the Benghazi attack and Operation Fast and Furious.
She even had an informant that acknowledged a role in the snooping and named Rod Rosenstein as the one directing the surveillance. Rosenstein was the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore for 12 years and went on to serve as deputy attorney general under President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019 and was eyeball deep in the FISA abuses directed against former President Trump.
POLITICO reported Ms. Attkisson’s lawsuit also named as defendants members of the mutli-agency group that investigated an online dark-web marketplace known as the Silk Road. Among them was a Secret Service agent who specialized in computer forensics, Shaun Bridges. He’s currently serving eight years in prison for stealing Bitcoins during his government work.
Another prominent defendant in Ms. Attkisson’s suit was former FBI executive assistant director Shawn Henry, who now serves as chief security officer for the global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
You will recall that CrowdStrike was the firm that conducted the “investigation” of the DNC servers and claimed the evidence pointed to the servers being hacked by Russia.
If these dots are beginning to connect for you then you are on the same line as we are and as Tucker Carlson is: The government and its employees, with or without authorization, can and does spy on whomever they choose to spy on – and they do so without fear of being held accountable.
After Tucker’s broadcast and several follow-up phone calls the agency denied Carlson's claim it was monitoring his electronic communications or trying to force "Tucker Carlson Tonight" off the air.
"Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air," the statement read in part. "NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."
However, Carlson said the statement did not directly address what he was asking when his team attempted to get an answer from NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone.
"Last night on this show we made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission. Period. Tonight’s statement does not deny that," Carlson said.
Carlson called Nakasone a "highly-political left-wing four-star general," and recounted that an NSA receptionist refused to connect his team to Nakasone's office during a call on Tuesday morning.
Carlson recounted another terse call with the NSA, which is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland.
"Did the Biden administration read my emails? NSA officials refuse to say," Carlson said. "In a very heated follow-up conversation 20 minutes ago, they refused even to explain why they won’t answer that simple question."
The message the NSA was sending him, Tucker Carlson said, was: "We can do whatever we want." And Tucker is right – they can and do, do whatever they want as long as it advances the interests of the Deep State and the Leftists that control it. And if they can do it to Tucker Carlson, they can do it to you.
National Security Agency
Tucker Carlson
FISA Court
personal privacy
4th Amendment
Whistleblower
Biden administration
Justice Department
Federal law enforcement
Intelligence Agencies
deep state
Sharyl Attkisson
Rod Rosenstein
Shaun Briges
Shawn Henry
Gen. Paul Nakasone