Tucker Carlson recently revealed that the NSA was spying on him and leaked his private emails to journalists in an effort to discredit him. He even claimed it was to make him look like a Russian agent.
According to Mediaite:
Carlson alleged last week that the National Security Agency had monitored his private communications, which, if true, would be a massive scandal. Carlson’s claim has been met with skepticism. And curiously, his bombshell allegation was mostly ignored by the rest of Fox News in the days that followed. So Carlson’s appearance on Fox Business with anchor Maria Bartiromo is notable.
The interview opened with the Fox prime time host recapping his previous allegations. Then, he made some news.
“Yesterday I learned, that — and this is going to come out soon — that NSA, leaked the contents of my e-mail to journalists in an effort to discredit me,” Carlson claimed. “I know this because I got a call from one saying ‘oh, this is what your e-mail was about.”
“So, it is not in any way a figment of my imagination,” he continued. “It’s confirmed, it’s true. They are not allowed to spy on American citizens — they are — and I think more ominously they are using information they gather to put leverage to threaten opposition journalists, people who criticize Biden administration happening to me right now, I think shocking I don’t think we should put up with it in a free country.”
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An article in Fox News adapted Carlson’s commentary about the incident where he claims:
Even now, some of the media are claiming that we deserve this. Emailing with people who know Putin, are you? Of course, the NSA is watching you. That’s what you get. But that’s hardly the point. By law, the NSA is required to keep secret the identities of American citizens who’ve been caught up in its vast domestic spying operations. So by law, I should have been identified internally merely as a US journalist or American journalist. That’s the law.
But that’s not how I was identified. It was identified by name. I was unmasked. People in the building learned who I was and then my name and the contents of my emails left that building at the NSA and wound up with a news organization in Washington. That is illegal. In fact, it is precisely what this law was designed to prevent in the first place. We cannot have intelligence agencies used as instruments of political control.
Both parties used to agree on that. Democrats were especially adamant on the point, but not anymore. So that’s exactly what is happening here. We need to find out how this happened, who did it, who allowed it?
…
We don’t have a lot of power, we’re just a TV show. But we’re going to keep pushing for that because it matters. Not just to us, but to the entire country. You can’t have a democracy in a place where unaccountable spy agencies keep people in line by leaking the contents of their emails, discrediting them with their own emails, which they thought were private. It doesn’t work if you allow that. And we suspect congressional Republicans will also demand an answer.
Carlson ended by claiming that the hard reality is that the intelligence agencies are not your friend.
