The NSA has offered a response to Tucker Carlson’s bombshell allegations that the agency and by default, the Biden administration is spying on him in an effort to get the show off the air.
To briefly recap, earlier this week on his show, Carlson claimed to have been told by a whistleblower in a “position to know” that he and his show were being spied on. The Fox News host claimed the unnamed informant provided details that could have only been obtained from a private email conversation he had with another individual close to him and the show. He then revealed that he and his team had reached out to agency officials and filed a FOIA request into the matter.
“Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. 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,” Carlson announced on his show Monday night.
“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 a FOIA request — Freedom of Information Act request — asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show.”
The National Security Agency responded Tuesday to these allegations that they are spying on Fox News host Tucker Carlson by claiming he was never the “target” of any of their operations.
“On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been ‘monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air,’” the agency said in a statement. “This allegation is untrue. 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.”
“NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States,” the statement added. “With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.”
In a back and forth, Carlson again took to his show in order to respond to the unsatisfactory agency statement in response to his allegations as well as state his show contacted directed the agency directly by reaching out to Paul Nakasone, director of the NSA. Nakasone’s office would not connect him.
“Then, just minutes before air tonight, the NSA sent us an infuriatingly dishonest formal statement, an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC, all those people they hire with the titles on the screen. They also tweeted out a few minutes ago,” Carlson said. “Now, last night on this show, we made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission, period. That’s what we said. Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that.”
“Instead, it comes with this non sequitur, in part, quote, ‘Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the agency.’ Okay, glad to know. But the question remains, did the Biden administration read my personal emails?” Carlson continued. “That’s the question that we asked directly to NSA officials when we spoke to them about 20 minutes ago in a very heated conversation. Did you read my emails? And again, they refuse to say, again and again. And then they refused even to explain why they couldn’t answer that simple question. “We can’t tell you and we won’t tell you why we can’t tell you.’ My emails.”
“And the message is clear. We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts, we can read your personal emails, we can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don’t like your politics, we can do anything. We are our own country. And there’s literally nothing you can do about it. We’re in charge, you’re not,” Carlson concluded.
“‘Orwellian’ does not begin to describe the experience, it was like living in China. But we should get used to it. Now that the Biden administration has classified tens of millions of patriotic Americans, the kind who served in the military and fly flags in front of their homes, as potential domestic terrorists white supremacist saboteurs, we’re gonna see a whole lot more of this kind of thing. A whole lot more.”
The allegations themselves as well as the resulting response generated a variety of reactions, from both sides. For the most part, the responses fell along party lines, some responded with skepticism of the National Security Agency’s response and while others were skeptics of Tucker’s allegations. Some went so far as to, predictably, label Carlson as a “conspiracy theorist.”
First some of the top responses made by those skeptical of the agency’s statement:
In contrast, there were also responses by the blue checkmarks on Twitter that took the agency’s statement at face value and claimed the Fox News host was forwarding more “conspiracy theories.” Most mocked and or called him a liar:
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