The National Security Agency denied that it eavesdropped on Fox talker Tucker Carlson, and Carlson angrily fired back that the agency’s statement did not deny his central claim.
Though the NSA said the popular commentator was not an intelligence target, it never denied that it had access to or read his e-mails. Nor, Carlson noted on his latest program, did the Biden Regime.
In other words, NSA might well have looked at Carlson’s e-mails and Internet traffic. Of course, short of a subpoena from Congress, it will never admit such illegal activity.
“Foreign Intelligence Mission”
The battle between Carlson and the super-secret intelligence agency began on Monday, when the commentator claimed a whistleblower said NSA was watching him.
The whistleblower, Carlson averred, “repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails.”
Continued Carlson:
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, a Freedom of Information Act request, asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show.
“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.’ This allegation is untrue,” the spy agency replied:
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. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.
Carlson Replies
Noting that other news organizations seemed to think it was “totally normal for heavily politicized intel agencies” to spy on journalists, Carlson said “it’s the end of democracy” if such spying continues.
Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki did not deny the allegation, Carlson noted, and instead appeared to read the Wikipedia entry for the agency.
Carlson called the NSA’s answer an “infuriatingly dishonest … entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC.” The commentators telephoned and unsuccessfully sought an answer from “highly political, left-wing” NSA chief Paul Nakasone. The answer from Nakasone’s underlings, figuratively speaking, was this: “Shut up, Serf! Obey!”
Later, NSA published its statement.
Said Carlson:
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.
That’s because the agency’s claim that he has never been an “intelligence target” is a “complete non sequitur,” and did not address his specific charge: that NSA read his e-mails.
“Did the Biden administration read my personal emails?” he asked. Carlson said his people repeatedly asked NSA officials that question just before the program:
Did you read my emails? And again, they refused 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 was 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’re our own country, and there’s literally nothing you can do about it. We’re in charge, you are not.”
Orwellian does not begin to describe the experience.
The NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, as Edward Snowden’s major leak of NSA documents in 2013 showed, as The New American noted in its first report on Carlson’s accusation. A half century ago, the Church Committee learned the agency had eavesdropped on Americans even then.
Founded in 1952, the NSA grew out of the military’s cryptological efforts during World War II and is responsible for signals intelligence.
