A week and a half ago, Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced on his nightly show that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on him, telling his viewers:
“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 effort to take this show off the air. Now, that’s a shocking claim, and ordinarily we’d be skeptical because it is 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.”
Why would the NSA be the least bit interested in Tucker Carlson? Granted, he’s on television nightly, but he lies so much and pumps out so many bogus conspiracy theories that nothing he says can be taken seriously.
Unless, of course, Carlson was reaching out to an adversarial government in an attempt to arrange an interview with one of the most despised men on the face of the planet.
According to Vox:
“Tucker Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.”
Think about that for a moment: An American going through intermediaries who contacted the Kremlin, either via phone or email, about meeting with Putin, who is believed to have personally signed off on a deliberate attack on the 2016 election and who is also in charge of various Russian intelligence agencies that continue to target the United States via computer hacking and ransomware attacks.
Quite frankly, Carlson’s lucky the FBI hasn’t paid him a visit and asked why he’s making contacts with sources inside of Russia.
Once again, quoting Axios:
“Those sources said U.S. government officials learned about Carlson’s efforts to secure the Putin interview. Carlson learned that the government was aware of his outreach — and that’s the basis of his extraordinary accusation, followed by a rare public denial by the NSA that he had been targeted.”
In other words, Carlson knew he’d gotten busted reaching out to Russia and tried to suggest he was being set up by U.S. intelligence. But it also begs the question of why Carlson or Fox didn’t make the government aware of their contacts in advance, which is often done by reporters who are attempting to communicate with foreign leaders.
Something about Carlson’s paranoid ramblings suggests there’s more to this story that has yet to come out. And when it does, don’t be surprised if the Fox host and his network are proven to have been on the brink of having broken the law.
This story isn’t over with, and that should terrify Tucker Carlson.