Tucker Carlson blasts NSA, says agency will not answer about whether it spied on his emails
Tucker Carlson blasted the National Security Agency on Tuesday after it released a statement saying that he "has never been an intelligence target of the Agency."
Carlson on Monday asserted that the NSA has been spying on him. He said that a whistleblower inside the government had warned that the NSA is surveilling his electronic communications and planning to leak the material in an effort to get his show removed from the air.
"The whistleblower, who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on" which must have been procured though "my texts and emails," Carlson said on his Monday program. "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," he said.
The NSA on Tuesday released the following statement: "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.' 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. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."
During his Tuesday night TV show, Carlson lambasted the NSA's statement as "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."
Carlson noted that on Monday "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," he said.
Carslon said that the NSA still has not provided an answer about whether it spied on his emails.
"But the question remains: Did the Biden administration read my personal emails? 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 refused to say. Again and again. And then they refused even to explain why they couldn't answer that simple question," Carlson said.