Fox News primetime star Tucker Carlson was dismissed as paranoid when he made the seemingly outrageous claim this summer that the federal government was spying on him.
Turns out he’s not paranoid after all: The NSA had collected, and then unmasked, Carlson’s name from its foreign intelligence surveillance program.
Now, the agency’s internal watchdog has just announced an investigation into how and why it happened – and whether Carlson was specifically targeted, as he has alleged.
“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 to take this show off the air,” Carlson said in June.
The NSA then issued a rare public statement, and even mentioned him by name.
“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,” the agency insisted.
As it turned out, Carlson was apparently trying to score an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the feds picked up on in their surveillance programs.
Those programs are supposed to monitor only foreign intelligence targets, and any American name swept up in the process should be “masked,” or kept anonymous, to protect their identity.
They can only be unmasked when there’s a good reason to seek their names.
That appears to be what happened here as Carlson’s name was revealed. Someone he described as a whistleblower then found out… and told him about it.
“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,” Carlson said on the air at the time. “There’s no other possible source for that information, period.”
But unlike the initial denial… in which the NSA mentioned Carlson by name… the new statement says only that they’re investigating to see if their surveillance operation “improperly targeted the communications of a member of the U.S. news media.”
The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the statement refers to Carlson.
Carlson said this week during an interview with Glenn Beck of The Blaze that when he first learned of his name being swept up by the NSA he called a senator he knew and said he was scared – and asked what he should do.
“And he said you’ve got to go public with it because you don’t have any other defense. You don’t have actual power. The only power you have is to talk, which is true, and you need to do that right away, prophylactically, as a self-defense move,” Carlson said.
He followed the advice – even though he knew what it would sound like.
“I felt like kind of a lunatic,” he admitted. “You don’t want to go on TV — I mean, would you want to go on-air and saying they’re spying on me? No, you sound like a nutcase, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice.”
Even Fox News seemed to distance itself from the allegations, remaining silent for days.
With the allegations confirmed, the network has been far louder in support of its star host.
“We are gratified to learn the NSA’s egregious surveillance of Tucker Carlson will now be independently investigated,” Fox News told The Hill. “As we have said, for the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson or any journalist attempting to secure a newsworthy interview is entirely unacceptable and raises serious questions about their activities as well as their original denial, which was wildly misleading.”
Carlson told Beck he’s not the kind of person that typically goes around making these kinds of claims.
“I think I’m the least paranoid, sunniest, most optimistic, naive person I know,” Carlson said.