According to Tucker Carlson, emails that he sent in an effort to get an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin were allegedly examined by the National Security Agency before being leaked to media outlets.
The revelation was the most recent development in Carlson’s allegations that the NSA was spying on him, and it led to a rare denial of the claim by the intelligence service in a statement. In addition, the organization refuted Carlson’s assertion that it was attempting to push his program off the air.
He persisted in his assertions, but the tale took on a new twist Wednesday afternoon when Axios revealed that Carlson had been looking to speak with Putin through a middleman.
That made it more likely that one of those middlemen, who was purportedly connected to Putin, was being watched as a foreign agent. Although Axios claimed that Carlson’s attempts to get the interview were discovered by American government personnel, the website did not corroborate that his communications were eavesdropped.
On his show, Carlson confirmed that he was seeking the Putin interview, saying that he wanted to keep his outreach quiet. “I figured that any kind of publicity would rattle the Russians and make the interview less likely to happen,” he said.
But Carlson claimed that he learned from a whistleblower of an NSA plan to leak the contents of the emails to media outlets, and “we learned they actually did it.”
He went on to contend that he was “unmasked,” or that his identity was revealed in the surveillance.
“I was unmasked, people in the building learned who I was,” Carlson said. “And then my name and the contents of my emails left that building at the NSA and wound up with a news organization in Washington. That is illegal.”
According to Axios, in order to comprehend the nature of intelligence, a government official would have to ask that the identities of people involved in intelligence be “unmasked.” Other theories were also suggested by the story, one of which was the possibility that the US had been listening in on contacts between a Putin ally and Carlson as they discussed the latter’s desire for an interview.
Although it’s also possible that the recipients of the emails made them public, Carlson has insisted that he only alerted his producer, Justin Wells, about his outreach.
Carlson said that the “point, of course, was to paint me as a disloyal American” a Russian operative, “a stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor,” for seeking the interview. It’s hardly a rarity for journalists for U.S. outlets to interview Putin, including Fox News’ Chris Wallace and, more recently, NBC News’ Keir Simmons.
An NSA spokesperson said the agency had nothing to add beyond its previous statement:
National Security Attorney Bradley Moss wrote his take on Twitter. “So NSA didn’t spy on Tucker. They weren’t trying to get him taken off the air. They appear to have been surveilling Putin’s cronies. Tucker’s e-mails were incidentally collected. No evidence NSA was the one who leaked them. No reason to believe Putin’s cronies didn’t leak them.”
In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson said, “We support any of our hosts pursuing interviews and stories free of government interference.”
Watch as Tucker Carlson talks about the hacking by the NSA:
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