On Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused the Biden administration of using the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on him by monitoring his emails and text messages.
“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 attempt to take this show off the air,” Carlson said.
“Now that’s a shocking claim and ordinarily we’d be skeptical of it; it’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens,” Carlson said. “It’s a crime. It’s not a third-world country. Things like that should not happen in America. But unfortunately, they do happen, and in this case, they did happen. 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. There’s no other possible source for that information, period.”
“The NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons,” Carlson claimed. “The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.”
If Carlson’s claims are true, this would not be the first time the NSA had spied on U.S. citizens without a warrant. Under the Obama administration with Biden as the Vice President, the “National Security Agency and FBI violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama administration by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts,” The Hill reported.
The NSA under Obama-Biden intercepted “hundreds of thousands of specific phone numbers and email addresses the agencies intercepted through the so-called Section 702 warrantless spying program created by Congress in late 2008.”
Carlson added, “This morning we filed a FOIA request — Freedom of Information Act request — asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show. We did it mostly as a formality. We’ve also contacted the press office of both NSA and the FBI.”
“We don’t expect to hear much back,” Carlson said. “That’s the way that usually goes. Only Congress can force transparency on the intelligence agencies and they should do that immediately. Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. If they are doing it to us, and again they are definitely doing it to us, they are almost certainly doing it to others. This is scary and we need to stop it right away.”
