The National Security Agency released a statement Tuesday evening refuting rumors that it was directed by the Biden administration to spy on Tucker Carlson.
Tucker previously said during his “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show on Fox News yesterday that he was certain the Biden administration’s Department of Defense was using the NSA to spy on him and other people working at Fox News.
The NSA fired back and noted that Tucker’s assertions that people at the NSA were monitoring his private conversations in an attempt to get “Tucker Carlson Tonight” taken off the air were false. As Tucker pointed out during his show Monday, it is extremely illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens — and as the NSA noted in its statement, it is predominantly focused on foreign intelligence issues, not what a domestic TV show host is doing.
In a statement published June 29, the NSA and Central Security Service said:
“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.”
Former president Donald Trump recently said he thhought it was “totally believable” that the NSA would be monitoring Tucker. Tucker had previously said that he was certain the government was spying on him, and he knew this thanks to an anonymous “whistleblower” who tipped them off.
Earlier this week Tucker claimed the leaker “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,” Tucker said. “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 this morning.”
Shortly after the NSA replied to his claims, Tucker fired back on his live show Thursday evening and called the NSA’s letter “infuriatingly dishonest.”