Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that the NSA was spying on him, and the totally-above-board-spy-agency responded with an extremely carefully-worded statement.
If you missed what Tucker said, here was his claim:
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. It is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air. Now that's a shocking claim, and ordinarily we'd be skeptical – it is illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. 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.
The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.
That's a pretty big claim, and interesting new details from Axios (yes, from a left-leaning media outlet!) show how said assertion could be true.
Before even getting into the article, let me point out this statement by journalist Jonathan Swan:
The NSA is denying the targeting of Carlson but is not denying that his communications may have been incidentally collected.
How can these two things be true at once? Because the NSA can collect information on Americans if they are, I don't know, writing to ask for an interview with a foreign person of interest:
Tucker Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.
Why it matters: Those sources said U.S. government officials learned about Carlson's efforts to secure the Putin interview. Carlson learned that the government was aware of his outreach — and that's the basis of his extraordinary accusation, followed by a rare public denial by the NSA that he had been targeted.
Axios posits three possible scenarios for how the NSA might have gotten Tucker's communications.
The first — and least likely — scenario is that the U.S. government submitted a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Carlson to protect national security.
A more plausible scenario is that one of the people Carlson was talking to as an intermediary to help him get the Putin interview was under surveillance as a foreign agent.
In that scenario, Carlson's emails or text messages could have been incidentally collected as part of monitoring this person, but Carlson's identity would have been masked in any intelligence reports.
In order to know that the texts and emails were Carlson's, a U.S. government official would likely have to request his identity be unmasked, something that's only permitted if the unmasking is necessary to understand the intelligence.
In a third scenario, interceptions might not have involved Carlson's communications. The U.S. government routinely monitors the communications of people in Putin's orbit, who may have been discussing the details of Carlson's request for an interview.
But under this scenario, too, Carlson's identity would have been masked in reports as part of his protections as a U.S. citizen, and unmasking would only be permitted if a U.S. government official requested that his identity be unmasked in order to understand the intelligence. And it's not clear why that would be necessary here.
If the NSA was monitoring Tucker Carlson for an interview with Putin (and Axios mentions specifically that this has not been a basis to monitor other journalists before), they wouldn't have had specific details about who Carlson was unless someone "unmasked" or revealed his name from the files.
The question in this case is who would have unmasked Tucker, as that takes some serious authority.
Two sources told Axios that Tucker's two primary contacts that he uses to contact the Russian government for news stories live in America.
This is relevant because if one of them was a foreign national and on foreign soil during the communications, the U.S. government wouldn't necessarily have had to seek approval to monitor their communications.
What actually happened here is an important story, because if indeed a spy agency working under the Biden admin was actively snooping on an extremely popular American journalist, it sets a scary precedent for us all.
If they can target someone like Tucker, it's all too easy to go after the rest of us, and just like that the free press (what's left of it) could die.
