NSA Responses To Carlson Triggering Controversial Debates On All Sides

The National Security Agency Issued a response on Fox News host Tucker Carlson claiming that they have been spying on him via his texts and emails. Their response sparked a wide range of emotions on Tuesday Night with most people either shifted to one of two sides: Either they used the statement to claim Carlson was lying for the views on Fox or they noted how carefully the statement by the NSA was crafted.

Carlson claimed this at the start of the week:

“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. … 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. 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.“

Read each sentence carefully. https://t.co/B3EzYj14PH

— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) June 30, 2021

The NSA responded by very publicly releasing a statement the moment Carlson’s show aired on Tuesday night that claimed:

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.

Carlson responded to the NSA’s statement by stating in part:

“Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that. Instead, it comes with this non sequitur, in part, quote, ‘Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the agency.’ Okay, glad to know. But the question remains, did the Biden administration read my personal emails? That’s the question that we asked directly to NSA officials when we spoke to them about 20 minutes ago in a very heated conversation. Did you read my emails? And again, they refuse to say, again and again. And then they refused even to explain why they couldn’t answer that simple question. We can’t tell you and we won’t tell you why we can’t tell you. My emails. And the message is clear. We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts; we can read your personal emails; we can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don’t like your politics; we can do anything.“