EDITOR’S NOTE: Courts, based on arguments from Fox News lawyers, have determined that Tucker Carlson is not unreliable: “Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes.”
Fox News host (and man who won’t mess up his coif by wearing a tinfoil hat) Tucker Carlson says the gubment is spying on him. (You can see the video here from an earlier post.)
“Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the US government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring out electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air. Now that’s a shocking claim, and normally we’d be skeptical of it. It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. It is a crime, it is 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 we are working on that could only have come from my texts and emails. There’s no other possible source for that information, period. The NSA’s capture that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons. The Biden Administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.”
Lots could be going on here, and as usual, Tucker’s wrong:
- Tucker could be once again playing the victim of a non-existent plot, like when he claimed a package he sent to California to prep for an interview mysteriously disappeared, only to show up in a UPS warehouse days later;
- He could be creating a cover story for legal, warranted surveillance for a criminal investigation he’s the subject of. He was, remember, Matt Gaetz’s cover story;
- He could be involved with a foreign national plot or government which the NSA *is* legally permitted to surveil. (Think Mike Flynn.) His claim that the government wants to “take [his show] off the air” could be a hint that whatever he’s doing involves planting evidence for something that he’ll claim was supposedly found overseas;
- Tucker’s accounts have been hacked, and it’s not an “NSA whistleblower” informing him of the information, but the hacker blackmailing him;
- The person who got the texts and emails turned them over; or
- One of his staffers had his cell phone and found text messages indicating an illegal, treasonous or untoward plot that they wanted someone in law enforcement to know about.