Tucker Carlson says the NSA is spying on him. Is that even plausible?

WASHINGTON – Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said this week that the National Security Agency was spying on him to “knock his show out of thin air.”

The NSA immediately denied the allegations, saying it focused solely on “foreign targets”. Critics dismissed Carlson’s claim as a cynical attempt to anger his conservative viewers who made him the most watched host on the cable news.

But is there any way Carlson’s assertions are true or partially true?

The National Security Agency’s mission is focused on tracking foreign threats and has the authority to retrieve emails, SMS, phone calls, and other electronic data from virtually any foreign source, including heads of state, foreign government officials, foreign spies, and terrorist organizations.

The National Security Act of 1947, which formed the legal basis for the establishment of the NSA, contained a special ban on intelligence officials from operating domestically.

The law prohibits the NSA from wiretapping a U.S. citizen directly unless a federal court rules that there is a suspicion that the person is collaborating with a foreign target. There is no evidence that a court has authorized Carlson to be monitored.

However, the agency ends up collecting emails or phone records from Americans when those US citizens are in contact with foreigners who are being monitored.

Tucker Carlson speaks on stage during the 2018 Politicon at the Los Angeles Convention Center on October 21, 2018.Phillip Faraone / Getty Images for poliicon file

Carlson claims the NSA monitored his communications for political reasons, implying that there was no legal basis for the alleged surveillance. There is no independent evidence for this claim which, if true, would constitute a grave breach of the agency’s legal guard rails.

If Carlson has been in contact with a foreigner targeted by the NSA, his emails or phone calls could be caught by this surveillance, experts said. It’s also possible that he didn’t know or wasn’t sure if the person on the other end of the call was a foreign agent.

“There is a very good chance that an American citizen may be accidentally intercepted or collected because he or she happens to be associated with a foreign target,” said Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI deputy director of counterintelligence.

If Carlson’s claims were true, it could be that “he was communicating with a foreign agent,” said Figliuzzi, who is also an NBC News employee.

Even so, intercepted messages containing a U.S. citizen are top secret, accessible to a limited number of people, and the American’s identity will be kept secret unless intelligence officials have valid reason to know their identity, Figliuzzi said.

“The division of a US person’s identity within the NSA is incredibly strict,” he added.

A former FBI agent, James Harris, tweeted that the NSA was unlikely to read Carlson’s emails or texts. But he said if that were the case there would be only two options under the law: that the person the TV expert emailed or texted was an agent of a foreign power, or that federal Carlson court itself ruled on a foreign agent have.

“Tucker Carlson was never an intelligence target for the agency, and the NSA never had any plans to take his program off the ground,” the National Security Agency said in its statement on Tuesday. “We target foreign powers to learn about foreign activity that could harm the United States. With a few exceptions (such as an emergency), the NSA cannot attack a US citizen without a court order expressly authorizing it . “

The wording of the NSA statement left open the possibility that Carlson’s emails or texts were accidentally collected while monitoring a foreigner.

Fox News has not issued a statement since Carlson made his on-air allegations and other shows on the network have not followed major coverage. When asked about the allegations, Fox News directed NBC News to a section on Carlson’s show that aired Tuesday but offered no further comment.

Carlson previously devoted a lot of airtime to allegations that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have ties to corruption in Ukraine. A public assessment by US intelligence agencies concluded that Russian intelligence agencies were trying to fuel this narrative during the 2020 election in an attempt to discredit Biden and try to re-elect then-President Trump. Russian agents were believed to have leaked material to “prominent US figures and media outlets in order to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences.”

It is not clear whether Carlson’s coverage of this or other issues could have brought him in contact with a foreigner targeted by the NSA. The prime-time presenter interviewed the President of El Salvador earlier this year, and the NSA is known for policing political leaders around the world.

The National Security Agency has received widespread criticism over the past two decades for its secrecy and handling of domestic electronic data. After secret service agent Edward Snowden leaked details about the agency’s extensive wiretapping, the NSA faced allegations of tampering with American privacy and hiding the extent of its data collection.

During a 2013 congressional hearing, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper misled Congress about the NSA’s controversial collection of domestic phone records and later apologized. According to intelligence officials, the NSA collected data on phone calls made and received and the duration of phone calls, but not the content of conversations.

In 2008, the FBI said it illegally obtained telephone recordings of reporters for the New York Times and Washington Post from the newspapers’ Indonesian offices. The then FBI director Robert Mueller apologized to the editors-in-chief of the newspapers for the incident. The FBI relies on the NSA to collect electronic communications overseas.

The administration’s handling of surveillance was also heavily criticized in the case of Carter Page, former Trump campaign aide who was the subject of a national security order but was never charged with a crime.

In January last year, the Justice Department concluded that two of the four court orders that allowed the FBI to conduct covert surveillance of Page’s national security were invalid because the government had made “material misrepresentations” in obtaining them . This was followed by a damning report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, who found that the FBI’s motions to spy on Page were full of “factual misrepresentations and omissions.”

Last January, a former FBI attorney was given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to forging an email in a site surveillance request. Notably, however, the judge said that the warrant would likely have been approved anyway without the false statement. Page had previously been the target of Russian intelligence recruitment efforts, according to court records.

“That could happen to you”

Carlson came out midway through his show on Monday with his NSA allegation, saying a “whistleblower” in the federal government had informed him of the NSA espionage aimed at forcing his show off the air.

“Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the US government who warned us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them to take this show off the air.” said Carlson.

He said the person who contacted him “was repeating to us information about a story we are working on that can only come straight from my texts and emails.”

“There is no other possible source for this information,” said Carlson.

He also alleged that the alleged surveillance was politically motivated with no evidence to be produced.

“The NSA captured this information without our knowledge and did so for political reasons,” he said. “The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Has called for an investigation into Carlson’s allegations and said he has asked California Representative Devin Nunes, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, to investigate.

On Tuesday’s broadcast, Carlson doubled his allegations, saying the White House avoided direct dementia and accused the Biden administration of attempting to “intimidate” him.

This undated government photo is an aerial view of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland.AP file

“If we let them go on, it’ll be the end of democracy. Democracy can’t work with semi-independent, highly politicized intelligence agencies. It’s really dangerous,” said Carlson.

The TV host claimed that the NSA “routinely” spies on Americans, sometimes for “political reasons”.

Then he suggested that his viewers had reason to fear that they might be next.

“A faceless hacker in a powerful state intelligence agency decides he doesn’t like what you think, so he’s going to hurt you and there is nothing you can do about it. That could happen to you, ”said Carlson.

“The message was clear: we can do what we want,” said Carlson. He called his experience “Orwellian” and similar to “living in China”.

Carlson then linked his allegations to a common theme in his program, claiming that the Biden administration was a threat to American freedom and wrongly labeled many “patriotic Americans” as indigenous terrorists and saboteurs of white supremacy.

PEN America, a nonprofit advocating freedom of expression, said the allegation that the NSA was spying on an American media figure was “worrying,” but questioned whether Tucker Carlson’s claims are considered credible given his track record could.

“In this case, however, the allegations were made without evidence and have now been dismissed by the NSA. Tucker Carlson’s veracity is poor as judged by credible fact-checking sources,” said Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America.

“Without further details and justifications, there is no basis on which to judge this allegation as credible.”

In a defamation lawsuit filed by former Playboy model Karen McDougal against Fox News for testimony by Carlson, attorneys at Fox argued that the TV host was not disclosing facts in the air, but rather exaggerating for rhetorical reasons. The judge agreed and ruled last year that Carlson’s statements could not be considered “factual representations”.

The Anti-Defamation League called on Fox News to fire Carlson, saying he defended a theory of white supremacy that claims that whites are “replaced” by blacks.

Carlson’s “Rhetoric wasn’t just a dog whistle for racists – it was a megaphone,” ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt said in an April letter to Fox News.

Fox boss Lachlan Murdoch dismissed criticism of the ADL and defended Carlson by saying the TV host “rejected and rejected the substitute theory” and focused only on one issue of voting rights.