Greenwald: NSA had ‘legal obligation’ to conceal Tucker Carlson’s identity from intercepted communications

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald responded to allegations made by Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the National Security Administration (NSA) had falsely identified him through communications an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Wednesday should.

On Wednesday, Carlson alluded to an Axios report that made such allegations about the NSA.

Carlson said that only he and his executive producer knew of his intention to have an interview with the Kremlin leader earlier this year. The host noted that he is not the first US journalist seeking an interview with the Russian leader.

NBC News reporter Keir Simmons was able to interview Putin ahead of the G7 conclave earlier this year, and Fox News host’s Chris Wallace – Fox News Sunday host – received an Emmy nomination for his concise interview with the ex-KGB agent in 2018.

“When the NSA collects information sent privately by an American citizen, they must keep that citizen’s identity secret unless they go through a process to” expose “it, Carlson told Greenwald on Wednesday. “It seems very clear that you did exactly what you are not allowed to do.”

Greenwald responded that the case has two important components: The likelihood that Carlson’s communications were intercepted with “legal authority” because he was dealing with either the Russian government or a “target in the United States, the [he] was used as an intermediary “.

“[If] In this way you learned that you spoke to the Russians about the possibility of an interview with Putin, they are legally obliged to hide your identity and to make sure that nobody knows that you were the one who spoke to the Russians ” , he said .

“The intelligence that [the NSA] interested that the Russians did something, not with whom they spoke – either neglecting the legally required concealment of your identity, which is illegal, or attempting to expose it after it was minimized. “

“They have been operating in secret and without democratic accountability for eight or nine decades,” Greenwald said, adding that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the pitfalls of the national security state when he stepped down in 1961.

TUCKER CARLSON: NSA READ MY PRIVATE EMAILS, PLANNED TO LEAK THE CONTENT

“The cure here is for Congress – it is the responsibility of Congress to oversee how the executive is spying on people, and for so long Congress is either afraid of the NSA and the CIA, or worse, it’s subject to them,” claimed the journalist.

“It was the Republican Party along with the Democrats who had long revered these agencies, and it was only under Trump that they began to realize that these agencies are actually interfering in our politics and threatening our democracy and really treading pernicious paths, and that they are doing this Have to accept knowledge that you have learned over the last five years and use it to get to the bottom of what happened here. “

Carlson said the NSA director General Paul Nakasone – a Trump candidate – would know the answer to these claims.

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Late last month, the agency responded to Carlson’s first report on the matter with the following statement:

“Tucker Carlson claimed the National Security Agency was’ monitoring our electronic communications and planning to leak them to take this show off the air.” This accusation is untrue; Tucker Carlson was never an Agency intelligence target, and the NSA never had any plans to take his program off the ground.

The NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to learn about foreign activity that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g., an emergency), the NSA must not attack a US citizen without a court order expressly authorizing the targeting. “