NSA Blasts FOX News Host Tucker Carlson for False Accusations

The National Security Agency (NSA) on Tuesday denied Fox News host Tucker Carlson's claims that the agency is spying on him. After Carlson on Monday alleged a government whistle-blower told him the NSA was monitoring him for "political reasons" in an effort to take his show off the air, the NSA, in a rare public statement, said the claims were simply "not true."

The NSA addressed the claims in a statement shared to its Twitter page Tuesday evening in part reading, "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." The statement went on note how the NSA "has a foreign intelligence mission" and targets "foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States." The agency added that "with limited exceptions," such as emergencies, the "agency may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."

The NSA's rebuke came just a day after Carlson, during a segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, said a whistleblower informed his show that the NSA "is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air." Carlson said his show "confirmed" the claim and explained that the alleged whistleblower "repeated back to us information about a story we are working on that could have only come from my texts and emails." He also accused the Biden administration of involvement, claiming, "the Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that." Carlson revealed he and his team filed an FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act, request Monday for alleged information collected by the NSA and other agencies and called on Congress to immediately "force transparency" on intelligence agencies. He told viewers that they did not "expect to hear much back," adding, "spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. If they are doing it to us — and again, they are definitely doing it to us — they are almost certainly doing it to others. This is scary, and we need to stop it right away."

Following the NSA's rare public statement, Carlson continued the war of words on-air, calling the NSA's comments "an infuriating dishonest formal statement" and "an entire paragraph of lies." He stood by his claim that the "NSA has read my private emails without my permission," and said the NSA's statement "does not deny that." He went on to warn, without any evidence, that "we're going to see a whole lot more of this kind of thing" and said it was a "recipe for tyranny."