Fox News’s Tucker Carlson dropped a shocking allegation this week.
He claims the National Security Agency is spying on both him and his show’s producers, and all in an effort to get the highly ranked cable news program pulled from the air.
If true, it’s a serious scandal, one that’d require serious ramifications. But that’s a big “if true.” Carlson has yet to produce evidence proving his case. All he has produced thus far is the say-so of an anonymous whistleblower.
As always, the burden of proof is on the accuser.
“Joe Biden told us recently that the single gravest terror threat this country faces is not Islamic radicalism, ISIS, or al Qaeda, as the government has told us for 20 years now,” Carlson said on his show Monday evening. “It’s not the brutal mobs of race extremists who burned and looted our cities last summer, BLM and antifa, as — if you’ve been paying attention — you’d assume it would be, of course. They’re the ones who burned the cities.”
He added, “So why does the Biden administration persist in telling that lie?”
The answer, the Fox News host asserted, is the Biden administration is signaling “a very real change to actual federal policy.”
“The war on terror, now ongoing for 20 years, has pivoted. It’s now being waged against American citizens — opponents of the regime,” Carlson said. “We saw this on display on Jan. 6. We told you a couple of weeks ago, based on the language in publicly available indictments, that the FBI clearly had foreknowledge of the riot at the Capitol that day. The agents we spoke to this weekend confirmed that’s true.”
There’s more, he said. The government is spying on more than just protesters.
“Yesterday,” Carlson said, “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 take this show off the air. Now, that’s a shocking claim, and ordinarily, we’d be skeptical of it. It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. It’s a crime. This isn’t a third-world country. Things like that shouldn’t happen here. But, unfortunately, they do — and in this case, they did.”
He added, “The whistleblower, who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story we’re working on that could only have come directly from my texts and emails. There’s no other possible source for that information, period. The NSA captured it without our knowledge for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us. We’ve confirmed that.”
Carlson claims his team has already filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all information the NSA and other agencies have gathered about his show.
“We did it mostly as formality,” the anchor said. “We contacted the press office at the FBI and the NSA. We don’t expect to hear much back. Only Congress can force transparency on the intelligence agencies — and they should, immediately.”
He concluded, “Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. If they’re doing it to us — and again, they are definitely doing it to us — they’re almost certainly doing it to others. This is scary, and we need to stop it right away.”
What more can be said at the moment? Nothing, actually.
What we do now is wait. We wait to see what happens with the FOIAs. We wait also to see if congressional inquiries turn up any proof of Carlson’s allegation. Until then, the best course of action is to hold fire. It certainly wouldn’t be surprising to learn the NSA is, in fact, spying on Carlson. It’s not as if the feds are above spying on members of the press. That said, until we have more than just an allegation, Carlson’s story should be treated exactly as that: an allegation.
In other words, no matter how plausible the story sounds, even if you want it to be true, it must be handled with skepticism until you see evidence of spying.
Remember, it “feels true” and it “rings true” are not good standards for determining a story’s authenticity. That’s how we got two years’ worth of Russian collusion stories.
