Fox News Host Tucker Carlson went there this week, revealing a wild tale involving the NSA, a whistleblower, and his personal electronic devices.
According the the conservative pundit, a whistleblower from within the National Security Agency reached out to Carlson to reveal that their employer had been spying on him. This whistleblower was alleged to have information available to them that could have only been gleaned from Tucker’s personal electronic devices.
Now, the agency is responding to the host.
The National Security Agency (NSA) on Tuesday rejected claims made by Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the agency was monitoring his electronic communications and seeking to leak them in an effort to take his show off the air, calling the allegations “not true.”
“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 NSA wrote in a statement shared on its Twitter page.
“NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting,” the agency added.
Carlson spoke at length about the issue on Tuesday, stating that the NSA’s clarification did not make any denial of the claims, but merely stated that Tucker himself wasn’t being burdened with any additional, arbitrary designations by the government agency.
