The Patriot Post® · Is Joe Biden's NSA Spying on Tucker Carlson?
In the least surprising revelation of the week, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson said Monday night that Joe Biden’s intelligence services are spying on him. He said he’d been told by a whistleblower that the National Security Agency had accessed his personal email and text messages. Why? To get him off the air. He’s the Democrats’ bête noire, after all — the hard-hitting, high-profile conservative critic for whom they have no answer.
“The Biden administration is spying on us,” Carlson asserted. “We have confirmed that.”
Tucker Carlson says a whistleblower told him that he is being spied on by the NSA and that he filed a FOIA request for information:
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 29, 2021
“The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.” pic.twitter.com/LY2vmDLFTK
We say Carlson’s claim is unsurprising simply because we wouldn’t put anything past a Democrat administration. Their party and their principles are rotten to the core, as they made clear when the Obama administration and its intelligence services spied on the Trump campaign before and after he became president, while lying to obtain FISA warrants and concocting a fantastical “Russian collusion” ruse to enable it.
National Review’s David Harsanyi isn’t surprised either, though he’s more measured in his condemnation: “My initial instinct should be to dismiss conspiratorial claims about domestic espionage,” he says. “As it happens, though, I’ve been alive for the past two decades. And history tells us it is wholly conceivable that intelligence and law-enforcement agencies would spy on a television personality. They spy all the time. They do it illegally. They do it for partisan reasons. They do it to lawmakers. They do it to journalists.”
It’s unsettling, isn’t it? That a forceful critic of the current administration could be targeted and ultimately silenced? But it happens, and not just to the likes of Tucker Carlson. Harsanyi notes that James Clapper, Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, lied to us all under oath when Democrat Senator Ron Wyden asked him, point blank, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
“No, sir,” Clapper said — a lie that was later exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
As Carlson reminded his viewers: “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.”
It is scary. Carlson’s claims compelled the NSA to tweet out a remarkable denial. For what it’s worth, it reads in part:
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. 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.
Joe Biden’s paid liar, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, also denied Carlson’s charges — again, for what it’s worth.
Last night, Carson provided an update on his claims. He called the NSA’s statement of denial “an infuriatingly dishonest formal statement — an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community’s lackeys at CNN and MSNBC.”
Carlson said that his staff had tried to contact NSA Director Paul Nakasone yesterday, but to no avail. He said Nakasone is “a highly political left-wing four-star general” and that an NSA receptionist had refused to connect his team to the director. “Did the Biden administration read my emails?” Carlson asked. “NSA officials refuse to say. In a very heated follow-up conversation … they refused even to explain why they won’t answer that simple question.”
Last night, a guest on Carlson’s show, civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon, said she wasn’t surprised by the NSA’s response. “In the last 20 years since 9/11,” Dhillon said, “I and other civil libertarians have been screaming about the Patriot Act and other laws. But dating back to 1947, the law said spying may only be on foreign and not on American citizens, and our government regularly flouts that.”
She, too, pointed to the Snowden revelations as proof that the agency “has been gathering and storing American telephone calling records for years.”
Carlson believes the message the NSA is sending him is this: “We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts and emails. We can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don’t like your politics. … Orwellian doesn’t begin to describe the experience.”
It seems clear that the NSA is sending another message on behalf of its leftist bosses: Shut up. Otherwise, the price you’ll pay for criticizing this administration and its fellow travelers will extraordinarily high.