Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night wondered aloud why Taylor Lorenz, the author of a Washington Post story earlier in the day on the popular Twitter account “Libs of TikTok,” isn’t registered as a foreign agent.
In the piece, the reporter makes note of findings from software developer Travis Brown that helped her reveal the right-wing account’s creator, Brooklyn-based real-estate agent Chaya Raichik. Specifically, Brown uncovered deleted tweets from the account, including those in which Raichik claimed she attended the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Brown, Lorenz notes, receives support from the German-based Prototype Fund. The fund, according to its website, “supports ideas in civic tech, data literacy, data security and software infrastructure” with money from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
That funding, Carlson claimed, proves that “what happened to the woman who runs Libs of TikTok—her life being destroyed—was not the work of Taylor Lorenz... it was a foreign intelligence operation designed to silence and intimidate an American citizen.”
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Carlson then questioned the legality of Lorenz’s reporting methods and even suggested the Biden administration could have been involved. The Fox News host had particularly harsh comments for Lorenz, a former Daily Beast tech reporter who has spoken publicly about how her work has led to a great deal of harassment. Among other things, Carlson called her “merely a receptacle for information other people gather for their own ends.”
“And since she was the willing recipient of this information from a foreign government designed to destroy an American citizen, why hasn’t Taylor Lorenz at the very least registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act?” Carlson wondered.
How exactly Lorenz, who used publicly available tweets from Brown to aid her reporting, is working on behalf of the German government, Carlson didn’t explain. He only closed his monologue by saying, “Lots of questions here.”
