Fox News host Tucker Carlson dropped a bombshell claim on Monday night against the U.S. government, declaring that a whistleblower had informed him that the National Security Agency was actively spying on his communications in an effort to take his show off the air.
In recent weeks, Carlson has spun a largely baseless conspiracy that the FBI was to blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, citing a far-right website to make the assertion that the presence of unindicted co-conspirators in the ensuing indictments means FBI agents were actively involved with organizing the seditious Capitol riots. (Besides Carlson fundamentally misunderstanding the role of cooperating witnesses after the fact, legal experts have pointed out that government agents can’t be named as unindicted co-conspirators.)
During Monday’s broadcast of his primetime Fox show, Carlson once again defended his claims about the FBI, though this time he noticeably softened the language of his prior assertion that the insurrection was a government false flag.
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“The war on terror, now ongoing for 20 years, has pivoted. It is now being waged against American citizens, opponents of the regime,” the right-wing host 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 had foreknowledge of the riots of the Capitol that day and the agents we spoke to confirm that is true. ‘The FBI had sources in that crowd, confidential sources, snitches. That’s 100 percent certain.’”
After claiming the FBI merely had prior knowledge of the rioters’ intentions because it had “sources” in the crowd, Carlson suddenly made a stunning accusation: The federal government itself was snooping on him, and for the sole purpose of ending his show.
“But it’s not just political protests that the government is spying on,” Carlson exclaimed. “Yesterday, 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 to take this show off the air.”
Insisting he would normally be “skeptical” of such a “shocking claim,” as it is a “crime” and the U.S. isn’t a “third world country,” the Fox star nonetheless said he knew for a fact that the NSA absolutely did spy on him.
“The whistleblower who is in a position to know repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails,” he said. “There’s no other possible source for that information. Period. They did it for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.”
Carlson claimed he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding all information that the NSA and other government agencies have gathered on him and his show. He then appeared to called on Congress to act on his behalf.
“Only Congress can force transparency on the intelligence agencies and they should do that immediately,” he concluded. “Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. 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 remains to be seen if any proof will come out that the Biden administration is using spy agencies to take down Tucker Carlson Tonight or if the Fox News star is looking to get ahead of a potentially negative story, as we’ve seen him do in the past.
