NSA spied on Fox News host Tucker Carlson?

Scoop: Tucker Carlson sought Putin interview at time of spying claim

axios

Why it matters: Those sources said U.S. government officials learned about Carlson’s efforts to secure the Putin interview. Carlson learned that the government was aware of his outreach — and that’s the basis of his extraordinary accusation, followed by a rare public denial by the NSA that he had been targeted.

  • Axios has not confirmed whether any communications from Carlson have been intercepted, and if so, why.

The big picture: Carlson’s charges instantly became a cause célèbre on the right, which feasted on the allegation that one of America’s most prominent conservatives might have been monitored by the U.S. intelligence community.

The backstory: Carlson told his roughly 3 million viewers on June 28 that the day before, he had heard “from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA … is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

PS: I don’t read Axios but this article was cited in an article in rt.com

If Carlson was communicating with the Russian govt to secure an interview, I imagine the NSA would be doing its best to collect information on the Russian govt and would see the “received mail”. That seems entirely reasonable, and would be consistent with we might have his emails with Russia, but “he wasn’t targeted”. Try to take him off the air? Not as much. He is probably more useful as a focus than unknown future people who would take his place, assuming NSA leadership is corrupt enough to worry about such things.

On the political humor side, when, in the history of the entire known universe, did anyone expect intelligence to develop from listening to Tucker Carlson?

:lolup:

This. There is no government interest in listening in on Tucker Carlson. If Tucker Carlson or his staff directly reached out to someone in the Kremlin, I would expect that the NSA is trying to monitor government officials there (as Russia and China likely are with our government officials). So far, this is not newsworthy.

Kind of like how General Flynn got caught up in scandal. He was talking to the Russian ambassador, who was being monitored by our spying agencies.

Sort of surprised this story didn’t come with a second angle: Americans are weak. If Putin doesn’t like a journalist he doesn’t bother to spy on them, he just has them killed.

Sounds like something Trump would say in some closed-door meeting.
Or at a news conference.

Is that what you are hoping Eliot Higgins would say with some shady sources…?

lol. his Russia work really upsets you. If you ever want to objectively discuss any of the Bellingcat work, I’m listening.

You can start with this list if you like:

It’s missing the arrests and attempted murders though.

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Here is the meltdown of Elliott Higgins

Yep, he is real unbiased expert.

I can give you some link to show where he gets his funding. nm, you already have them.

Hmm, so it’s not his reporting it’s that he told the GRU to suck his balls after they accused him of manufacturing open sourced information? Would you care to comment on any of the actual reporting?

Wait until you find out who funds rt

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:rofl:

Tucker Carlson is an entertainer. No reasonably intelligent person would believe anything he says.

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Unfortunately his audience isn’t comprised of reasonably intelligent people.

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Are you expecting me to defend all the alleged wrongdoing of Putin? I like Putin and Xi Jinping for a simple reason. They stand up to the USA. I read a really nice reader comment:

Western “liberalism” is not about freedom (and this becomes more and more obvious each day, as “liberalism” reveals its deeper totalitarian nature) but is just a tool for power - the expansion of the rule of certain circles of interest through the expansion of “liberalism”. A tool and a trick for gaining power.
This is probably why the CIA is so “pro-liberal”, because they recognized that “liberalism” is the perfect tool for the expansion of US hegemonism, through so called “liberal values”. “Liberalism” is a Trojan horse. It is also good for the ideological control of the domestic population.

I accidentally deleted another post in the process of editing the previous post. From today’s rt.com

Which brings us to the present day, and the revelation that the NSA spied on Carlson’s emails. The details of how aren’t yet clear. It could have been through a FISA warrant, the way the FBI spied on Trump’s campaign and the first year of presidency, falsely claiming Carter Page was a “Russian agent” and citing the fraudulent, Democrat-funded Steele Dossieras evidence. Or it could have been through incidental spying on a foreign citizen he was emailing, but with Carlson’s name illegally “unmasked” and leaked to the press – the same way Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn was set up in early 2017.

To borrow a phrase from Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point does it make? Only one of the people involved in ‘Spygate’ was ever punished for it – with a slap on the wrist, no less – while the rest went on to become heroes of the Resistance. Ditto with the railroading of Flynn. Having successfully spied on and sabotaged an existing president, why wouldn’t they go after a cable TV host?

Moreover, Americans who get their news from CNN or MSNBC don’t know about any of this, and think these are Republican conspiracy theories – unlike the Russiagate fantasy that Trump was a Kremlin agent and Russia somehow “hacked our democracy” in 2016, which they believe is 100% real.

Liking someone for the sole reason that they stand up to the US is really mindless. You must have loved Osama Bin Laden.

And slaveowners.

:confused:

By the way, do you share the same affection for Maduro. Assad. Kim, and most recently Ortega who has recently arrested all potential political opponents…