The National Security Agency (NSA) Tuesday night announced that Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is making “untrue” allegations about the agency spying on him.
Carlson, who has been accused of endorsing white supremacist theories and echoing white supremacist rhetoric, on Monday told his audience that the NSA is spying on him in an effort to force him off the air.
“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,” Carlson claimed Monday evening. “We have confirmed that.”
The NSA in a rare move but on timed to co-ordinate with the start of Carlson’s show tweeted out a statement saying Carlson’s “allegation is untrue.”
“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.”
Here’s Carlson Monday night: