By Breitbart. I laughed when Fox News host Tucker Carlson said a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower told him that agency was monitoring his emails to leak them in an attempt to take his show off the air. From my 19 years as a CIA analyst and five years with House Intelligence Committee staff, I found this impossible to believe[.]
[T]he NSA spying on Carlson would have to be approved at the highest level of the Biden administration—probably by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. I believed Sullivan and other senior Biden officials were too risk-adverse to order NSA surveillance of Carlson. Third, I have little regard for high-profile NSA whistleblowers, too many of whom have been disgruntled former employees pursuing personal agendas. . .
Carlson rejected this explanation by calling it “an infuriating, dishonest formal statement.” He added, “Last night on this show, we made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission. Period,” Carlson stated. “That’s what we said. Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that.”
In a tweet, Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan, a longtime critic of NSA, also sharply criticized NSA’s response, saying: “Don’t know whether NSA is *specifically* spying on Carlson, but this statement is worthless. 1st, it denies a compound allegation re ‘monitoring’ *and* taking show off air. 2nd, it says he’s not a ‘target,’ which is a term of art. Real danger is so-called ‘incidental collection.’”
Let’s be very clear about what the NSA said in its statement. It denied “targeting” Carlson, but did not deny reading his emails. The NSA also did not deny that it may have accessed Carlson’s communications through “incidental collection.” (Read more from “The NSA Does Not Deny Reading Tucker Carlson’s Emails” HERE)
______________________________________________________________
Tucker Carlson Says the NSA Is Spying on Him. Sadly, It’s Plausible
By Real Clear Politics. Tucker Carlson says a “whistleblower” in the National Security Agency tipped him off that the agency was planning to leak emails and texts to get him off the air over a story he’s working on. Sounds rather fantastical. We’ve seen no evidence or corroboration of the accusation. My initial instinct should be to dismiss conspiratorial claims about domestic espionage. 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 wasn’t that long ago when former President Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied to Congress about the agency’s snooping on American citizens. “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” asked Sen. Ron Wyden in 2013. “No, sir,” Clapper said under oath, ” … Not wittingly.” Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed this as a lie.
It was John Brennan’s CIA that ran an illicit spying operation against the United States Senate, with five agents breaking into Senate Intelligence Committee files. He then lied about it to lawmakers and the public. When asked about the hacking, Brennan claimed that “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the — you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Do you think people who hack into Senate files — and get away with it — will have any ethical compunction about spying on a TV personality?
Obama also weaponized the NSA for partisan reasons, abusing its foreign-intelligence-collection authority to spy on pro-Israel Jewish-American groups and lawmakers in connection with its Iran-deal negotiations. It was also Obama’s FBI that fabricated FISA-warrant applications — 390 problems were found in 39 of the 42 applications, “including unverified, inaccurate, or inadequately supported facts, as well as typographical errors,” according to a subsequent inspector general’s report — to spy on the opposition campaign over trumped-up “collusion” charges that were largely propelled by a partisan oppo-research document. (Read more from “Tucker Carlson Says the NSA Is Spying on Him. Sadly, It’s Plausible” HERE)
Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.
