We now know the National Security Agency (NSA) not only was monitoring the electronic communications of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, but that either NSA or senior Biden officials leaked information from his communications to the news media in an attempt to smear him.
Axios reported July 7: “Tucker Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.”
The Axios article proves several troubling aspects of this story.
First, Carlson was right. This confirms what he says an NSA whistleblower told him: that NSA has been reading his emails, or transcripts of his phone calls, or both. Carlson did not make this up.
Second, the law was broken here. Although it is normal for an American reporter trying to interview a Russian official to have his or her name and electronic communications incidentally (accidentally) collected by NSA, U.S. law and intelligence community regulations require this information to be strictly protected. Since Carlson is an American citizen, NSA would be required to “mask” Carlson’s name in its reports and replace it with something like “an American reporter.”
Third, it is very possible that the request to unmask Carlson’s name came from the White House. Very senior U.S. officials are allowed to ask for the names of Americans masked in NSA reports to understand them.
Although such requests are supposed to be uncommon and a very serious matter, this process was extensively misused by senior Obama officials in 2016 to obtain the names of Donald Trump campaign staff from NSA reports. Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice made some of these requests. She is now in the Biden White House and would know how to make unmasking requests.
But Carlson claimed something even worse: that NSA personnel both unmasked his name and leaked it to the media to smear him and take him off the air. He also contends “people in the [NSA] building learned who I was,” implying that his unmasked name was widely circulated within NSA.
read more here: https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/09/why-the-white-house-is-probably-behind-the-tucker-carlson-nsa-email-scandal/
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