New: Tucker Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Putin shortly before he accused the NSA of spying on him. U.S. gov’t officials learned of this outreach … but that’s where details get cloudy. https://t.co/5kbjMJnQ2r
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 7, 2021
An NSA spokesman declined to comment and referred Axios back to the agency’s earlier, carefully-worded, statement. In other words, the NSA is denying the targeting of Carlson but is not denying that his communications may have been incidentally collected. https://t.co/puTyIEUTEi
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 7, 2021
I don’t suggest there’s anything wrong with this type of back-channel outreach. I often do it myself trying to get foreign leader interviews. I am trying to establish what actually happened at the collection end, and here I’ve reported what I could confirm so far.
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 7, 2021
IOW, the NSA was spying on Tucker Carlson. https://t.co/ubFIJJdhhO
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) July 7, 2021
According to the Axios article:
The first — and least likely — scenario is that the U.S. government submitted a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Carlson to protect national security. A more plausible scenario is that one of the people Carlson was talking to as an intermediary to help him get the Putin interview was under surveillance as a foreign agent.
In that scenario, Carlson’s emails or text messages could have been incidentally collected as part of monitoring this person, but Carlson’s identity would have been masked in any intelligence reports. In order to know that the texts and emails were Carlson’s, a U.S. government official would likely have to request his identity be unmasked, something that’s only permitted if the unmasking is necessary to understand the intelligence.
In a third scenario, interceptions might not have involved Carlson’s communications. The U.S. government routinely monitors the communications of people in Putin’s orbit, who may have been discussing the details of Carlson’s request for an interview.
But under this scenario, too, Carlson’s identity would have been masked in reports as part of his protections as a U.S. citizen, and unmasking would only be permitted if a U.S. government official requested that his identity be unmasked in order to understand the intelligence. And it’s not clear why that would be necessary here.
WHO UNMASKED @TuckerCarlson and leaked his emails? There is a crime in this chain of events.
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) July 7, 2021