Tucker Carlson NSA Allegations: Intelligence-Agency Abuse Has Happened Before

Tucker Carlson now says a “whistleblower” in the NSA 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 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 Ron Wyden in 2013. “No, sir,” Clapper said under oath, “. . . Not wittingly.” Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed this as a lie.

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David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.

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Tucker Carlson now says a “whistleblower” in the NSA 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 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 Ron Wyden in 2013. “No, sir,” Clapper said under oath, “. . . Not wittingly.” Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed this as a lie.