As journalist Tucker Carlson said Monday, February 12, that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on him and kept him from interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin in previous years, the United States government has previously refuted those claims.
In a rare move, the NSA put out a news release on X to refute the claims, Knewz.com has learned.
"On June 28, 2020, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been 'monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.' This 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," the agency wrote on June 29, 2021.
The NSA clarified that its mission is to monitor foreign threats.
"NAS 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 U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting," the agency wrote.
Still, Carlson claims the NSA has interfered with his reporting.
“I’ve been trying for three years to do this interview,” Carlson said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in his first remarks since he broadcast his conversation with the Russian president last week, according to Spy Talk. “The U.S. government prevented me from doing it by spying on my text messages and leaking them to The New York Times. And that spooked the Russian government into canceling the interview.”
Carlson's claims date to a 2021 show on Fox News in which he said that a "whistleblower" contacted his team, saying the NSA “has been monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”
On the show, Carlson said the whistleblower “repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and e-mails,” Carlson said. “There's no other possible source for that information. Period.”
The NSA, which generally is tight-lipped, followed with the tweet in a rare move.
According to The Record, a cybersecurity news site that used anonymous sources in its reporting, the NSA wound up with some of Carlson's information through "third parties" that mentioned him.
In a controversial move, Carlson finally secured his interview with Putin, which was aired last week.
As Knewz.com reported on February 9, Putin told Carlson that Russia could have had an agreement to end the Ukraine war if former United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn't intervene.
Putin reportedly told Carlson that Boris Johnson "dissuaded" the leader of Ukraine's leading party from signing a document to end the conflict.
According to The Daily Mail, Putin told Carlson that Ukraine signed a deal to end the war but backed out after Johnson said it was "better to fight Russia."
Putin alleged that Davyd Arakhamia, the head of Ukraine's ruling party, put his "preliminary signature" on a document after negotiations with Russia in Istanbul before changing his stance.
"But then he [Arakhamia] publicly stated to the whole world, we were ready to sign this document but Mr. Johnson, then the Prime Minister, came and dissuaded us from doing this, saying it was better to fight Russia," Putin said. "They would give everything needed for us to return what was lost during the clashes with Russia. And we agreed with this proposal."
Putin said the idea of Kyiv refusing to sign the deal was "ridiculous."
"And it's very sad to me because, as Mr. Arakhamia put it, we could have stopped those hostilities with war a year and a half ago already. But the British persuaded us, and we refused this. Where is Mr. Johnson now? And the war continues," Putin said.
As Knewz.com reported the same day, Putin also said a deal to return jailed journalist Evan Gerskovich is possible.
Putin said that the Kremlin was holding talks with the United States to facilitate Gershkovich's release.
Gershkovich was arrested on March 29, 2023, from the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, around 1,000 miles east of Moscow, on charges of espionage. In January 2024, Putin extended Gershkovich's pre-trial detention to March, according to BBC News. If found guilty of espionage, the reporter stands to face 20 years of incarceration in Russia.
Putin said that a deal could be attained "if our partners take reciprocal steps," according to BBC News. "The special services are in contact with one another. They are talking… I believe an agreement can be reached," Putin added.