Faced with that language, Carlson put on his angry lawyer hat. On his Tuesday night show, he called the statement “infuriatingly dishonest.” He recapped the whole thing as follows:
Now last night on the show, we made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission, period. That’s what we said. Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that. Instead, it comes with this non sequitur: In part, quote, ‘Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the agency.’ Okay, glad to know. But the question remains: Did the Biden administration read my personal emails? That’s the question that we asked directly to NSA officials when we spoke to them about 20 minutes ago in a very heated conversation. Did you read my emails? And again, they refused to say. ... And then they refused even to explain why they couldn’t answer that simple question.
Like any statement that crashes onto Twitter in the midst of a hot public controversy, the NSA’s words were carefully patted down for omissions. Glenn Greenwald, whose work on NSA surveillance helped the Guardian earn a public service Pulitzer Prize, tweeted in that vein, arguing that “NSA has used this same deceit for years: they can spy on US citizens’ communications without ‘targeting’ the American” and that the agency has “extremely broad authorities to collect communications without ‘targeting’ a person.”
Another point cited by Greenwald and Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney who appeared on Carlson’s show: The NSA collects communications of American citizens “incidentally” because those communications get bundled up in the messy targeting of foreign nationals. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has railed against this practice: “The intelligence community calls this ‘incidental’ collection to downplay the fact that it routinely uses this broad and privacy-invasive foreign intelligence surveillance authority to collect Americans’ communications that should require a warrant.”
“That’s a huge dragnet,” Dhillon told Carlson Tuesday.
And so it is. The trouble, however, is that Carlson has presented no proof whatsoever that he was caught in that dragnet. Well, no proof other than his stern-faced assurances to his audience that the NSA’s snooping is “confirmed.” And as of Tuesday night, the Erik Wemple Blog had yet to hear any word from Fox News that it believes Carlson.
Now, let’s posit for a moment that, somehow, Carlson’s communications ended up under the NSA microscope per “incidental collection.” What about the part where he claimed that the NSA would leak the communications as part of an attempt to knock him off the air? This is one host who has a lot of evidence to present.
Then there’s the suggestion that “Tucker Carlson Tonight” presents some sort of threat to the security state — that the scoops and truths told on Fox News’s prime time are so subversive as to trigger an extraordinary abuse of governmental power. As any sane viewer knows, however, Carlson thrives on aggregating half-baked stories, making up other ones and always — always — stirring white grievance, not on digging up secrets.
In February, for instance, Carlson emailed the Erik Wemple Blog out of the blue to fling a few insults, including these selections: “On some level, you’ve got to hate yourself. You’re pushing 60. Get some dignity while you still can. Life’s got to be more than about keeping your sad little job working for Jeff Bezos,” he wrote. Think the NSA cares about that stuff?