Tucker Carlson Claims CIA Has Been Reading His Texts to Frame Him
What To Know
- Tucker Carlson claims the CIA is reading his text messages and intends to frame him for acting as a foreign agent.
- Carlson asserts he is not concerned about criminal charges, emphasizing his loyalty to the United States and his journalistic duty to speak with various sources worldwide.
- He alleges that intelligence agencies use investigations to intimidate and discredit critics, citing previous incidents involving leaked communications and suggesting his views on Israel have made him a target.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson says the Central Intelligence Agency is spying on his text communications with plans of framing him for a crime.
In a video posted on X and YouTube on Saturday, Carlson alleged that the CIA had read his text messages and was preparing to report him to the Department of Justice for “acting as an agent of a foreign power” and “talking to people in Iran” before the ongoing war in the Middle Eastern country.
“When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime,” Carlson wrote in the caption to his video on X.
But Carlson said in the video that he’s not “too worried about an actual criminal case” against him. “One, I’m not an agent of a foreign power. Unlike a lot of people commenting on U.S. politics and global affairs, I have only one loyalty, and that’s the United States, and have never acted against it,” he said. “I’ve also never taken money from anybody. Don’t need it, don’t want it. And that’s provable. And moreover, it’s my job to talk to everybody all the time and try and figure out what’s happening around the world. That’s literally what I do for a living. And I’m not going to stop doing that. Nor should I, I don’t think. I’m also an American. I can talk to anybody.”
Carlson said that “countries tend to become more authoritarian in wartime” and that “the United States fights wars on behalf of freedom, but there’s always less of it here in our country during war.”
The conservative commentator told viewers that intelligence agencies pass on criminal complaints to law enforcement to “justify warrants for spying on Americans” and “to leak the existence of the investigation, such as it is, to the media and then humiliate and terrify the subjects of this op.”
According to Carlson, such intimidation has happened to him twice. One time, when he was trying to set up a Fox News interview with Vladimir Putin, the NSA grabbed his text messages and leaked them to The New York Times, he alleged. The same thing happened two years later, Carlson said, though the host said he got his Putin interview anyway that time.
Now he believes some people at the CIA are upset with his views about Israel. He previously said that the Iran conflict was “Israel’s war… not the United States’ war,” that the war was based on manipulations by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that Israel “wants to control the Middle East,” according to The Times of Israel.
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