The National Security Agencyâs internal watchdog confirmed Tuesday an investigation into the conspiratorial claims of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who in June alleged a âwhistleblowerâ had come forth to disclose a plot by the Biden administration to sabotage his careerâpurportedly by leaking materials obtained via an illegal wiretap.
While the governmentâs long history of abusing its surveillance powers makes giving it the benefit of the doubt difficult if not foolhardy, Carlsonâs own record of proffering conspiracy theories and false and misleading claims rival that of any rogue agency. That in mind, the decision by the NSAâs inspector general to probe the accusations seems justified if only by the sheer number of Americans consuming Carlsonâs diatribes daily; not to mention that Carlson, who is decidedly not an impartial commentatorâeven according to his own lawyersâis still a member of the broader news media, and like any U.S. citizen, has a constitutional right not to be spied on by his own government, illegally.
Feigning knowledge of an investigation before it even begins would be imprudent, but the known facts of the caseâCarlsonâs own activities and statements and those of the NSAâsuggest that, so far, of all the possible outcomes, one is more probable than the rest: That Carlsonâs name has been referenced by one or more foreign intelligence targets, whose communications U.S. spies lawfully intercepted.
Whatâs more, it seems likely that we eventually hear how U.S. officials believed that intelligence was worthless without knowing the name of the American being discussed by those targets; a process familiar to avid news readers at this point know as âunmasking.â
Such a finding would be the best possible outcome for the NSA. It would effectively absolve the agency of any wrongdoing and discredit Carlsonâs claim. That said, it seems far-fetched to assume Carlson would ever accept such a findingâor any result, really, that doesnât place him square at the center of some nefarious plot. And why on earth would he?
Regardless of what facts investigators turn up, Fox News will undoubtedly use the process to continue painting Carlson as the victim of a Deep State conspiracy. (At the corporate level, Fox has already backed Carlsonâs claims.) The network will likely milk the story for all itâs worth, doing its best to cast its own political nemeses at the head of an illegal spying operation, one ripped straight from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel.
The majority of Carlsonâs 3 million nightly viewers, who are conditioned to believe sensational claims over factual ones, will buy into that narrative, lock, stock, and barrel. The minority who arenât as easily convinced is just as unlikely to abandon him over it. In effect, Fox News has already won its war against the NSA. In the end, the watchdog report will only satisfy those already skeptical of Carlson, whose reputation for ducking the truth is well deserved and hard-earned.
Within days of Carlson initially airing his claims, the NSA moved to rebuff him in what reporters reveled in describing as a âhighly unusualâ announcement. The agency asserted that Carlson had never been an âintelligence targetâ and that the so-called âplansâ to âtake his program off the airâ were entirely make-believe. (The agency had not, if memory serves correctly, ever singled out a person before just to say they werenât being spied on.)
The NSAâs denial, which is not absolute, cannot be interpreted to rule out the following scenarios:
Carlson was communicating with a foreign intelligence target overseas whose conversations were being monitored by the NSA.
Carlson was communicating with an intelligence target on U.S. soil whose conversations were being monitored by the FBI.
The FBI or NSA intercepted communication of an intelligence target mentioning Carlsonâs name.
We first learned in July that at least one of these possibilities is almost certainly true when Axios political reporter Jonathan Swain revealed that Carlson had been in contact with âKremlin intermediariesâ in an apparent effort to book Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. The intelligence communityâs primary focus is gathering information about agents of hostile foreign powers. The fact that such an agent happens to be communicating with an American has little bearing on whether theyâre surveilled.
One would imagine, if anything, that only enhances the odds.
By August, Carlson had moved on to host a weekâs worth of shows in Budapest, where he met with, and lavished much affection on, Hungaryâs autocratic prime minister, Viktor OrbĂĄn. Preparations for such a visit would, again, have required Carlson, or one of his surrogates, to broker plans with foreigners who are undoubtedly targets of NSA surveillance.
If, for a moment, we set aside Carlsonâs ancillary (and less believable) claimâthat the surveillance he was caught in was devised to discredit himâthere still remains one outstanding issue: whether someone in the government acted improperly by âunmaskingâ Carlson in some highly classified report.
In the course of monitoring foreign targets, the NSA acknowledges routinely intercepting communications involving what it calls âU.S. personsââa term that encompasses not just people but companies without ties to a foreign power. The job of intelligence analysts is chiefly to shift through raw data and produce classified reports on individuals and events with some bearing on national security. When those reports involve a U.S. person, itâs required to delete or âmaskâ that identity, replacing it with a âgeneric term or symbol.â
There are at least eight justifications for unmasking a U.S. person. They include basic rationales like the information being already public, or the person giving their consent; they include reasons of safety, such as a person being involved in terrorism or being the target of a crime; as well as indicators of espionage: a person secretly acting as an agent of a foreign power or planning to disseminate state secrets to an unauthorized person.
Perhaps the best-known justification is that the information underlying the report is simply unintelligible without knowing the identities of the people involvedâwhen âthe identity of the United States person is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance,â as the NSA puts it.
The names of officials who can approve an unmasking request are secret, but the process has been described by the NSAâs privacy officer as a strict legal review; fewer than two dozen agency officials are said to possess that authority. Media reports have suggested that unmasking requests are rarely refused, but also note that many classified reports are only viewed by a handful of executive branch officials. Only the president can choose to make that information public; doing so otherwise would be a felony.
For all of President Trumpâs ado about the unmasking that took place under his predecessor, the number of such requests approved under Trump skyrocketed in his second year in office. Whereas in President Obamaâs final year in office, more than 9,200 requests were approved, that figure rose in 2018 to more than 16,700. (The number of approved requests fell again to around 10,000 the following year.)
According to the Washington Postâs Shane Harris, the uptick may be explained by the U.S. government working harder to warn people and businesses who are targeted by foreign governments. âForeign computer hackers have aggressively stepped up their efforts in recent years to steal private communications or pilfer trade secrets from U.S. companies,â Harris notes.
One question that lingersâbeyond the identity and motivation of Carlsonâs so-called âwhistleblowerâ sourceâis the impact of Carlson revealing to foreign targets that the U.S. has monitored their talks. Carlsonâs high-level dealings with Moscow, Budapest, and presumably other foreign governments, suggest those targets may be of some importance to the nationâs intelligence keepers.
Even then, Carlson canât really be shamed for not keeping that knowledge to himself. Itâs the governmentâs job, after allânot the mediaâsâto keep its methods and sources a secret. Itâs a stretch to imagine that many public figures, having learned theyâd been featured in some classified document, would choose to take that knowledge to the grave.
Update, 8/12: A Fox News spokesperson reached out with the following statement:
âWe are gratified to learn the NSAâs egregious surveillance of Tucker Carlson will now be independently investigated. As we have said, for the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson or any journalist attempting to secure a newsworthy interview is entirely unacceptable and raises serious questions about their activities as well as their original denial, which was wildly misleading.â