Tucker Carlson alleges the CIA read his texts regarding Iran conversations to frame him under the Foreign Agent Act, claiming leaks by the NSA and New York Times in 2021 and 2023 were ideological maneuvers to stop his Putin interviews. He argues that wartime authoritarianism suppresses dissent domestically despite U.S. rhetoric on freedom, suggesting intelligence agencies misuse secrecy laws to humiliate Americans with grudges against his Israel views. Ultimately, this behavior links to RussiaGate, implying a future where such surveillance escalates to justify warrants and silence critics through manufactured criminal investigations. [Automatically generated summary]
So the other day I found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report, the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed.
What's that crime?
Well, talking to people in Iran before the war, they read my texts.
So the crime under consideration apparently would be the Foreign Agent Act or something like that, acting as an agent of a foreign power.
And I don't expect this to go anywhere.
I'm not too worried about an actual criminal case against me for a bunch of reasons.
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.
Its interests are the only interests I care about because I'm from here and I have a lot of kids.
So that's not a concern.
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.
I have no secrets to divulge.
So legally, I think the case is ludicrous, and I doubt it will even become a case.
I'm bringing this up for a couple of reasons, though, and they're pretty obvious.
One is that countries tend to become more authoritarian in wartime.
It's just the nature of war.
People are dying.
The stakes are high.
People's emotions have risen to a very high point, to a crescendo.
And so there's much less tolerance for any kind of dissent in the homeland.
The irony, of course, is the United States fights wars on behalf of freedom, but there's always less of it here in our country during war.
So that's a widely recognized phenomenon, and it's likely to happen now, too.
Another point to make that is worth knowing is that the USIC, the intelligence agency, spy on Americans.
Now, you probably knew that, and it's been revealed a lot, including by Julian Assange and Ed Snowden, both of whom are threatened with death for revealing it, but everyone knows.
But it's probably a little more widespread than most people understand.
And it's outrageous.
There's no justification for your government, which you own, you're a shareholder in it, you pay for it, to be violating your privacy like this.
But it happens all the time.
And in fact, one of the reasons that CIA or people within CIA, just to be clear, it's a huge, sprawling, disconnected agency.
What it does in a specific case doesn't represent what everybody in the building thinks, but there are some people who are mad at me for my views about Israel.
And they have some latitude.
And one of the reasons they pass on criminal complaints, in effect, to law enforcement is to justify warrants for spying on Americans.
So that is an absolutely real thing.
But the main reason they do it is to leak the existence of the investigation, such as it is, to the media and then humiliate and terrify the subjects of this op.
And that's, of course, happened to me repeatedly, many times, including in famously 2021, when I was still at Fox News and trying to set up an interview with Vladimir Putin.
And the NSA, I heard from someone there, had grabbed my text messages with an American citizen and had leaked them to news outlets.
Those texts were basically my attempts to set up an interview with the foreign head of state.
And they leaked them to the New York Times in order to stop the interview, which they successfully did, by the way.
And they admitted that they were spying on me.
This is not a fantasy.
It actually happened.
They did it again two years later.
my second attempt to get a Putin interview.
I managed to get it anyway, and they've done it since.
And so when you get a call from a reporter who knows the contents of your texts, it's pretty clear something's going on.
None of this, in my judgment as of right now, is a huge threat to me.
So I'm not making this video to complain about it or whine or ask you to send me money because I'm under attack.
I'm saying it because it's true and you should know what your own government is doing and you should know what the stakes are.
And you should know that a lot of what happens in this country that affects outcomes happens behind the scenes.
Some of it is legal, some of it is not, including what I'm describing now.
But it has an effect.
And the intel agencies, again, not everyone in the intel agencies, because there are decent, hardworking Americans who work in the intel agencies are Americans, just like they're decent, hardworking Americans who work at the DMV.
But there are also people with agendas and grudges and no sense of restraint who are happy to misuse the power they have granted them by our elaborate secrecy laws to hurt fellow Americans for ideological reasons.
That is entirely real.
That's the story of RussiaGate.
And it's likely that things like that will begin to happen at greater scale now.