The top-rated cable news personality, who accused the National Security Agency of spying on him last year, made the comment during an interview Friday with Utah GOP Rep. Chris Stewart. The congressman has introduced legislation to better protect U.S. citizens from domestic surveillance activities.
Carlson said he's "spoken directly to two sitting members of Congress" tasked with overseeing the intelligence community, and he heard they "were being spied on by the intel agencies, and they didn't do anything about it."
He did not name any names, but Carlson did say, "I wonder how many members of Congress are too intimidated to push back the powers of these agencies?"
Stewart, a Republican from Utah and member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "I guess we're going to find out."
Just what is being asserted here is unclear. There is precedent for U.S. intelligence officials admitting to spying on members of Congress. Then-CIA Director John Brennan admitted his agency did snoop on Senate staffers in 2014 after previously denying it. There are also murkier situations.
Carlson made headlines last summer when he accused the NSA of "spying" on him in an attempt to take his show off the air. The Fox News host's communications were said to be about scheduling an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The NSA released a rare public statement June 29 saying Carlson was "never" a target of the agency and denied a plot to get Carlson's show taken off the air. However, the statement did not preclude the possibility any communications were incidentally collected or Carlson's name being unmasked by some official in the Biden administration.
Sources told the Record that Carlson's identity was disclosed through a process known as "unmasking," which is when the names of U.S. citizens that are mentioned but covered up in final intelligence reports about the surveillance of foreigners are revealed upon the request of authorized officials, who have the ability to ask for the disclosures, often to understand the information better.
"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," a Fox News spokesperson told the news outlet in July.
In August, the inspector general for the NSA announced an investigation into claims that the agency targeted a member of the press.
Stewart's bill, introduced last week, would make two changes to the National Security Act of 1947.
"First, it will add a new section that explicitly bans the IC from conducting any surveillance activity that is unrelated to foreign intelligence or counterintelligence. Second, it will clarify terms used in the National Security Act to remove ambiguities, which have been claimed by certain authorities of the IC. Namely, it limits 'intelligence' to mean only 'foreign intelligence and counterintelligence,'" he said in a statement.
The legislation has one co-sponsor in Rep. Kelly Trent, a Mississippi Republican, according to Congress.gov.
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