Tucker Carlson Blasts NSA Spying Denial —'Paragraph of Lies'

Tucker Carlson launched a scathing attack against the National Security Agency (NSA) and branded its statement denying having targeted the Fox News host, a "paragraph of lies."

An incensed Carlson hit out at the agency on Tuesday night branding its rebuke "an infuriating dishonest formal statement."

He continued: "An entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community's lackeys at CNN and MSNBC, people they hire with the titles on the screen."

The Fox News host doubled down on the comments he made on Monday that the NSA had spied on his emails and texts and accused it of not denying having done so.

Carlson continued: "Last time on the show we made a very straightforward claim, 'NSA has read my private emails without my permission.' That's what we said. Tonight's statement from the NSA does not deny that."

He later added: "Did the Biden administration read my personal email? That's the question that we asked directly to NSA officials when we spoke to them."

Carlson also claimed the NSA refused to answer directly whether the Biden administration had read his personal messages.

On Monday, Carlson claimed a whistleblower within the NSA had revealed to him information about stories the show was working on.

He added the only way the whistleblower could have known this information would have been if they had gone through his emails and texts.

In a Tuesday night statement, the NSA denied it had targeted Carlson and also that it had ever tried to take his show off the airwaves.

An NSA spokesperson said: "On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been 'monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.'

"This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.

"NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."

The Washington Post reported that in 2013 classified court documents revealed the NSA secretly collected thousands of emails from U.S. citizens that "had nothing to do with terrorism."

Later that year, leaked documents found the NSA had used a program called PRISM to obtain data on U.S. citizens from major internet companies.

The NSA and internet companies said the data could only be collected for specific people and only with court approval.

Newsweek has contacted Fox News and the NSA for comment.