Tucker Carlson said yesterday in a three-hour podcast on Feb. 27 with Lex Fridman that, during his eight days in Moscow, U.S. intelligence agents were monitoring his movements and activities. “I was being surveilled by the U.S. government, intensely surveilled by the U.S. government. And this came out, they admitted it, the NSA admitted it a couple of years ago that they were up in my signal account, and then they leaked it to the New York Times. They did that again before I left. And I know that because two New York Times reporters, one of whom I actually like a lot, said and called other people. ‘Oh, he’s going to interview Putin.’ I hadn’t told anybody that, like anybody. My wife, two producers, that’s it. So they got that from the government.”
Carlson described how he had met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, having dinner together at Moscow’s Four Seasons hotel, where Carlson stayed. While Snowden accepted the dinner invitation, he did not agree to an interview or a photo, and he did not want Carlson to make public their private meeting. However, Carlson said that he “was being intensely surveilled by the U.S. government” and his meeting with Snowden was reported. He stated: “I didn’t tell anybody.... Semafor runs this piece—reporting information they got from the U.S. intel agencies, leaking against me....” Of note, a founder of the “news” outlet Semafor, Ben Smith, as a former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct BuzzFeed newsroom, was the one who published the infamous, British-intel-based “Steele Dossier.”
When Semafor reported that Carlson had met with Snowden, Carlson immediately denied it. His first admission of the meeting and his talking about the incident yesterday with Fridman, somewhat curiously, comes a day after the circulation on the internet of a video confession of a man, allegedly recruited by Ukraine’s GUR to install a bomb in the car that was to take Carlson to the Kremlin for his interview with President Vladimir Putin. There is, as of yet, no independent verification of that story. It is the case, however, that Tucker Carlson is certainly on both Ukraine’s Myrotvorets and CCD hit lists, along with the newer Molfar blacklist.
