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Clip resurfaces of Tucker saying there are members of Congress controlled by intel agencies

May 8, 2023 | | Print Article

Footage of a December 2022 interview featuring Tucker Carlson as a guest on Tulsi Gabbard’s podcast was recirculating over the weekend, with the former Fox News host saying that members of Congress are “controlled by intel agencies.”

Carlson recounted a conversation he had with a high-ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee whom he said told him over dinner that the National Security Agency (NSA) reads their text messages after he asked the unnamed lawmaker to communicate with him via text.

Keep in mind that in June 2021, Carlson said on-air that he heard from a whistleblower within the federal government “who warned us that the NSA was reading our electronic communications, our emails and texts and was planning to leak them selectively in an effort to hurt us.” The NSA released a carefully crafted statement at the time that said Carlson “has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to take his program off the air.”

“There are members of Congress who are controlled by the intelligence agencies. I’m not speculating about this, I know this. I lived there for 35 years. I know this,” Carlson told Gabbard, the former congresswoman from Hawaii.

“I had a very high-ranking member of the House Intel Committee tell me at dinner at a restaurant in Washington, he’d been drinking. ‘We’ve got to talk about this.’ I said to text me. He said, ‘I don’t text.’ Why is that? Well, he said the NSA reads my texts. I said, ‘The NSA reads your texts? You’re the head guy on the Intelligence Committee. You’re their boss? You’re providing oversight in our Constitutional system.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but they’re still spying on me.'”

Carlson then recounted an exchange he had with U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the current chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman emeritus of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“The second thing: Michael McCaul, who is the… leader of the neocons in the House, I got into an argument once with him last year on the phone,” he said. “He told somebody that I was a Russian agent or something. And I was outraged! So I called him on the phone, and I used bad language. I was really mad. He said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I just got that — that’s what the intel briefers told me, that you’re working for Russia.'”

“He said they had all sorts of corroborating evidence. You’ve seen evidence I’m a Russian agent? I’m an American. I was born here. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’m pretty patriotic. What an outrageous thing to say,” Carlson added. “Basically, he tells me I believe what they say. And I told him like five times, I probably shouldn’t even be repeating this, but I was so mad, I was thinking about this, this morning. Because I just saw that McCaul is now sending more money to Ukraine.”

After asking why McCaul would do that, Carlson answered his own question, “Because you’re controlled by the intel agencies. That is true, And I’m just absolutely sick of it.”

Here’s a quick sampling of responses to the story from Twitter:

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