Tucker Carlson, Target of Domestic Spying, Joins the Show

BUCK: We have Tuck, that is Tucker Carlson, with us now, the one and only host of Tucker Carlson Tonight. He joins to talk to us about the NSA and some spying stuff. Tucker, great to have you.

TUCKER: Oh-ho-ho, gentlemen, thanks for havin’ me!

BUCK: All right. Could you just tell everybody…? There’s what you know, and then there’s what you think and may still find out about the NSA intercepting your communications. Just tell everybody what do you know for sure at this point about what happened?

TUCKER: Well, I know for sure that NSA read emails and texts I sent to a couple of different people trying to set up an interview with Vladimir Putin back in April and May, and I learned this two weeks ago when I was in Washington for a funeral and ran into somebody who said, “I’ve been told to tell you they’ve been reading your stuff.”

They repeated details from an email that I sent that nobody had seen, of course, and actually rattled me. I spent my whole life in Washington and everyone joked, “I’m sure it’s all being read,” and I was as paranoid as anyone else. But to hear that they have read it, that they’ve unmasked you, that they’re planning to leak this to news organizations in an effort to discredit you? I mean, it was like it’s just not even America. That was my feeling, and then they did do that.

BUCK: Now, the leak part of it, Tucker… Why would the leak have discredited you? I mean, reaching out for an interview like this, people do it. Wasn’t it Chris Wallace what interviewed Putin a few years ago? I think he even got an Emmy for it or Emmy nomination.

TUCKER: It’s ludicrous. The idea that Russia is our primary enemy is ludicrous. The whole thing is insane. But that was the idea, and that’s why I went public with it. I didn’t feel I had a choice. I certainly didn’t want to! No one wants to go out in public and say, “Oh, the government’s spying on me.” You’re like a nutcase if you say that. But it was true, and I felt just as a prophylactic measure, I’d better do this, and so I did.

CLAY: Tucker Carlson with us. Tucker, this is Clay. I’ve been asking the question, which I think is a really interesting one here: Why is this political at all? If, for instance… I’m curious what you think the reaction would be — what would the reaction in the media have been if this had been happening to Rachel Maddow while Donald Trump were president?

How much more attention would this get from the quote-unquote, “mainstream media”? And ultimately isn’t that an incredible indictment of the media culture that we’ve created that I would think everybody should be rallying around the idea that this is wrong. Instead, people have called you crazy. And now that there seems to be some acceptance that this might have been going on, it’s, “Oh, well, it’s Tucker Carlson; he’s at Fox News. Who cares?”

TUCKER: Yeah, I mean, if that had happened to Maddow, I would have defended Maddow —

CLAY: Right.

TUCKER: — because I think the principle is worth defending. It’s not about the person against whom it’s being used. It’s about the fact it’s happening at all. You don’t want to live in a country where that happens because that’s no longer a democracy.

You know, the decisions have to be made by elected leaders who are accountable to the public. That’s the system. But if you have massive bureaucracies with very little oversight — and they do have very little oversight; that’s true — meaningful oversight, then they act independently. And that’s not the system that we were promised.

It’s not the one we’ve had, and we can’t have that ’cause it’s totally Third World. So, yeah. As for the media, well, they’re just utterly corrupt. Just when I think I can’t be shocked anymore. I’ve spent… This my 30th year doing this. So of course, I know everyone involved, ’cause that’s the world I live in and lived in.

They shock me more because they’re that corrupt, and I think after Trump there’s a kind of nihilism that’s crept into the hive mind that is like, “Screw it! Let’s just burn it down. We’re not pretending anymore.”

There’s no effort to pretend this is journalism or there’s balance or “Our goal is to tell you the truth or bring you the news.” It’s like they’re not even going through the motions at this point. They are protectors of the ruling class, they hurt anybody who gets in the way, and that’s what they do.

CLAY: What happens now? If you believe that you have been spied upon and the evidence certainly suggests that you have, how can you change your behavior? What can you do to stop this from happening going forward? I don’t even know the answer. I’m sure you’ve had to research what the answer might be as well.

TUCKER: I don’t think there’s anything. I mean, if I’m being honest, I personally don’t care that much that I’m being spied on, because I’m not really embarrassed. I lost the capacity for embarrassment a long time ago working in cable news, and I’m not doing anything criminal — and if you think I am, then charge me with a crime.

Otherwise, you know, buzz off. What bothers me is the unmasking and the leaking. The idea that the U.S. government would try and make up stories to discredit its opponents is terrifying, and there’s nothing I can do about it is the truth. I have no power. I’m a talk show. That’s it. I’m like you.

You sort of imagine, “Oh, I’m really important. I’m talking in public.” But actually, you’re not. You don’t have subpoena power; you can’t arrest anybody; you’re not powerful at all. You’re just a guy with a megaphone. So you have to hope that the Congress — the Republican Congress — is the last hope of the country.

And the irony is they’re some of the least impressive people in the country, but we don’t have a choice. Nobody else — no other reasonable person — has power right now in this country other than the Republican Congress. And that’s why it’s so important that they wake up and start protecting their voters and America and its founding documents and just do the job. Stop lecturing about Afghanistan and tax cuts. Defend civil liberties, immediately.

BUCK: Tucker, Buck here — and we’re speaking to Tucker Carlson for anyone who’s joining us of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News about the NSA straight up reading his stuff and Tucker finding out about this and now there’s this Axios report that gave additional credibility to the initial allegation. Tucker, it seems that for anyone who has been paying attention honestly in recent years… We had Donald Trump on the show — gosh, I can’t remember — a week ago now.

CLAY: Last week. Yes.

BUCK: And we asked him about this and it’s totally incredible this would happen to you. He didn’t even miss a beat. “Yeah, I’m sure this could be happening.” This is the former commander-in-chief used to read the PDB every day.

TUCKER: Yeah.

BUCK: We had General Flynn, a leak of a conversation — I like to point this out to everybody — that clearly came from within the intelligence community. I used to work in the intelligence community.

TUCKER: Yes.

BUCK: It clearly came from within, and no one was ever charged, and that was used as a weapon against the administration. So it feels to me like we’re almost becoming more numb to the shock that we should feel because this is so credible and that that in itself is cause for serious concern.

TUCKER: Well, I mean, if that doesn’t shock us, then all is lost. I mean, that’s so unacceptable to do that to an American citizen without any even pretext of national security concern. It’s just, “We don’t like you, you complain, we’re gonna hurt you,” and they’ve done this a lot.

If that doesn’t move you to act, if it doesn’t spur you to outrage, then, like, what’s the point of living here? You know what I mean? Let’s just — I don’t know — become Third World, which we are, as you have noticed, rapidly becoming. But I think if you’re not interested in living in a country like that, you need to be as loud as you possibly can.

I mean, I always liked Mike Flynn. I knew him before he joined the administration. I feel like the main mistake that he made was listening to his idiot lawyers and not going public with what happened to him for four years, letting other people tell his story. Saying things out loud — telling the truth out loud — has an effect.

Again, it’s not maybe as effective as a subpoena or an arrest warrant, but it’s what we have, and we need to use it. Words matter. Framing things honestly and loudly and doing it again and again until people understand what happened, that is the first step to making things better. And, I mean, that’s all we can do.

CLAY: Tucker, do you think there should be an investigation into who unmasked you? I mean, you talked about the Republicans in Congress being the last —

TUCKER: Oh, there will be.

CLAY: You believe there will be?

TUCKER: Oh, yeah, I know there will be ’cause I’m getting texts about it. Yeah, there will be, and there should be. And I hate the fact, honestly, that it’s about me. I spend my whole life fighting against narcissism because in our business, as you know everyone’s a narcissist and they’re all unhappy.

So I really try not to think about myself and talk about myself too much so I hate this is about me. But it is. I can’t control that. If it was about you or about Rachel Maddow, I would still be calling for an investigation ’cause there needs to be one — and, yes, there will be one. And, by the way, if they did it by the book, there’s a record.

There has to be, by law, a record of who asked for the unmasking and who granted it. In the case the NSA, it would have been granted by Paul Nakasone, who’s the director, and Avril Haines is the director of national security. She may have been involved, too, I have heard. But we can find this out. This is knowable. They could tell us this afternoon, and I hope that they are forced to.

BUCK: Tucker, could I also ask you, do you think that the people that are talking this week in particular about…? This ties into this for me because going after critics of the regime is part of it, which is what they’re doing to you. But then there’s also the otherize and dehumanizing of the critics of the regime by this insurrection talk and how any…

You know, we’re all guilty of January 6 is the attitude you have in the elite corporate media and from the Democrat Party, from Nancy Pelosi on down and from Biden on down. Do you think they actually…? Like, when CNN talks about the “insurrection,” do those anchors really believe all the weeping and the gnashing of teeth over this thing? Or do they just know that this is outright propaganda meant as a weapon against anybody that stands in the path of power for the left?

TUCKER: I don’t think that’s a meaningful distinction to them. In other words, I don’t think it’s interesting to them whether or not something is technically true. They believe as a matter of faith that there’s a huge knot of people in the middle of this country, tens of millions of them, who are cretinous Klansmen.

They’re dangerous, and if those people have any political power at all, we’re in deep trouble. So their job when they wake up in the morning is to protect the people in power, the people currently running things against America’s middle class. So whether or not there was actually an insurrection or as bad as Pearl Harbor and 9/11? In some deeper sense, they do believe that these people are Nazis or ISIS; they’re an existential threat to America.

They definitely believe that. That is true. This is not a ratings ploy. And these, by the way, are really damaged people. If you look at the psychology of people who have those politics, they’re really damaged. I mean, there was just actually a study on this. I’m sure you saw it. The majority of liberal white women had a diagnosed mental illness (laughing) and, of course, that’s not a surprise if you live in this country!

CLAY: (laughing)

TUCKER: Like, “Oh, yeah, I noticed that.”

BUCK: Yeah, I mean, leftism feels like it is a meant illness these days as they’re triple masking and running around talking about the insurrection. But, hey, Tucker, great to have you on, man. First time and hopefully you’ll come back again soon. Tucker Carlson, everybody. Tucker, thanks so much.

TUCKER: Thank you, guys!