A former chief of staff of the National Security Council says the White House likely is behind the Tucker Carlson NSA email scandal.
Fred Fleittz, who served for 25 years in national security with various agencies, wrote in a column Friday for The Federalist that it’s now known not only that the National Security Agency was monitoring the Fox News host’s electronic communications, but that “either NSA or senior Biden officials leaked information from his communications to the news media in an attempt to smear him.”
He noted an Axios story Wednesday confirmed Carlson’s claim that an NSA whistleblower informed the Fox host that the agency was reading his emails, or transcripts of his phone calls, or both. A law was broken, Fleitz said, because the names of any American citizens incidentally collected by U.S. intelligence must be strictly protected.
However, top U.S. officials are allowed to ask that the names of Americans be unmasked in rare instances, when warranted.
Carlson has claimed that NSA personnel both unmasked his name and leaked it to the media to smear him and take him off the air.
Fleitz said that “as someone who worked for almost 25 years for U.S. intelligence agencies and the House Intelligence Committee staff, it is hard for me to believe NSA would so recklessly break the law.”
Fleitz served in 2018 as deputy assistant to President Trump and chief of staff of the National Security Council. He previously worked for the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department and the House Intelligence Committee staff.
He argued in his column that the only people who know the name of an unmasked person are the small, trusted staff at NSA who are part of the process and the policymaker who made the request.
“The unmasked name is not supposed to be released to other U.S. officials or NSA personnel,” he said.
For those reasons he believes is was a senior White House official who received the name in response to an unmasking request and then leaked the information to hurt Carlson.
“One might ask why a White House official would ever ask to unmask the name of a U.S. journalist? I can’t think of any valid reason. And the potential downside of appearing to spy on a journalist would be huge if such a request ever was made public,” he wrote.
Because the White House and Congress are in Democratic hands, there probably won’t be a serious investigation of what he called “the latest weaponization of an American conservative.”
He said that with Biden officials “planning to use U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on conservatives by claiming they are extremists or subversives, we may see more instances like this in the future.”
“In the meantime, it is incumbent on American patriots working in U.S. intelligence agencies to stand up to the abuse of their organizations for political purposes by the Biden administration. We need more whistleblowers like one who went to Carlson to report such wrongdoing.”
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