Podcaster Tucker Carlson has revealed that the CIA is preparing a criminal referral against him because he opposes the war in Iran, presumably on the grounds that he is illegally acting as a foreign agent because he interviewed the president of Iran before U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel began the war against that country.
Carlson detailed the agency’s spying on him, and predicted nothing would come of any allegations because they simply aren’t true.
After Carlson’s broadcast, GOP Representative Max Miller of Ohio called for his arrest as a “foreign agent,” a sentiment with which “chicken hawk” commentator Mark Levin agreed. Another commentator called for Carlson and fellow podcasters Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes to be arrested and jailed in a “WWII-Style internment camp.”
“Supposed Crime”
On Saturday, Carlson posted a 5-minute, 21-second video to say that he “found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice [DOJ], on the basis of a supposed crime I committed.”
Carlson’s crime, he said, was “talking to people in Iran before the war. They read my texts. So, the crime under consideration apparently would be the Foreign Agent Act or something like that — acting as an agent of a foreign power.”
Carlson said the case won’t go anywhere for two reasons:
One, I’m not an agent of a foreign power. Unlike a lot of people commenting on U.S. politics and global affairs, I have only one loyalty, and that’s the United States, and I have never acted against it. Its interests are the only interests I care about because I’m from here, and I have a lot of kids.
So, that’s not a concern. I’ve also never taken money from anybody. Don’t need it, don’t want it. And that’s provable. And moreover, it’s my job to talk to everybody all the time and try and figure out what’s happening around the world. That’s literally what I do for a living, and I’m not going to stop doing that. Nor should I, I don’t think. I’m also an American. I can talk to anybody. I have no secrets to divulge.
The case, he said, is ludicrous.
He said he’s raising the issue because during wartime, societies are more authoritarian and “there’s much less tolerance for any kind of dissent in the homeland.”
But another important point, he said, is that U.S. intelligence agencies spy on Americans. That spying is “probably a little more widespread than most people understand.” Such surveillance is “outrageous” he continued, and constitutes a violation of privacy that “happens all the time.”
There are some people [in the CIA] who are mad at me for my views about Israel. And they have some latitude. And one of the reasons they pass on criminal complaints, in effect, to law enforcement is to justify warrants for spying on Americans. So that is an absolutely real thing.
But the “main reason they do it is to leak the existence of the investigation … to the media and then humiliate and terrify the subjects” of the probe, he said:
And that’s of course happened to me repeatedly, many times, including in, famously, 2021 when I was still at Fox News and trying to set up an interview with Vladimir Putin and the [National Security Agency], I heard from someone there, had grabbed my text messages with an American citizen and had leaked them to news outlets. Those texts were basically my attempts to set up an interview with the foreign head of state, and they leaked them to The New York Times … to stop the interview, which they successfully did, by the way. And they admitted that they were spying on me. … They didn’t again two years later [in] my second attempt to get a Putin interview. … And they’ve done it since. [W]hen you get a call from a reporter who knows the contents of your texts, it’s pretty clear something’s going on.
Fellow podcaster Glenn Greenwald, a fierce opponent of the Trump administration’s shift to an Israel-first foreign policy, explained his conversation with Carlson about the referral.
“Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ,” Greenwald wrote on his Substack:
The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the … war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.
Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or misled me.
Carlson interviewed the president of Iran in July.
Hate-Carlson Mob
Levin and others have been on a hate-Carlson tear for some time. Last year, the Israel-first commentator called Carlson a “maggot,” and on Sunday he called for his arrest. The Iran-war enthusiast reposted a Mediaite story on X about Miller’s call for Carlson’s prosecution. “Yep,” the Iran-War enthusiast wrote over the post.
“NEVER FORGET,” Levin continued minutes later:
The entire cabal of Woke Reich neo-fascist isolationists are smearing our POTUS and our military in the middle of a righteous and noble military campaign. They are a Fifth Column giving aid and comfort to a horrific, genocidal enemy. They’ve always been fake MAGA and have joined the Marxist-Islamist left in their unconscionable efforts and campaign. In the end, it is us — we, the people — who they despise.
“Everyone has always known Tucker is in love with himself and happy to sell falsehoods for attention,” Miller wrote on X, inspiring the Mediaite story:
The Left excels at this, when Tucker fully joined them it was just sad.
Now? Treason. If Tucker really worked with Iran against America’s interests he is a traitor and should be prosecuted.
Miller has received almost $1 million from the Israel lobby, the AIPAC Israel lobby tracker reported.
In February, Israeli journalist Yair Kleinbaum called for Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes to be locked up until the war is over. “Carlson, Fuentes and Owens Must Be Jailed Inside a WWII-Style Internment Cam,” the headline over his story at JFeed.com says: “The First Amendment isn’t a suicide pact. Just as the Greatest Generation neutralized threats in 1942, we must stop the influencers turning our soldiers against the Commander-in-Chief before the front lines collapse.”
“There are individuals who, right now, while America is locked in a struggle against the dark forces of Shia Islam, that must be placed in detention camps,” he wrote:
They are guilty of:
Inciting mutiny among soldiers
Aiding the enemy
Cowardice in the face of the enemy
Demoralization
By not supporting the war they “provide aid and comfort to the enemy” and “directly incite soldiers to defy their orders,” he continued:
We have reached a point where there is no choice but to take decisive action and arrest them. …
We must act immediately.
There is no other way.
Once the war is won and the threat is neutralized, we can release them.
