In what may be an early example of the saying “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” Tucker Carlson reported on his show Monday night that he has received notice — AND EVIDENCE — that internal communications among the staff of his show are being monitored by the Intelligence Community of the Biden Administration.  This would be the first reported instance that I’m aware of regarding a Biden Administration official leaking information to a news media outlet calling attention to allegedly illegal/objectionable conduct taking place inside the Administration.

These kinds of leaks were endemic during the Trump Administration, as liberal Trump-hating officials in the government bureaucracy regularly leaked information to media outlets hostile to Trump such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN.  Now we have a Biden Administration Official engaged in the same conduct — but this time the operations being “leaked” are targeted at a media outlet hostile to Biden.

The segment that runs a little over two minutes is captured in the Tweet below by my new BFF Cernovich.

The left’s reaction to Tucker Carlson being spied on will tell you everything about “conservatives” who spend more time criticizing “fellow conservatives” than they do exposing official government misconduct.

pic.twitter.com/mI0m9ip1Wf

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 29, 2021

While the piece is relatively short, there are a few issues covered by Carlson that need to be unpacked, starting with the claims about the NSA.

Carlson reports that over the weekend he was in contact with a “whistleblower within the US Government.”  Later Carlson adds that the Whistleblower is “in a position” to know the information he/she was providing.

According to Carlson, the Whistleblower told him the NSA is monitoring communications for the purpose of later leaking them to the public with the goal of taking Carlson’s show off the air. To prove that the information was legitimate, the Whistleblower described back to Carlson information about a story his staff is working on that could have only come from text messages and email communications between Carlson and members of his staff. Carlson told his audience that they filed a “Freedom of Information Act” request earlier today seeking any and all information about surveillance activities being conduct against him or members of his staff by any government agency.

There are a few legal and technical inaccuracies in Tucker’s story — not really his fault; he’s just got a few details wrong. The NSA is not “spying” on Carlson — the NSA “spies” on everyone all the time.  The NSA gathers “signals intelligence.” Pretty much every form of communication or data transfer that takes place in electronic fashion is monitored and recorded by the NSA in massive database facilities in various locations. It is listening to everyone all the time. NSA’s technical capabilities involve simply “riding” the structural “spine” of the internet, and copying data as it passes through. It similarly intercepts electronic data in the atmosphere and downloads it.

Accessing the contents of those databases by government officials for the purpose of pulling out and listening to/looking at the communications by specific individuals is the act of “spying.” The NSA does not have a cadre of employees/agents who engage in that activity on their own. The NSA workforce simply pulls out data at the request of other government agencies in the intelligence community and passes along the requested information to them.

There is a legal process for doing this. But with respect to United States citizens, that process is supposed to involve an appropriate warrant issued by a federal judge based on the correct kind of showing under an appropriate statute, all justifying access to the stored communications. It is certainly possible that some agency has gone through that process to access the communications of Carlson and his staff, but it is hard to come up with any kind of plausible “legal” scenario involving a subject matter that might involve. The fact that a Whistleblower reached out to Carlson to alert him to what was happening and communicated to him that the motives behind the acts are political lends substantial credence to the idea this is an illegal enterprise being conducted for political goals.

A second issue raised by Carlson tonight is his report that FBI “Agents” — plural — to whom he spoke over the weekend confirmed that the FBI did have “sources” or “informants” among the crowd during the protests on January 6.

I’m not sure that is a shocking revelation as federal law enforcement often mixes in, or has sources providing information who are mixed in among protest crowds at public gatherings.  Carlson’s report on what he was told by the Agents ends with that, but Carlson added words to the effect “So the FBI knew what was going to happen.”  It is impossible to know if that is true without knowing what information the FBI sources had learned prior to the protests beginning.  Just having sources in place is oftentimes not enough — it all depends on whether the place where they have positioned themselves is such that they can acquire non-public information known only to a limited number of people.

But, more important in my view is the contact reported by Carlson confirms something that I have long tried to convince readers about — that there are “anti-Biden” and “anti-Democrat” people employed across the federal workforce — including in the Intelligence Community and the FBI — and these people will be a source of information to the outside world in the same way that “anti-Trumpers” inside the Trump Administration were sources of information to the outside world.  These people exist, in large numbers, and they hate what the Democrats and the Biden Administration are starting to do to the institutions where they work and to the country as a whole.

The next task is uncovering the operation that has targeted Carlson and exposing the Biden Administration Officials involved.