Tucker Carlson Defends Using His TV Show To Accuse the NSA of Spying on Him: ‘I Had No Choice… I Really Felt Threatened’

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who recently claimed that his communications were being monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA), told his colleague Lisa Boothe that he felt like he “had no choice” but to make that accusation on his television show.

In a highly-scrutinized segment that aired on June 28, Carlson told his viewers that a whistleblower from the U.S. government had reached out to his show “to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

“This allegation is untrue,” said the NSA in a rare public statement denying the spying claims. “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.”

Carlson fired back, calling the NSA’s statement “infuriatingly dishonest” and claiming that the NSA had also leaked contents of his private emails to journalists in an effort to discredit him.

He spoke with Boothe for her podcast, The Truth with Lisa Boothe, the episode for which airs Monday. In a preview clip obtained exclusively by Mediaite, Carlson explained why he had made such a stunning accusation:

So, like, getting on TV and saying the government spying on me was, you know, I did not want to do that at all, but they were spying on me and I felt like I had no choice. I mean, I did it defensively, you know? I mean, I don’t, I don’t have any other — I don’t have subpoena power. I can’t arrest anybody. I can’t make them answer questions. All I can do is talk about stuff, um, with the megaphone of the show in the hope that that will, you know, protect us, but I really felt threatened by it.

Listen to the clip above, via The Truth with Lisa Boothe.