Lawyer For Journalist Accused of Hacking Fox News For Tucker Carlson Videos Says Clips Were Accessed Legally

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Off-air Fox News clips of Tucker Carlson that were published in various outlets were not “hacked” by journalist Tim Burke but accessed legally, his attorney said in an interview that published Wednesday.

In the days after Carlson was fired from the network, multiple reports stated his ouster was in part fueled by network leadership learning, as The New York Times put it, of “highly offensive and crude remarks” Carlson made. The Times reported that they reviewed some off-air footage of Carlson talking about whether his “postmenopausal fans” would approve of his looks, as well as another video where he commented that someone else’s girlfriend was “yummy.”

That footage, and other clips of candid comments made by Carlson, was eventually published by Media Matters. The videos sparked a spat between Fox News and Carlson’s legal team, which accused the network of leaking the clips in the days following his firing to make him look bad, an allegation the network categorically denied.

(That wasn’t the first time hot mic clips of Carlson were published. Vice ended up getting a hold of unaired footage from Carlson’s interview with Kanye West last year.)

Then, in May, it was revealed that a Tampa federal prosecutor was investigating an alleged hack of Fox that was expected to be the source of the videos. Authorities searched Burke’s home, taking computers and electronic devices he used for freelance work.

Burke’s attorney Mark Rasch said in a new interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that the government may not have viewed him as a legitimate journalist because he worked digitally.

“There’s a journalism part of this, and then there’s a technology part of this,” Rasch said, continuing:

Part of it is the question of who is a journalist, and what protections does a journalist have? It’s entirely possible that the government did not think of Tim as a journalist because he operates primarily in the digital environment. And therefore, all of the protections that are afforded to journalists may not have been afforded to Tim. There’s an entire approval process that is required before you can get a search warrant for a journalist, but there isn’t if it’s not a journalist.

The government reportedly informed Fox that they may have been hacked or wiretapped after the video went viral, but Rasch refuted those allegations, claiming the videos were accessed through a public website. He explained:

There are third-party sites that transmit these live feeds as a service. They have password-protected websites. And in this case, somebody on the internet provided Tim with the publicly posted user ID and password for a demo account on one of these services that are used by broadcasters. So Tim logs in to the site, and the site automatically downloads to his computer a list of all the livestreams on the site. The important thing to note here is that those livestreams did not require a user ID and password to access them, just a URL.

Authorities have not said exactly why they raided Burke’s home and “the affidavit that the Department of Justice used to obtain a search warrant remains sealed,” according to CJR. Rasch has filed a motion to have the affidavit unsealed so the reasons behind the raid are made clear.

Read the full CJR article here.