Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Wednesday that surveillance conducted against Michael Flynn during the Obama administration amounted to “a domestic spying operation.”
“The N[ational] S[ecurity] A[gency] forwarded all surveillance reports that included Mike Flynn’s name to the White House, where Mike Flynn’s name was promptly unmasked,” Carlson said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“This was a domestic spying operation,” Carlson said. “It was hidden under the pretext of national security,” he continued, noting that dozens of people in the Obama administration asked for Flynn’s name to be “unmasked” even though they did not have any reason to know Flynn’s identity.
Those who sought Flynn’s unmasking included former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Vice President Joe Biden. (RELATED: ‘Do You Know Anybody Who Trusts The Government Anymore?’: Tucker Carlson Blames ‘Official Washington’ For Russia Collusion Hoax)
Carlson noted that this did not appear to be a formal national security investigation because most of those looking for Flynn’s name “were not national security officials. They were political hacks, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
“On December 6th for example, the American Ambassador to Italy, a guy called John Phillips, asked to unmask Mike Flynn’s name. Phillips is not an intelligence officer. He is an Obama campaign donor who is married to a former Obama aide. Why was Phillips party to spying on an American citizen?”
“That means there were an awful lot of intelligence reports being generated with Mike Flynn’s name in them in the closing weeks of the Obama administration.”
Carlson says it is “obvious” why this activity reached a fever pitch. “The Obama administration wanted to monitor Mike Flynn’s private communications. Legally they could not do that, they didn’t have a FISA warrant, so instead they used the NSA to do it for them.”
The Fox News host was critical of news reports Wednesday that tended to downplay the unmasking as “no big deal,” insisting “if it was no big deal, the names wouldn’t be redacted in the first place by law.”
Vice President Mike Pence (L) shakes hands with then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn before U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hold a joint press conference at the White House on Feb. 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The release of the documents comes a result of House Intelligence Committee transcripts released last week that prompted the Department of Justice’s recent decision to drop charges against Flynn. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: Every Time Adam Schiff Claimed He Had Evidence Of The Russia Collusion Hoax, ‘He Was Lying’)
Carlson also noted that it will be a matter of time before the public discovers why the unmasking requests were made because “you have to explain why you want it.”
Biden was also one of those people looking for Mike Flynn’s name. “Biden asked to uncover Mike Flynn’s name on January 12th, that was just a week, eight days, before Donald Trump took office. What official justification could Biden possibly have had for doing that … we can only speculate about Biden’s motives,” Carlson said.