Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday he will seek additional details on alleged NSA spying on Tucker Carlson from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
Rubio, who is the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, will send a letter to Haines to push for more information regarding the allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson, according to The Record.
The Director of National Intelligence serves as the leader and oversight of the Intelligence Community, which compromises 17 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
”If there’s no information, then tell us that. Ultimately it’s a very delicate issue because there are things that are classified and they control classification, we don’t. We can’t declassify something or reveal it,” Rubio told the outlet, while adding the episode is ”undermining the intelligence community.”
NEW: @marcorubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is seeking additional details from @ODNIgov on Tucker Carlson’s spying accusationshttps://t.co/KO1cDN4dPw
— Martin Matishak (@martinmatishak) July 29, 2021
During a segment in June, Carlson accused the NSA of reading his confidential texts and emails in order to try and take his show off the air. He said a whistleblower notified him and revealed back to him information about a story Carlson was working on. (RELATED: It Increasingly Looks Like Tucker Carlson’s Private Emails Were Leaked To The Media By The Government)
The Daily Caller previously reported that a group of House Republicans sent a letter to the NSA calling on the agency to provide more information, while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has called for an investigation into the matter.
Rubio also criticized the agency’s now infamous statement denying the accusations. “It was completely bizarre and almost unresponsive to the claim,” he told The Record.
”This allegation is untrue. 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,” the agency said in a statement posted to Twitter last month. However, the NSA recently revealed that it unmasked Carlson’s identity during a foreign intelligence gathering, according to a report by The Record.
Axios reported that at the time of the spying accusation, Carlson talked to Kremlin intermediaries in the U.S. about a potential interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.