Weissmann: ‘Anti-American’ for Tucker Carlson to Complain About NSA Surveillance

Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor for former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Fox News host Tucker Carlson was “anti-American” for questioning being monitored by the NSA.

Weissmann said, “If you think about what Tucker Carlson could have done here, he could have followed the same route that “The New York Times” and other respected journalists did when they were incidentally overheard and may have, in fact, not been incidentally had their call records obtained by the Department of Justice. They could have gone to the attorney general, and Tucker Carlson could have joined them to say what I’m concerned about here is not that there was incidental collection when I am calling a foreigner, including if you try to reach out to Vladimir Putin, you can pretty much be sure you’re going to be high risk of being intercepted.”

He continued, “He could have said, look, there’s a First Amendment issue, and I want to be sure there are safeguards, but he didn’t take that route. He did, as you said, and as frank pointed out, he wanted to use this for his own purposes and to sow distrust which is so anti-American. Instead of raising a legitimate issue about safeguards in the system when you’re dealing with journalists to make sure that this is not something that senior officials in the department are making sure this was done responsibly.”

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