At least one official in the Biden administration failed to comply with federal law when they unmasked Tucker Carlson’s name after it was inadvertently (allegedly) collected by our intelligence community monitoring the communications of third parties. And the unnecessary unmasking of his name, followed by the inevitable leak, alerted foreign adversaries that their communications were being collected.
On July 7, 2021, Axios' Jonathan Swan reported, “Two sources familiar with Carlson's communications said his two Kremlin intermediaries live in the United States, but the sources could not confirm whether both are American citizens or whether both were on U.S. soil at the time they communicated with Carlson."
Tucker Carlson was merely attempting to setup an interview of Vladimir Putin.
If he was instead conspiring with him to harm U.S. interests, it would have undoubtably been leaked and become the headline in every liberal media outlet. Carlson would be in a cell just down from "QAnon Shaman" Jake Angeli. And Nancy Pelosi would be demanding a 9/11-style commission investigate Fox News.
However, those flatly stating the government should not be spying on Americans need to refresh their memories. Over the course of our history, a number of Americans and so-called “U.S. persons” – a term applied to anyone physically on U.S. soil – conspired with foreign powers to commit acts of espionage, sabotage, and terrorism against our nation. And a reckless and unnecessary “intelligence wall” policy, which exceeded then existing FISA statute requirements, got 2,978 innocent people killed on 9/11.
In his book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright wrote:
The source of [the NSA’s] intelligence about the [January 2000] Malaysia meeting was the telephone in Yemen belonging to the al-Qaeda loyalist, Ahmed al-Hada, that was so central in mapping al-Qaeda’s network. The Hada phone was an al-Qaeda clearinghouse and an intelligence bonanza. Ironically, it was the FBI’s investigation in the embassy bombings case—headed by the New York office—that had uncovered the Hada phone in the first place. Any information that had to do with the Hada household was crucial. The CIA knew that one of the men in the photographs of the Malaysia meeting—Khaled al-Mihdhar—was Hada’s son-in-law, but the agency also kept this vital detail from the bureau.
The NSA, not wanting to bother with applying to the FISA court for permission to distribute essential intelligence, simply restricted its distribution. For example, in San Diego, [future 9/11 hijacker] Mihdhar made eight calls to the Hada phone to talk to his wife [during May of 2000], who had just given birth, which the NSA did not distribute at all. There was a link chart on the wall of the “bullpen”—the warren of cubicles housing the [FBI’s] I-49 squad—showing the connections between Ahmed al-Hada’s phone and other phones around the world. It provided a map of al-Qaeda’s international reach. Had the line been drawn from the Hada household in Yemen to Hazmi and Mihdhar’s San Diego apartment, al-Qaeda’s presence in America would have been glaringly obvious.
Federal law does not and should not bar the intelligence community from inadvertently collecting the communications of U.S. persons. When actually necessary to understand the intelligence, their names should be unmasked by senior officials and widely disseminated within the IC. Yet the names of U.S. persons who mean no harm to our nation should remain masked.
The FISA Court has ruled that Section 702 requires:
In general, for non-public information concerning an unconsenting U.S. person, agencies may only include the identity of the U.S. person if it itself constitutes foreign intelligence, is necessary for the recipient to understand the foreign intelligence being transmitted, or is evidence of a crime. Agency minimization procedures generally provide for the substitution of a generic phrase or term, such as “U.S. person 1” or “a named U.S. person” when including the identity of the U.S. person does not meet dissemination criteria. This is informally referred to as “masking” the identity of the U.S. person.
It may have been necessary to unmask the “two Kremlin intermediaries.” Yet there was no need to unmask Carlson’s name who was just seeking an interview.
Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Keir Simmons, and even Oliver Stone have interviewed Putin. Presumably, the U.S. intelligence community knew in advance from its monitoring those interviews were being planned. Their names and plans were not leaked. But then, they don’t work for Fox News.
Biden’s intelligence community needs to fix its enemy identification problem.