Joining MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Thursday to discuss this were former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence, Frank Figliuzzi, and former top Robert Mueller prosecutor and Justice Department criminal fraud investigator Andrew Weissmann.
Figliuzzi said that he's "not convinced at all that this whistleblower exists," speaking of the person who told Carlson about the emails.
"What better way for Tucker Carlson to cover his rear end, because he's called a Russian intelligence officer or intermediary for the Kremlin?" he explained. "He gets worried about it. He decides to go on the offensive and announce that 'the NSA is listening to me' and have them try and deny it. I think it's a good cover. There's something much larger going on here. Another page in the playbook of folks like Tucker Carlson and the GOP who want to continue to erode the public's trust in their institutions. If you keep doing that enough the objective is you can't trust your institutions and the career professionals and then the only people you can trust are us. And you get to reshape the truth into your own version of reality. That's what's going on here."
Weissmann said that Carlson isn't the first person to have been allegedly spied on. It was revealed over the past month that reporters at the New York Times, CNN and Washington Post were all targeted by Donald Trump in 2017 as he attempted to find a leaker. Trump even had the FBI monitor Democrats in Congress, their staff, their family and even their children.
Weissmann said that Carlson should have gone to the Justice Department and talk to them about what was being done to ensure the First Amendment right to a free press was being followed. It's what the New York Times did when there was a suspicion of the Justice Department monitoring their calls.
"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 at high risk of being intercepted," said Weissmann. "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."
One of Carlson's greatest problems is that he's not actually a journalist. As Fox News explained in court, no reasonable person would believe anything Carlson says on his show. It's perhaps why Figliuzzi questions whether this so-called whistleblower exists.
Figliuzzi noted that he has concerns about even acknowledging that this could be real because it seems fishy to him.
"I don't know what the truth is when it comes to Tucker Carlson's assertions," he confessed. "But, yes, look, if he's talking to people who have a governmental function or act on behalf of foreign adversary government officials like Vladimir Putin, it is possible -- I don't want to get into the highly classified details, but it's possible that he was talking with targets in some way, shape or form. Whether they were here on U.S. soil or whether it was something that had to be approved by a FISA court or even perhaps U.S. persons who are representing Vladimir Putin or the Russian government is really not relevant to me as long as the rules were followed."
The missing piece for him is whether there was really a whistleblower or if it was something Carlson made up.
"Were there violations -- and, again, even as I say this I'm giving credence to someone who deserves no credence at all," Figliuzzi confessed. "Were the rules followed in terms of mask being and unmasking? In my 25 years running counterintelligence for the FBI it is a major deal to get a U.S. person's name unmasked. Very few people have access to that inside the NSA. The idea somebody saw Tucker's name being passed around or they had access to it and they leaked it to him, let me say this, if that person even exists, they're going to be arrested for passing top-secret information. But I'm not sure that person exists."
See the full discussion below:
Does Tucker's whistleblower really exist ?
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