Thread by @ggreenwald

Tucker Carlson adds more specifics and more reporting to corroborate his claim that the NSA was not just spying on his email communications but using them to leak to reporters. I'll be on tonight at 8 pm ET discussing these claims.

https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1412779425876353025

The media dynamic we're seeing here is the same as with the Julian Assange prosecution. You would expect journalists to lead the way in denouncing the prosecution of a journalist and wanting answers to whether the NSA spied on another journalist. But they don't do either.

One reason is they are petty hacks who can't see principle: they don't regard Assange or Carlson as one of them & thus don't care what's done to them.

But the real reason is they're authoritarians: they revere DOJ & NSA - the security state - and thus reflexively side with it.

But there's another crucial dynamic here. We saw it with that VICE article on how liberal journalists need to think they at "An Insurrection" and are traumatized.

They aren't threats to anyone. They spout liberal pieties & serve officials. So they hate those who actually dissent

The culture of the failing part of corporate media - the liberal HuffPost/BuzzFeed/Vice/MSNBC blob - is shaped by their knowledge that they never take real risks or threaten power centers. For that reason, they align with the security state & despise those who provoke their wrath

If you're a journalist who knows you've never done meaningful reporting and never taken risks and never threatened power centers, you'll hate those who do, but will also invent fictions where you get to be the courageous star of a drama for once.

https://twitter.com/VICENews/status/1412435959694741508

It's just astonishing to watch this liberal skepticism that the NSA would do such a thing. A large part of our Snowden reporting is they spy on *everyone*: journalists, human rights activists, etc. NSA leaked Flynn's conversations with a Russian official!

washingtonpost.com/world/national…

Everyone should want to see the evidence about whether NSA spied on Carlson's emails and leaked them. That's how we'll know for sure whether it happened.

But you have to be staggeringly naive or willfully ignorant to think NSA/CIA haven't always done exactly this and still do.

Axios just reported the contents of Tucker Carlson's communications with "U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin."

axios.com/tucker-carlson…

There's obviously nothing wrong with trying to set up an interview Putin. Any decent journalist would do that.

But there are lots of questions about how the US Govt knew Carlson was doing this, who leaked it, and whether the learning of it and/or the leaking of it was illegal.

One of the most serious crimes in the US Code is leaking the contents of intercepted communications, even if the interception itself was legal. Whoever leaked the contents of Gen. Flynn's call with Kislyak, for instance, committed major felonies.

theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the…

This is 100% the standard liberal mindset and it's what makes that faction so authoritarian. I have zero doubt that if it's proven that someone in the intelligence community obtained these communications & criminally leaked them, liberals will justify it:

https://twitter.com/seattlecarl/status/1412893894698704899

Imagine if this story happened during the Trump years and someone leaked the contents of Jim Acosta or Rachel Maddow's conversations to Fox News which then reported on them.