As RedState reported earlier, Tucker Carlson’s previous claims of being spied on and having his communications leaked by the NSA were true. Axios reported on the leaked emails today, which contained nothing but Carlson attempting to set up an interview with Russia’s Vladamir Putin. Of note is that NBC News interviewed Putin just a few weeks ago and there is nothing untoward about a news host seeking an interview with an adversarial figure.

Now, Carlson has responded via his show and in the process, he burned his critics and the intel community to the ground.

As Carlson points out, when he first made the allegation last week, the usual suspects jumped in to call him a liar with the caveat that if it was true, then it must have been because Carlson was doing something wrong. Now, we know the truth thanks to Axios’ decision to play along with the illegal leak of Carlson’s emails instead of doing the right thing and rebuking the government for spying on a fellow journalist.

That means a lot of people who originally doubted the story look like clowns tonight (and I’ll have a separate piece on that later), and Carlson continued his victory lap by pointing out the obvious motivation of the leak — to try to paint him as a Russia agent.

It’s a go-to accusation that the left, facilitated by the left-wing hacks in our intelligence community, just can’t let go of. Of course, Carlson was simply trying to do what NBC News had done prior — land a major interview and make news. But by leaking his emails, the intel community wanted to make it seem as if Carlson had done something wrong and sinister. It’s an insidious, completely unAmerican game.

Carlson then got to the real heart of the issue — that laws were broken here. The NSA is required to keep the identity of Americans caught up in surveillance of foreign figures secret. Only via an unmasking request could his name have been revealed. After that request was clearly made, likely by someone in the Biden administration and having to have been signed off by the NSA head, they then took that information and leaked it to try to harm Carlson and Fox News. It’s literally the Michael Flynn saga all over again, except Carlson is going to handle this in a much smarter way (he won’t be sitting down to talk to the FBI anytime soon, for example).

Our intel communities are hopelessly corrupt. There is no saving them. They need to be completely torn down by the next Republican president. As to the absolute hacks who are claiming that it’s not spying for the NSA to gather communications of a journalist, unmask him, and then leak to the media, they are the worst kind of bootlickers. That our government has sunk this low is dangerous, and those who run it clearly intend to keep using the same character assassination schemes they tried on Donald Trump. This is not how things are supposed to work, and anyone defending this is disgusting.