Tucker Carlson facing ‘foreign agent’ charges, he says—’they read my texts’

Tucker Carlson has claimed he is facing potential criminal charges stemming from his conversations with people in Iran after U.S. government agencies “read my texts.”

Posting on X, the former Fox News host said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was preparing “a crime report” to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the basis that he was “acting as an agent of a foreign power” by conversing with individuals from Iran. Carlson denied these alleged claims.

Carlson did not provide evidence to substantiate the claim that the CIA and DOJ were preparing crime reports about his conduct and Newsweek was unable to independently verify these claims. Newsweek reached out to the DOJ by email and the CIA by website form to comment on this story outside of normal business hours.

Why It Matters

Carlson has been under the spotlight recently by breaking with President Donald Trump on a number of issues. Trump publicly booted the podcaster out of the MAGA movement over his opposition to the Iran war. 

“Tucker has lost his way,” Trump told ABC News. “He’s not MAGA,” he said.

Carlson has also criticized Trump for involving the U.S. in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Is it ‘America First’ to take money from a foreign lobby so you’ll send taxpayer dollars to that country? Even the question kind of answers itself, obviously it isn’t. That’s not an attack on Israel; it’s certainly not antisemitism, despite the efforts of many to claim that it is. It’s just an obvious statement,” Carlson said at a Turning Point conference in December.

What To Know

“The CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed,” Carlson said in his X video.

He said the crime was “talking to people in Iran before the war.” “They read my texts,” he said.

“The crime under consideration would be the foreign agent act or something like that, acting as an agent of a foreign power,” Carlson said, appearing to reference the Foreign Agents Registration Act which “requires certain agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the statute to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.”

“I don’t expect this to go anywhere,” he said. He added that he was “not an agent of a foreign power” and was loyal to the U.S. and had “never taken money from anybody.”

He added that some people in the CIA were “mad at me for my views about Israel.”