500 Journalists Working for US Agency left Behind

  Voice of America is taxpayer funded. And Radio Free Europe is United States government-funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East.

In part from Washington Monthly 5 days ago:

One group that, surprisingly, has hundreds of staffers and their families stranded in the country is the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs the pro-democracy Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

On Wednesday, 67 members of Congress sent President Biden a bipartisan letter saying that these staffers are being forgotten. “We stress to you that the 550 USAGM employees and their families are no different from journalists you have already doggedly worked to evacuate,” the letter reads.

I’ve been hearing from fellow journalists who are trying to get their own colleagues out of Afghanistan that there is a much higher number than 550, but, like everything in this shambolic pullout, the truth is obfuscated. A spokesperson for VOA told me that, for security reasons, the broadcasting organization is “unwilling to provide specific details in response to your query, but know that VOA is working with USAGM and other authorities to ensure the safety of all of our personnel in Afghanistan.”

Also on Wednesday, a source told me that a group trying to get VOA staffers and other vulnerable people out of Afghanistan ran into a wall because the evacuees were unable to get into the airport. The group, which consists of humanitarian aid workers and former embassy and U.S. Agency for International Development officials, has two charter flights that can carry 340 people each. The organization is holding them in Kabul, for now, they said, until Friday.

Were they counted in any of the Biden administration numbers of those still stranded? No one knows.

An update..now it is 100 journalists left behind?

FB: Amid its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration abandoned more than 100 government-sponsored journalists in the war-torn country.

The State Department promised to evacuate employees of Voice of America and Radio Azadi, which are overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, according to the Washington Post. The government employees, however, were unable to board evacuation flights by the administration’s Aug. 31 deadline, when the last U.S. troops departed from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The situation for the journalists, who face reprisals from the Taliban, is now a matter of “life and death,” according to an agency official.

“You would have expected that the United States government, which helped create the space for journalism and civil society in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, would have tried to do more over the last several weeks to assist journalists who made a decision that it was best for them to leave the country,” Jamie Fly, the president of Radio Liberty, which oversees Radio Azadi, told the Post. “But they consistently failed to do that.”

The Biden administration has faced mounting criticism for its withdrawal efforts, which have left between 100 and 200 Americans in the Taliban-controlled country. President Joe Biden said last month that U.S. troops would stay in Afghanistan until every American is evacuated—a broken promise that has angered both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to Politico.

“America’s last flight left Afghanistan, even though we still don’t know the total number of Americans trapped behind enemy lines—it’s unforgivable,” Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.) told the outlet.

Biden defended his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in a speech on Tuesday, saying it was “the right decision, a wise decision, and the best decision for America.”

 

More Terrifying Details on the Bagram Prison Release

Fox News’ Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin asked the Department of Defense press director Admiral Kirby how many prisoners were at the prisons at Bagram. Kirby’s answer was merely thousands, and nothing more specific. To be candid, the military knows precisely how many were there and their full militant criminal backgrounds. This all was until Bagram was turned over to the Afghan forces and subsequently to the Taliban which released all prisoners. In January 2002, the U.S. government began detention operations in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Field in Parwan province. For many years, detainees were held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a converted Soviet aircraft machine plant.

So, what about more details? Well, that prison system was known as Gitmo Part 2 and what pressured to be closed for years. After some open source investigations, there are some interesting details as follows:

  • In 2014, the BBC was finally granted access to a Bagram prison. The Afghan Review Board (ARB), is/was the committee responsible for the prisoner issue, had announced that it would be releasing some of the inmates.

    The ARB said these men could not be prosecuted because of a lack of evidence.

    The Nato-led international peacekeeping force (Isaf) quickly came out and slammed the decision, saying the detainees were dangerous terrorists and had “blood on their hands”.

  • Afghan President Hamid Karzai told me Bagram is a “Taliban-making factory” where innocent people are indiscriminately mixing with extremists and being indoctrinated.

    Now that some of these prisoners have been released – some of them to the most troubled regions where the Taliban hold sway – the question is, will American fears be realised?

  • Before the prison break, Bagram Air Base, including its prison, which holds 5,000 inmates, surrendered to Taliban control, the Associated Press reported.

    Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi said the former U.S. base that held both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters was taken over on Sunday. Other Taliban gains include Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul after the government collapsed.

  • The other large prison was located in Kabul and those prisoners have been released as well. Thousands of inmates, including former Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters, were released from a prison on the outskirts of Kabul — Pul-e-Charkhi — as well as another facility at Bagram airbase as the Taliban called for a “peaceful transition” of power. sourcePrisoners run free in Afghanistan
  • Many liberal groups packaged as human rights organizations have long mobilized to close not only Guantanamo but all the prisons in Afghanistan. Now, they seem to have fallen silent given the present conditions in Afghanistan. However, the most disgusting organization advocating for closures of terror prisons which I found somewhat unexpectedly was old man George Soros and his Open Society. Yup….that guy.

Could this be the very reason that the prisons were handed over to the Taliban….George Soros? Could it be that Open Society operatives are driving part of the Biden White House decisions on Afghanistan?

Open Society in 2012 issued a white paper titled ‘Remaking Bagram‘. Could it be that Soros et.al waited for Biden to reintroduce that objective and is now successful?

In part for the opening summary of the white paper is:

The United States has been using internment in Afghanistan for many years, where detainees are “preventatively detained” for “imperative security reasons,” rather than accused of a crime and tried in a court. In order to facilitate the transfer of the detainees interned by the U.S. military, the Afghan government created its own internment regime, closely resembling the U.S. system. Though the Afghan government has chosen to transfer many of the detainees to a criminal court, more than 50 are now being held by the
Afghan government without charge or trial through this new internment power. Senior Afghan officials have told the Open Society Foundations that they believe the new system is unconstitutional.

Though numerous Afghan officials have told Open Society Foundations researchers that they believe Afghan internment will come to an end in September 2012, when they assume the detention transition will be complete, U.S. statements and actions suggest otherwise. U.S. forces have continued to capture individuals in military operations and detain them on the “U.S. side” or part of the DFIP since the transition process began in March 2012.

Read the full document here.

As the top government leader Ashraf Ghani bailed out with millions and millions of dollars from his job and duties in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzi has chosen to stay. One little detail is Karzai has been collaborating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar who is the co-founder of the Taliban for quite sometime. It was Karzai that demanded Baradar’s release from prison because once upon a time Baradar saved Karzai’s life. Baradar was released under the Taliban’s demand that started the peace talks between the United States (NATO) and the Taliban. It was Baradar that took a meeting(s) with CIA director William Burns and it is Baradar that continues to collaborate operations in Afghanistan which is why the CENTCOM leader, General McKenzie. Baradar is a busy man as weeks before, he met with Chinese leaders.

China’s foreign minister has met a Taliban delegation, signalling warming ties as the United States-led foreign forces continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Wang Yi on Wednesday told the nine visiting Taliban representatives, which included the group’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, that Beijing expected it to “play an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan”, according to a readout of the meeting from the foreign ministry. source

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, left, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pose for a photo during their meeting in Tianjin, China, on Wednesday, July 28.

During a meeting with Taliban’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s political committee, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the Taliban as an important military and political force in Afghanistan, and said he expected the Taliban to play an important role in the country’s “peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process,” according to China’s Foreign Ministry. source

The doubling of enemies against the West including the United States is manifesting.

 

 

France Warned the US About the Wuhan Lab Often

Will this Biden ordered investigation within 100 days include anything from the past including what France warned us about regarding the Wuhan Lab? You be the judge…read on.

In part:

The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

Between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided $1.1 million to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to USAID. EcoHealth Alliance also received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that was subcontracted to the Wuhan lab, New York magazine reported. National Institutes of Health grants to EcoHealth Alliance totaling $600,000 between 2014 and 2019 were subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH, Defense Department and USAID should have stopped sending U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan lab back when the French warned the State Department in 2015, Asher said. More here.

***

Stephen Mosher, a REAL China expert and previous radio guest on my radio show (several times) had this piece in the NY Post in part:

  • China had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
  • Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
  • Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in ­microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ ”
  • As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.

Even at the time there was other evidence available, which likewise pointed to the lab — and to the PLA’s involvement:

  • The authorities ordered all of the early samples of the coronavirus collected by private and university labs in China — vital for tracing the origin and early spread of the disease — to be destroyed.
  • China’s civilian Center for Disease Control was completely shut out of the picture in favor of the PLA, suggesting a classified military program was involved.
  • Military academies and installations in and around Wuhan were closed around January 1, well before the Chinese public was notified that there was a problem.
  • China lied about human-to-human transmission, leaving the US and other countries unprepared for the rapid spread of the virus, ensuring that more lives would be lost.

The evidence was circumstantial, to be sure, but I was fairly certain by that point that I could have convinced a jury of China’s culpability. Even so, while I waited for more facts to surface, I was careful to call the “lab origin” just a possibility.

Facebook, however, didn’t wait. It quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17. The mainstream media likewise piled on, slamming The Post for publishing the writings of a “conspiracy theorist.” Others who raised questions about the pandemic’s origins were heavily censored as well — if not “canceled” entirely.

 Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Thomas Peter/REUTERS

China locked down the Wuhan lab, and the US virology establishment closed ranks, both denying that gain-of-function research — or a PLA bioweapons research program — had anything to do with the pandemic.

It has taken over a year, but the attempted cover-ups on both sides of the Pacific have gradually unraveled.

During that time China has burned through a half-dozen increasingly implausible cover stories. After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolins and raccoon-dogs, oh my! — for harboring the virus. We seem now to be back to bats, and are being told that many years ago, in a cave far away from the Wuhan lab, minors fell ill from being peed upon, pooped upon, and even bitten by those same nasty, virus-harboring creatures.

But the wildest tale by far being bandied about by the Chinese authorities is that CoV-2 was a US bioweapon, created in the U. Army’s research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. As to how the “American Virus” — as they unabashedly call it — got to China, they have an answer for that too: it was secretly released on the unsuspecting Chinese population of Wuhan by the American soldier-athletes who participated in the October 2019 Military World Games in that city.

Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at US Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Who makes up such bat-sh*t crazy stories about secret bioweapons and superspreading soldiers? The same people, it seems, whose fever dream for decades has been to do exactly the same thing. There are numerous scientific publications that prove Chinese labs were engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research, along with new evidence that these techniques were being used in an active bioweapons program that included the Wuhan lab. As China defector Dr. Yan Limeng has taught us, the PLA itself isolated the original bat coronavirus that served as the “backbone” or “template” for CoV-2. Additional genetic material was then spliced into this virus to make it more infectious and deadly to humans. This is not speculation.

Those doing the splicing left “signatures” behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.

The dwindling ranks of lab “deniers” continue to insist that the vast laboratory of nature is capable of infinite surprises. Of course that’s true. And it’s also true that if you have enough monkeys typing the four DNA bases A, C, G, and T on enough computer keyboards they will eventually produce a complete and accurate copy of the human genome, which is 6.4 billion such bases long. But what are the odds?

And what are the odds that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans?

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China February 18, 2020.
Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment in China on Feb. 18, 2020.
China Daily via REUTERS

Dr. David Asher, who headed the now-canceled State Department investigation, put that very question to a biostatistician, and was told that the odds were roughly … 1 in 13 billion. In the face of that vanishingly small probability, Asher remarked, “to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous.”

What we do know, as former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger pointed out in a February interview, is that the PLA had been “doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. While the Wuhan lab poses as a “civilian institution,” Pottinger said, US intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated with China’s military on publications and secret bioweapons projects.

That’s David Asher’s opinion as well. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” he says. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Dr. David Asher
Dr. David Asher believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was running a biological weapons program.
Rod Lamkey/CNP

A Chinese book that recently fell into the hands of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) further confirms that Chinese military scientists have been focused on what they called the “new era of genetic weapons” since at least 2015. They begin by asserting that World War III would be fought with biological weapons, and go on to describe how viruses can be collected from nature and “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.”

Sound familiar?

In fact, the scientists even singled out coronaviruses as a class of viruses that can be readily weaponized, and they suggest that the ideal candidate for a bioweapon would be something like the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. It is worth noting that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus, which is why the World Health Organization insists that we call it SARS-CoV-2. As in, the “second” SARS virus.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of ASPI, said the new document “clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed. It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use.”

Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market before its closure in Hankou, Wuhan city, central China's Hubei province, 31 December 2019.
After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolin.
Alamy

The document, he went on to say, is the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got.”

Is it really that surprising that the same murderous regime that has brought us forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, and genocide in real time would also be developing deadly bioweapons to release upon the world?

China had both the intention and the capability to take a harmless bat virus, turn it into a deadly pathogen, and then release it upon the world. And the evidence suggests that it did just that.

More than half of all Americans — including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — now believe the virus was made in a lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. Indeed, there has been a massive hardening of public opinion against the communist giant across the board, with 89 percent of adults now seeing the country as hostile or dangerous.

By killing 600,000 Americans, China has proven that it is both.

But whether the Biden administration makes China pay for its crimes is another question.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of the forthcoming “Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).

 

Biden Getting Softer on Moscow

Was any of this actually discussed in that summit between Biden and Putin? No mention of any of it during the press conference. Read on…

The state trials of Russia’s newest Zircon hypersonic missile from a surface carrier will begin in August 2021, a source in the military-industrial complex told.

source

Newsweek reports in part:

Moscow has warned the Pentagon that the U.S. deploying hypersonic missiles in Europe could unintentionally spark hostilities, just hours after Russia test-fired a weapon it wants to equip its warships and submarines with.

On Monday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby was asked about Russia’s claims that it had successfully tested a Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile.

“The tactical and technical characteristics of the Tsirkon missile were confirmed during the tests,” the Defense Ministry said, also releasing video of the weapon, which President Vladimir Putin had previously boasted would be able to reach speeds of Mach 9, and hit targets up to 700 miles away.

When asked about the test, Kirby said: “We’re certainly aware of President Putin’s claims, […] it’s important to note that Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are potentially destabilizing and pose significant risks because they are nuclear capable systems.”

Kirby added: “By contrast, the United States is developing solely non-nuclear hypersonic strike capabilities. So alongside our NATO allies we remain committed to deterrence while promoting greater stability in the region.”

But then we have the matter of the Havana Syndrome.

More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome – a mystery brain illness – since President Joe Biden took office in January.

The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.

It was first found in Cuba in 2016-17.

US and Canadian diplomats in Havana complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss and anxiety to something they described as “cognitive fog”.

The US accused Cuba of carrying out “sonic attacks”, which it strongly denied, and the incident led to increased tension between the two nations.

A 2019 US academic study found “brain abnormalities” in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.

The Vienna cases first came to light in the New Yorker magazine on Friday and were later confirmed by the US State Department, which said it was “vigorously investigating”.

Reuters quoted an Austrian foreign ministry statement saying it was “working with the US authorities on jointly getting to the bottom of this”.

Vienna has long been a centre for diplomatic activity and has had a reputation as a hotspot for espionage, particularly during the Cold War.

Countries like the US have a large diplomatic presence there.

The city is currently hosting indirect talks between Iran and the US over attempts to resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Cases of the condition have been reported elsewhere in the world, but US officials say the numbers in Vienna are greater than in any other city apart from Havana.

In June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a wide-ranging review into the causes of the illness.

Then there is the matter of that pesky pipeline…Russia’s….Biden shuttered our own Keystone pipeline  on day one.

Factoid: The Biden Admin’s NSA Unmasked Tucker Carlson

So, who exactly ordered the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson’s emails and leak them is unclear but there is at least one common name that did the same thing against General Flynn…..Susan Rice….ahhh but read on. (Remember former AG Barr called it spying)

Axios:

Tucker Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before the Fox News host accused the National Security Agency of spying on him, sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.

Why it matters: Those sources said U.S. government officials learned about Carlson’s efforts to secure the Putin interview. Carlson learned that the government was aware of his outreach — and that’s the basis of his extraordinary accusation, followed by a rare public denial by the NSA that he had been targeted.

  • Axios has not confirmed whether any communications from Carlson have been intercepted, and if so, why.

The big picture: Carlson’s charges instantly became a cause célèbre on the right, which feasted on the allegation that one of America’s most prominent conservatives might have been monitored by the U.S. intelligence community.

The backstory: Carlson told his roughly 3 million viewers on June 28 that the day before, he had heard “from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA … is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

  • Carlson said his source, “who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails.”
  • “It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens,” Carlson added. “Things like that should not happen in America. But unfortunately, they do happen. And in this case, they did happen.”
  • The NSA said in a tweet the next night, as Carlson’s show went on the air, that his “allegation is untrue.”
  • “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air,” the statement said.

A Fox News spokesperson gave this response to our reporting: “We support any of our hosts pursuing interviews and stories free of government interference.”

  • And Carlson gave this statement: “As I’ve said repeatedly, because it’s true, the NSA read my emails, and then leaked their contents. That’s an outrage, as well as illegal.”

It is unclear why Carlson, or his source, would think this outreach could be the basis for NSA surveillance or a motive to have his show canceled.

  • Journalists routinely reach out to world leaders — including the leaders of countries that are not allied with the U.S. — to request interviews. And it’s not unusual to first reach out through unofficial intermediaries rather than through the leaders’ official press offices.
  • Numerous American journalists have interviewed Putin in recent years, and none have faced professional repercussions. Quite the contrary: Chris Wallace earned Fox News its first Emmy nomination for his 2018 Putin interview.

On Wednesday, Carlson told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business that only his executive producer knew about the communications in question and that he didn’t mention it to anybody else, including his wife.

  • But, of course, the recipients of Carlson’s texts and emails also knew about their content. And we don’t know how widely they shared this information.

Between the lines: The NSA’s public statement didn’t directly deny that any Carlson communications had been swept up by the agency.

  • Axios submitted a request for comment to the NSA on Wednesday, asking whether the agency would also be willing to categorically deny that the NSA intercepted any of Carlson’s communications in the context of monitoring somebody he was talking to in his efforts to set up an interview with Putin.
  • An NSA spokesperson declined to comment and referred Axios back to the agency’s earlier, carefully worded, statement. In other words, the NSA is denying the targeting of Carlson but is not denying that his communications were incidentally collected.

What’s next: Experts say there are several plausible scenarios — including legal scenarios — that could apply.

  • The first — and least likely — scenario is that the U.S. government submitted a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Carlson to protect national security.
  • A more plausible scenario is that one of the people Carlson was talking to as an intermediary to help him get the Putin interview was under surveillance as a foreign agent.
  • In that scenario, Carlson’s emails or text messages could have been incidentally collected as part of monitoring this person, but Carlson’s identity would have been masked in any intelligence reports.
  • In order to know that the texts and emails were Carlson’s, a U.S. government official would likely have to request his identity be unmasked, something that’s only permitted if the unmasking is necessary to understand the intelligence.

In a third scenario, interceptions might not have involved Carlson’s communications. The U.S. government routinely monitors the communications of people in Putin’s orbit, who may have been discussing the details of Carlson’s request for an interview.

  • But under this scenario, too, Carlson’s identity would have been masked in reports as part of his protections as a U.S. citizen, and unmasking would only be permitted if a U.S. government official requested that his identity be unmasked in order to understand the intelligence. And it’s not clear why that would be necessary here.

The intrigue: 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.

  • This is relevant because if one of them was a foreign national and on foreign soil during the communications, the U.S. government wouldn’t necessarily have had to seek approval to monitor their communications.