CIA Prepares Criminal Referral of Tucker Carlson, as Israel and Its Loyalists Demand His Arrest

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CIA Prepares Criminal Referral of Tucker Carlson, as Israel and Its Loyalists Demand His Arrest

As the Israel Lobby gets more desperate watching the collapse of American support for their country, they also become more nakedly authoritarian to control U.S. discourse.

By Glenn Greenwald, Reposted from Glenn Greenwald’s Substack, March 15, 2026

On Friday morning, I taped an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program to discuss the ongoing Iran War, growing Israeli influence in the U.S., and proliferating attacks on free speech in the West in the name of shielding that one foreign country from critique. (I presume it will air in the next few days.) Perhaps the most notable part of our conversation was what Tucker told me prior to the cameras rolling.

Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others living in Iran prior to the start of the Trump-Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.

Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or misled me. Tucker has been in public life as a journalist and media figure since his 20s. There have been many harsh criticisms launched against him during those decades, many of which — as he will be the first to tell you — were ones that were quite valid.

Notably, many of the harshest attacks on Tucker came from me during my first decade after becoming a journalist (last year, Tucker discussed our friendship in a podcast conversation with Chris Cuomo and he noted that, during the War on Terror and his ongoing war cheerleading, “nobody was meaner to me than Glenn Greenwald”; Cuomo said the same was true of him).

But it is precisely because I have gotten to know him so well over the past decade or so that I am thoroughly convinced about the authenticity of his epiphanies regarding how lifetime immersion in D.C. culture led him to all sorts of false beliefs; his deeply felt regret and shame about much of what he supported in the past (including but not at all limited to the Iraq War); and the clearly new prism through which he sees the world, clarity enabled by leaving both Fox News and the dual prisons of incestuous D.C. culture and corporate media constraints.

All of that is to say that I harbored zero doubts that Tucker was accurately conveying to me what he had heard. And I also knew this was not just idle low-level D.C. gossip. Tucker’s decades in mainstream media and especially his years as the highest-rated prime-time cable host in the history of the medium — to say nothing of his closeness to key figures in Trump world — have resulted in an array of friends and sources at the highest levels of American power centers. His regular visits to the White House to meet with Trump prove that point.

But still, the idea that an American journalist of any kind, let alone one of Tucker’s stature, could be surveilled by the CIA and then criminally investigated by the DOJ for treason or related offenses — all for trying to report the truth about an imminent and indescribably dangerous war — is so inherently shocking and unimaginable that I just assumed his sources were hyperbolically sounding an alarm out of caution.

Perhaps that reaction was more wishful thinking than objective analysis. After all, I have lived through many American wars — especially the Iraq War, but others, too — where it was commonplace to equate war criticisms with treason, and journalistic reports at odds with the U.S. Government’s rosy pictures of imminent glorious victory as some sort of anti-American subversion.

Still, the possibility that someone like Tucker could be in serious legal jeopardy for the crime of critical war reporting seemed vanishingly low to me: until I woke up the next day and saw Saturday’s morning tsunami of clearly orchestrated commentary, discourse and pressure campaign from Israelis and their hordes of American loyalists demanding Tucker’s arrest.

Perhaps I was being naive, but I still regard the prospect of Tucker Carlson being charged by the Trump DOJ with felonies for his reporting to be quite low. But the fact that it is being aggressively promoted — not by random accounts online but some of the most influential voices in Washington — is, at the very least, designed to create a climate of fear and intimidation for anyone who has been harshly criticizing both Israel and the Trump-Netanyahu war and, especially, for those reporting that the U.S. government’s triumphalist claims do not correspond with reality.

Hours after we concluded our interview, Tucker on Saturday night published on various social media platforms a five-minute summary of what he had told me. The video, entitled, “We Discovered the CIA Is Reading Our Texts to Frame Us for a Crime,” described how the CIA’s referral to the DOJ is based on private conversations which Tucker, as a journalist, had with people inside Iran.

As Tucker explained, the only way for the U.S. government to have obtained those conversations is through eavesdropping and surveillance on his texts and calls: carried out either by the NSA through domestic surveillance or through use of the Mossad or some other allied spying agency which furnished those conversations to the CIA. One major part of the reporting we did from on the Snowden files detailed how the NSA often used allied spying agencies to snoop on Americans and provide them with the findings, all a way to circumvent constitutional and other legal limits on the ability of American security state agencies to spy on their own citizens.

This is not the first time that the NSA and/or allied agencies have spied on Tucker in his work as a journalist. Both times that he attempted to arrange an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, those conversations were intercepted by US spies and leaked to the U.S. media. This is simply the nature of being a dissident American journalist, or a citizen of any kind, in the world of ubiquitous domestic, warrantless surveillance we have allowed our government to create.

The reaction to Tucker’s announcement of this CIA criminal referral was as revealing as it is dangerous and nauseating. All sorts of Israelis and their most devoted loyalists in the U.S. threw caution to the wind and just explicitly demanded Tucker’s arrest, simply assuming his guilt.

One Israeli politician — Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, until recently the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who has served and continues to serve in all sorts of official and quasi-official Israeli entities — issued this demand: “Tucker Carlson should be arrested and tried for treason.” Ponder how much hubris and entitlement an official of a foreign country must possess in order to publicly demand that the U.S. Government arrest and prosecute an American journalist for “treason”: which, by definition, is the ultimate crime that defines loyalty to the United States, not to Israel.

One would think that any American claiming primary allegiance to the U.S. would — no matter their views on Israel — be deeply offended by this brazen and aggressive interference by a foreign official into American affairs and, specifically, her efforts to dictate how the duties and obligations of American citizens should be defined. But one would be wrong. Many prominent American citizens who have long demonstrated that their loyalty is to Israel (at least as much if not more so than to the U.S.) echoed Hassan-Nahoum’s demands for Tucker’s arrest and even went further.

Laura Loomer — who, in a minimally rational world, should be entirely ignored and perhaps even institutionalized as a mentally unwell, attention-desperate freak show, but who is, instead, so influential in the White House that Trump found the time to speak with her on the night he ordered the attack on Iran, as American troops were dying — is leading the campaign for Tucker’s arrest. The same is true of many of the most extremist and repellent Israel loyalists in the U.S.

On early Saturday morning, Loomer cited the mention by Iranian media of Tucker’s view that the U.S. war effort is going more poorly than anticipated to conclude: “This is TREASON, and Tucker needs to go to prison.” Unable to contain her raging fantasies of Israel critics in the U.S. being punished as harshly as possible, she later added: “I can’t wait to see Tucker Carlson go to prison.”

Congressman Randy Fine (R-FL), whose entire life has been gluttonously devoted to Israel despite running for the American Congress, cited a biblical verse to imply that Tucker is being punished by God for his lack of loyalty to that foreign state. One of the most militaristic Israeli social media influencers, Eli David, announced that Trump purposely met with Tucker prior to the war because Trump knew Tucker was a spy for Iran and used Tucker’s criminal disloyalty to feed him disinformation to take back to his masters in Tehran.

I could spent weeks detailing such accusations and demands from prominent Israel loyalists and still not have created anything close to a comprehensive list. Their long-time quest to criminalize dissent on Israel in the U.S. seems to them closer than ever, and that perception is far from unreasonable.

Even as I report all of this, I am consciously aware that this is all so inherently deranged. It is such malicious propaganda on behalf of a foreign state that it should not warrant even passing commentary, let alone a long article warning of its gravity. But that is simply due to the fact that many have not fully processed just how deep and pervasive the influence and infiltration of Israeli subterfuge in American discourse and government are: a threat that has only grown as American support for Israel has collapsed.

There are so many ways to illustrate this dangerous subversion, many of which I have covered extensively. Many of America’s largest and most influential news and social media outlets — from CBS News and TikTok to Paramount, Warner Brothers and CNN — have been quickly consolidated in the hands and under the control of Larry Ellison, the largest-ever donor to the Friends of the IDF.

Trump himself boasted during the 2024 campaign of how loyal he was to Israel, how much he gave them in his first term, and then vowed to “Make Israel Great Again.” Throughout 2025, Trump used the leverage of his termination of federal funds to American universities to force them to institute radically expanded hate speech codes that define “anti-Semitism” in such a way as to ban a wide range of commonly expressed criticisms of both Israel and certain Jewish individuals. His administration has eliminated the precise kind of DEI programs they vowed to abolish for disfavored groups: but then forced on the same colleges classic new DEI programs that benefit only Israeli and Jewish faculty.

Though it has long been true, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups exert immense and virtually unparalleled power in American election. They have easily removed members of Congress who have questioned U.S. financing of Israel by pouring obscene sums into their districts, and are currently targeting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) for the same crime, by using the unlimited funds of pro-Israel billionaires such as Miriam Adelson, who gave Trump’s campaign more than $100 million in 2024 alone (even as Trump himself suggested that Adelson, born in Israel, has greater loyalty to Israel than the U.S.: a comment ironically banned on American campuses thanks to Trump’s imposition of expanded hate-speech codes to protect Israel).

Both parties in Washington banned TikTok on the ground that it was permitting too much anti-Israel content and forced its transfer into the hands of Ellison, who now has a former IDF soldier censoring content about Israel. And, of course, we are currently engaged in a dangerous and increasingly deadly war against Israel’s primary adversary: a war that Netanyahu has admitted he dreamed of luring the U.S. into for decades.

All those facts have been well-reported, including by my journalism over years, and are more known than they ever were before. That is one reason public opinion polls in the U.S. now consistently reveal a rapid collapse of support for Israel among every demographic group other than elderly and rapidly aging Fox and Hannity viewers.

But permit me to show you a highly relevant video clip which, though not nearly as known as these other events, vividly illustrates what is going on in the U.S. when it comes to the otherwise-inexplicable dominance of this small foreign country. It is an excerpt of a speech delivered by one of the most beloved Israel-loyal neocons in the U.S. She is a Harvard Professor of Yiddish named Ruth Wisse. She in an old-school neocon, one of the most vocal proponents of the War on Terror, the War in Iraq, and every other U.S. war in the Middle East against Israel’s enemies.

In a speech at The Jewish Agency for Israel in Connecticut in 2019, Wisse explained the core duty and mission of Jewish Americans. Please listen to what she said. Clearly not all Jews subscribe to this sermon but many of them do, including influential American Jewish figures in media, politics, entertainment and beyond. That is why she is regarded as an influential figure and not a fringe one:

Wisse’s decree is nothing less than a directive to American Jews that they have a supreme and inescapable moral duty to “enlist in the army of public opinion” — not to defend their own country, the United States, but to defend a foreign country many have been taught from birth to revere and defend. And there are countless American journalists and politicians — and not only the obvious examples of Mark Levin, CBS News President Bari Weiss, Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, Rep. Randy Fine, White House Advisor Stephen Miller, new media barons Larry and David Ellison — who do indeed see this as their overarching goal because they were taught from birth to embrace it. This fact is one reason why it is so commonplace to see Americans (such as the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg) leave the U.S. to go join Israel’s military, but never the U.S. military.

The collapse of Americans’ public support for Israel since October 7 has only made these efforts more desperate and panic-driven. And it is all of that which, in turn, has led us to the previously unthinkable campaign to actually arrest and prosecute an American journalist for the crime of opposing an American war he believes is devastating for the interests of his own country, even if beneficial for Israel.

No discussion of these events is complete — or really even comprehensible — without noting how Israel and its loyalists now perceive Tucker Carlson as the greatest danger to Israel’s ability to dominate American politics, especially conservative politics, for its own interests. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — who last year boasted to Tucker one of the most notorious confessions a major US politician has ever made: “I came into Congress to serve Israel and I work every day to do that” — spoke to the Republican Jewish Conference and pronounced him “the single most dangerous demagogue in the country.”

It is now commonplace amount junior-varsity Israel loyalists to label Tucker “the single most dangerous anti-Semite in America” (which is code for: one of the most influential Israel critics in years). Just two weeks ago, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt accused Tucker of having “a long history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and the Jewish state.” And virtually the entire mainstream Israeli media and government united to demonize him as such when he sought to enter Israel to interview U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

I hope there is nobody naive or rosy-eyed enough to believe that the campaign to now demand Tucker’s arrest and prosecution for “treason” is somehow unrelated to his clear status as Public Enemy Number One of the Israeli government and its army of American loyalists. Israeli demands for the arrest of Israel critics has become commonplace, and quite effective, throughout the democratic world.

Behold the indescribably horrifying arrest of this 18-year-old Australian citizen this week for wearing a t-shirt with what the law calls a “legally banned slogan” (“from the river to the sea”). This ban is a part of a new law that Israel demanded Australia adopt, a repressive speech-destroying trend repeating itself throughout the West not in the name of protecting citizens of those countries but of Israel:

American journalist have not only the right but the duty in war time to ensure that Americans hear not only from their own government but also from the governments of the countries we are attacking. Large corporate outlets have often failed in that duty through a combination of fear of name-calling, misplaced patriotism, and even war-heightened repression that typically results when the U.S. initiates new military conflicts. The E.U. criminally banned any and all media outlets from platforming Russian state media at the start of the war in Ukraine to ensure its citizens heard no counterpoints to state propaganda about the war.

Tucker deserves praise, not vilification, for ensuring that his reporting and analysis of this war for his audience is informed not just by mimicking what the Pentagon and CIA tell him to say, but also by the views and perspectives of all countries in the region, including Iran. This type of reporting is not welcomed in censor-heavy Israel during its wars, but thankfully, America has a much more robust tradition of free speech and a free press even during wartime, even when it has often been under attack. At least that had been true — imperfectly true, but still true — until the recent spate of increasingly aggressive Israeli attacks to curb free speech in the democratic world for the benefit of that foreign country.

Many believe, with good reason, that the U.S. is now involved in an extremely volatile war because of Israel. The last thing we should want, or tolerate, is having American citizens and journalists threatened with arrest due to the commands of Israelis and their rabid pack of loyalists embedded throughout our country’s institutions. Even if Tucker ends up not being arrested or prosecuted, the message to journalists and other American citizens with far fewer resources and far less of a platform than Tucker is unmistakably clear and deliberately chilling. And that message should be crushed and rejected by any American purporting to care about American national interests and believe in the core rights that we were always taught defined our country.

Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008. He gas also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award, the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism , the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award, the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned from The Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism on Substack and Rumble.

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