WATCH: Tucker Claims NSA Hacked Into His Signal Account After Seeking Putin Interview

Tucker Carlson told a pair of interviewers in March that the National Security Agency, the nation’s most clandestine intelligence bureau, obtained messages he sent using Signal. The clip of Carlson’s commentary is now going viral.

Knowing the NSA could tap Signal, which is frequently used by journalists to send encrypted messages, was unsettling enough for Carlson, he said on the podcast. But what really “freaked out” Carlson was learning he was the target of the agency’s surveillance over his upcoming plans to visit Russia.

“The NSA broke into my Signal account… I got a call from somebody in Washington. This person said, you know, ‘Are you going to come to Washington anytime soon?’ Yeah actually, I’m going to be up in a week. Meet me Sunday morning. So I go and this person’s like, ‘Are you planning a trip to go see Putin?’ And I was like, how would you know that? I haven’t told anybody. And I mean anybody. Not my brother, not my wife, nobody. How would you know that?” he said.

“‘Because NSA pulled your texts with this other person you were texting,'” he was told.

WATCH:

On Monday a Russian state-run media service reported that Carlson was “strongly” appealing to the Kremlin to conduct an interview with President Vladimir Putin. In a previous interview, Carlson claimed that the NSA intervened to prevent him from conducting a pre-invasion interview with Putin.

“And so immediately I was intimidated, I’m not embarrassed to admit but I was completely freaked out by it, I called a U.S. Senator… Congress asked NSA and NSA said yes we did this but for good reason. What would be a good reason?” he asked.

To date, Putin has not spoken with a Western media outlet about his decision to launch an invasion into Ukraine more than a year ago, which has sparked international condemnation and billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine from the United States. Carlson and other conservative public figures have criticized the price tag of the war.

Should he decide to participate, Putin would benefit from media exposure that would likely be greater than any he could expect by sitting down with a cable TV network. Last week’s interview between Carlson and Trump on X garnered millions more viewers than Fox News’s GOP debate.