For months, I've been seeing Tucker Carlson show up at the White House during delicate moments. Not once, not twice. Several times. In sensitive meetings, on key days. I saw it myself, like in this photo I took. He was there when they were talking about Venezuela, about oil, about Iran.
Among the journalists, the same question always floated around in hushed tones: what exactly is a television host doing here? Why is he in rooms where normally only officials, diplomats, or national security advisors are allowed?
Carlson seemed convinced that he could play another role. That he could be an informal link, someone capable of calming Trump, opening channels, pushing deals. For years, he has defended that strategy of negotiating with autocrats, talking to dictators, exploring pacts like the ones he proposed with Russia or with the Venezuelan regime.
But no.
Now he himself has said something that changes everything: that the CIA has reviewed his messages with people in Iran and that there could be a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for those contacts before the war, under the law that regulates agents of foreign powers (FARA).
If that's true, many scenes from these months start to take on a different light. Those discreet entries into the White House. Those meetings where no one quite understood what he was doing there. And those conversations in which Trump seemed to give him information that later turned out to be incomplete or downright wrong.
Within the administration itself, there's talk of the possibility that Trump might have been feeding him misleading or incomplete information to throw off the ayatollahs before the attack. It would be a pattern that was already seen in another recent episode: when he agreed to speak on the phone with Nicolás Maduro in the middle of negotiations, sending messages through Ric Grenell, and shortly afterward ended up ordering his arrest.
Moreover, this episode also has an internal reading in Washington. In the struggle within Trumpism between Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the situation is relevant. Carlson is close to Vance and has been for years one of Rubio's harshest critics. If now his figure is called into question in this context, that indirectly strengthens Rubio's position within the administration.
