Tucker Carlson Says US Government Stopped Him Interviewing Putin

Tucker Carlson has claimed that he was prevented from interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin by the United States government.

Speaking to Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche, the former Fox News host did not specify when he had attempted to conduct the interview, giving it as an example of what he saw as an attempt to "subvert a democracy" by controlling the media.

"I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. government stopped me," he said in the article, published on Thursday. "By the way, nobody defended me. I don't think there was anybody in the news media who said, 'Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says.'

"You're not allowed to hear Putin's voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me. I'm 54 years old. I've paid my taxes and followed the law," he said.

It is unclear which arm of the U.S. government Carlson claims blocked the interview. Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment on Monday.

Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan said in August that Carlson requested to interview Putin, but his recent comments mark the first time he has publicly acknowledged making such a request. When Newsweek previously reached out to him for confirmation, he did not respond.

The editor-in-chief of the Russian state media organization RT described Carlson as "doing a great job," adding at the time: "It would be great if someone hears this and gets [his] message to the president."

Since leaving Fox News to set up his own show on X, formerly Twitter, Carlson has been described as playing the role of the "useful idiot" for Kremlin propagandists by experts, regularly being cited on Russian state media when his espoused views appear to align with theirs.

In late August, Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov told his Russia-1 audience that Carlson was a "dead man walking" for saying that the U.S. and Russia would go to war in the next year—a war Carlson predicted America would lose.

Dmitry Kiselyov, an appointee of Putin who in 2014 said Russia could turn the U.S. "into radioactive dust," repeated Carlson's comments again, visibly taking glee in the former Fox anchor's claims that Ukraine "would crumble" without NATO support.

While Kiselyov described him as "a highly qualified journalist," in July, Carlson was criticized by a U.S.-based Orthodox Christian group for "spout[ing] Russian propaganda" about unfounded claims of the persecution of Christians in Ukraine.

Joanna Szostek, a scholar in Russian disinformation at the University of Glasgow in the U.K., previously told Newsweek that it was common practice for Russian state media to use sympathetic views from western commentators "in an attempt to make the Russian propaganda appear more persuasive, as well as to suggest divisions in Western political circles (and where possible, to suggest that Western countries are not really democratic, that critics are suppressed, etc.)."

Asked about why he felt the state of the media was "so miserable" in the Die Weltwoche interview, Carlson said: "If you want to subvert a democracy, you need to control the information that citizens receive. I'd argue that the news media in democracies is far less trustworthy than it is in other countries simply because it matters more in a democracy."

He went on to say: "There has been a very aggressive attempt, over a number of decades on the part of the people who run the United States, to control what's available on our news stations and in our newspapers—to control the news media. And they have."