Tucker Carlson persisted with claiming the NSA was spying on him, despite the agency flatly denying it

• Tucker Carlson has kept up his claim the NSA is spying on him, despite the agency rejecting it.
• On his Tuesday show he described an NSA statement on the issue as "infuriatingly dishonest."
• Carlson has long pushed conspiracy theories about "deep state" plots.

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson did not back down from his claim that he's being spied on by the US National Security Agency, even after the agency issued a statement flatly denying it.

The NSA pushed back hard on the allegation the host made on his Monday-night show: that the NSA had hacked his personal communications and planned to leak information in a bid to take his show off the air.

"This allegation is untrue," the NSA said. "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."

On the Tuesday-night edition of his top-rated Fox News show, Carlson called the statement "infuriatingly dishonest."

He said he did not accept the denial, describing it as "an entire paragraph of lies written purely for the benefit of the intel community's lackeys at CNN and MSNBC."

He went on to claim that someone working on his show confronted an NSA official over the specific allegation that Carlson's emails had been hacked and that the official had not denied it.

"We made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission," he said, adding: "Tonight's statement from the NSA does not deny that and instead it comes with this non sequitur: Tucker Carlson has never been an intel target."

Carlson claimed to have has been tipped off by a whistleblower that he was under surveillance.

The claim has been greeted with widespread skepticism, with some critics questioning why his colleagues at Fox News were not covering it as a major story if the evidence was as compelling as Carlson claimed.

The claim that "deep state" operatives are seeking to undermine the movement of conservatives and supporters of former President Donald Trump has long been a favored narrative among Carlson and his allies.

Carlson has long claimed that US intelligence agencies are seeking to persecute ordinary conservatives under the guise of investigating far-right extremism.

He has sought to downplay the significance of the violence during the Capitol riot, and in recent weeks he pushed a conspiracy theory linking the FBI to the riot.