Jonathan Swan’s scoop for Axios last night has predictably been distorted beyond recognition by partisans on both sides, forcing Swan to wade into the chatter on Twitter and remind people what his story did and didn’t say.

It’s worth re-reading it again in full before watching Tucker. It’s not long. But if you need it boiled down, here’s every factual assertion in it:

1. Swan spoke to “sources familiar with the conversations” between Carlson and Kremlin intermediaries who might be able to land him an interview with Vladimir Putin. Not specified: Were those sources from the NSA? From some other government agency? From Tucker’s camp? Were they the intermediaries themselves or people in contact with them?

2. The sources claim that “U.S. government officials learned about Carlson’s efforts to secure the Putin interview.” Not specified: Did those officials learn of Tucker’s efforts by reading his communications or through some other means? Do the officials work for the NSA or another federal agency, like the DOJ? At no point in his story does Swan actually confirm that any of this originated with the NSA, although they’re the agency that’s most likely to have access to chatter between people who are connected to the Kremlin and a U.S. citizen.

3. The two Kremlin intermediaries live in the United States. Not specified: Are they U.S. citizens or Russian citizens? Were they physically present in the U.S. when Tucker spoke to them or abroad, in which case the NSA wouldn’t have needed a FISA warrant to listen in on them if they’re not American citizens?

4. The NSA has no comment on any of this apart from its statement last week insisting that it never “targeted” Carlson.

That’s all Swan’s report says. The rest of it is conjecture about how the NSA might have hypothetically come to know he was in touch with the intermediaries, whether by getting a FISA warrant targeting him or collecting his communications incidentally while targeting foreign agents or eavesdropping on conversations between foreign nationals in which Carlson’s outreach was mentioned.

Here are two “facts” that Swan’s report doesn’t assert:

1. The government, whether the NSA or some other agency, has accessed Tucker’s communications with the intermediaries. Note again the curiously vague phrasing Swan used: “U.S. government officials learned about Carlson’s efforts to secure the Putin interview.” He never says that Tucker’s emails or texts were read. On the contrary, he makes clear that he doesn’t have evidence of that: “Axios has not confirmed whether any communications from Carlson have been intercepted, and if so, why.” Swan is leaving open the possibility that the feds found out about Carlson’s conversations with the intermediaries second-hand, possibly based on what the intermediaries were saying to others about them.

2. The government unmasked Tucker in order to identify him as the unnamed American journalist who was in touch with the intermediaries. Swan speculates, reasonably, that Carlson was unmasked and justifiably wonders why the feds would need to know the identity of a broadcaster who wanted to interview Putin. But he doesn’t know for a fact that it happened. It’s possible that Tucker’s name was redacted in the reports but that his identity was clear anyway from the context of the communications. (“I could promise Putin the biggest audience in American cable news if he agrees to an interview.”) It’s also possible that the intermediaries were suspected spies and the feds had some pressing reason to want to know which Americans they were in touch with. We just don’t know. It makes sense to surmise that Carlson was unmasked but Swan never claims it.

As I say, he’s been spending his time since the story was published trying to correct the record on Twitter:

Not what story says. I have tried to get foreign interviews w adversaries & use back channels when front door doesn’t work. I would not expect my name to be unmasked if comms involving me or about me were intercepted.We don’t yet know how US Govt learned info, only that they did. https://t.co/w0Q7VZakgD

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 8, 2021

If I had specific info on Tucker’s communication I would publish it. If I had info on an intel report/unmasking I would publish it. I don’t. I published everything I could confirm so far. The piece lays out different scenarios & raises questions we are still chasing. https://t.co/kkJ5lSo9f4

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) July 8, 2021

An NPR reporter asked Swan if he’s claiming, or has claimed to anyone, that the source for last night’s scoop was the NSA. Nope, said Swan. “I would never discuss a source’s identity or any aspect of their identity with anyone besides my editor.”

Compare the above to some of the claims Tucker made in last night’s segment discussing the Axios scoop:

Even now, some in the media are claiming that we deserve this. ‘Emailing with people who know Putin, are you? Of course the NSA is watching you! That’s what you get.’ But that’s hardly the point. By law, the NSA is required to keep secret the identities of American citizens who’ve been caught up in its vast domestic spying operations. So by law, I should have been identified internally merely as a U.S. journalist or American journalist. That’s the law.

But that’s not how I was identified. I was identified by name. I was unmasked. People in the building learned who I was and then my name and the contents of my emails left that building at the NSA and wound up with a news organization in Washington. That is illegal. In fact, it is precisely what this law was designed to prevent in the first place. We cannot have intelligence agencies used as instruments of political control.

If he’s going off his own sources there, okay, but none of it is asserted by Swan in his story. He doesn’t say it’s the NSA that got wind of Carlson’s chats with the Kremlin buddies, he doesn’t say that Carlson was unmasked, he doesn’t say that it would necessarily be illegal to unmask Carlson under the circumstances, and he certainly doesn’t say that this was part of a scheme to exert “political control.” In fact, Tucker’s own phrasing is interesting. Last week he claimed that the NSA leaked his emails to try to ruin him somehow; now he’s using a more passive construction in which the contents of his emails somehow left the building and ended up being shared with journalists. Conceivably someone who’s sympathetic to Carlson inside the NSA found out that his communications had been captured incidentally and told Tucker’s allies that, which is how the information made its way to Tucker’s source, then to Tucker, and somehow along the way to Swan. No one has identified a malicious actor yet who’s out to get Carlson in all this.

And what happened to his original claim that this was all part of a scheme to get his show canceled? He elaborated on that last night:

I figured that any kind of publicity would rattle the Russians and make the interview less likely to happen. But the Biden administration found out anyway, by reading my emails. I learned from a whistleblower at the NSA plan to leak the contents of those emails to media outlets. Why would they do that? Well, the point, of course, was to paint me as a disloyal American. A Russian operative. Been called that before. A stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor doing the bidding of a foreign adversary.

I fail to see how Carlson would have been ruined if the Biden administration had leaked his interest in interviewing Putin but *not* ruined by successfully landing an interview with Putin and airing it on Fox. If he’s a “stooge of the Kremlin” for wanting to interview Vlad, he’d be that much more of a stooge for actually following through with the interview, no? In his first public comments about this last week, Tucker went so far as to claim that the goal of the leaker(s) was to see his program taken off the air. Show of hands: Does anyone think Fox News would have fired Carlson for landing a Putin interview instead of promoting the hell out of it? Especially considering, uh, one of their own anchors interviewed Putin as recently as three years ago?

It makes no sense. But this story obviously isn’t over. Maybe Swan or others will have more information today. Here’s Carlson’s segment from last night.