Tucker Carlson: “You don't have a democracy when you have powerful government…”

“Would you, would you talk a little bit about that and how, what a chilling effect that has on our society and our democracy. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, you know, You don't have a democracy when you have powerful government spy agencies with multibillion dollar black budgets turning their powers against the population they're supposed to be serving. It's that simple. So that's compatible with, with representative government and it's happening at scale. So in my case, not a complicated story. I wanted to interview Putin.” (39:35–39:48)

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.