Tucker Confronts Mike Huckabee on America’s Toxic Relationship With Israel

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
We're about to play you an interview we did with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee two days ago in Israel. In general, it's never worth talking about the backstory behind an interview. It's kind of not the point, makes it about the interviewer, not the person being interviewed. For one thing, for another, it's not that interesting most of the time. And for another, it's kind of off the record. You know, the other person hasn't consented to you telling the story. So in general, we don't do that. Who'd want to hear that, let the interview speak for itself. But in this case, we want to tell you just a few things about how this interview came about, because they are pretty interesting, revealing, and now weirdly relevant, apparently. So this interview with Mike Huckabee came about a couple of weeks ago. On Twitter, one of our producers showed me, he said something to the effect of, you're talking to Middle Eastern Christians, Tucker Carlson, maybe you should talk to me, why don't you come do an interview? And I paused for a minute, I thought in the past about trying to interview Mike Huckabee, whom I've known for over 30 years and worked adjacent to at Fox. And I had mixed feelings about it, mostly because it's hard if you're me to interview Mike Huckabee, because of just the personal affect. Mike Huckabee is jovial, comes off as friendly, he's a grandfather. When annoyed, I can be nasty in interviews. It takes a lot of self-control to interview someone like Mike Huckabee, not because I hate him, but because it's hard to ask him tough questions and not come off as a jerk, which I often am. But I thought in this case, yeah, I should definitely do this for a bunch of different reasons. Mainly the United States is moving toward a big war, a real war, with Iran, a regime change war. The biggest war we've had since the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, and Israel is driving that. We are doing this at the behest, at the demand of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. So it seems like now is the time for more Americans to understand the dynamic between the US and Israel and to call attention to that. For another, Huckabee's behavior in the last year in Jerusalem, as the ambassador, has been very, very striking. He famously had a meeting with the most damaging spy in American history. And why did he do that? He hadn't been asked by anybody up until two days ago. Why did you do that? So I wanted to be able to ask him that. And so we accepted and then began the usual negotiations about when and where the interview would take place. And we were constrained because we weren't expecting this. We wanted to do it quickly, but we had tons of travel. So we threw them a date, them being the American Embassy. We can do it on this date. And they were very accommodating. And then the question became, well, where do we do it? Maybe a Christian holy site. We said, we've got to get in and out really quick. Got to be back to do a bunch of other interviews, but we've got this time frame. They said, well, why don't you do it at the US. Embassy? Maybe we set that great US. Embassy. So the US. Embassy is about an hour, 55 minutes from the big airport in Israel, Ben-Gurion. So we said, okay, what about security? Now at this time, the Israeli government, the prime minister included, were attacking me in this show. Netanyahu suggested I was a Nazi, for example. And so we thought, you know, how about security?
Obviously, not because the Israeli government necessarily would do something bad, because there are a lot of people in Israel who think, because they've been told, you know, that I'm an anti-Semite or a Nazi or want to kill Jews, this kind of crazy overstatement, all untrue, obviously, but it would be good to have security. And I should say, having done interviews on six out of seven continents over 35 years, I'm not very security conscious at all, never really feel uncomfortable with this, it does seem like a prudent thing to do. So we were told by the embassy spokesman, no, we're not going to provide security. And so we said, okay, I guess we'll get private security. But could we get someone from the embassy to ride in the car with us from the airport to the interview? And we were told, no, we get what they call a control officer, just an American with us and a fit, you know, in an official capacity as an embassy employee with us. No, quote, for legal reasons, we can't do that.