Two days after former President Jimmy Carter said he believes the NSA is spying on his emails, the NSA assured Carter they are not keeping tabs on him.
Carter told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that he communicates with foreign leaders via snail mail to avoid being monitored by the NSA.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News, outgoing National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said monitoring Carter's emails would be against the law.
"We're not [monitoring the emails]," General Alexander told Fox News' Bret Baier. "So he can now go back to writing emails. The reality is, we don't do that. And if we did, it would be illegal and we'd be...held accountable and responsible."
Alexander said that even after an investigation into the agency's practices, "no one has found anything, zero, except for in 12 cases where people did that and we had already reported those."
The NSA was put under the international spotlight after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked confidential documents revealing it was surveilling the Internet and phone activities of Americans and leaders of nations overseas. Snowden is currently in Russia on asylum after fleeing the U.S. last summer.
The NSA director is leaving his position at the same time President Barack Obama seeks to implement mass changes to the NSA. Obama want's Congress to pass legislation to stop the NSA from stockpiling phone records for years.
But Alexander refuted that claim, telling Baier "we don't have Americans' emails or their content of their phone calls in that database."
"It's just numbers. It's just the call detail records," Alexander said in the interview. "Think of this in the old phone bills that you used to get that would list all the numbers that you called. Take off your name off the top, put the two phone numbers, put those in a database, that's what we have. That's it."
Alexander's interview on "Special Report With Bret Baier" will air Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET.
