It's an ambiguous paraphrasing. Was it opened before they found it, or did they find it damaged or with a different weight, and then opened it?
Carlson does not have first hand experience of the state of the evidence, and his retelling of what he got told would be dismissed as hearsay in any court room.
I assume that both Carlson and UPS have a more detailed and accurate understanding of the basic facts than we do. In the original segment, Tucker says, "To their credit, the company took this very seriously..." Here's how it was reported on the Fox website (more or less the script he read on air):
"Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared."
The company immediately launched an investigation, tracing the envelope from the moment it was dropped off in New York, until 3:44 a.m. Tuesday, when an employee at a sorting facility in another state noticed that the package had been opened and arrived empty.
"The company security team interviewed every one of its employees who touched the envelope we sent," Carlson said. "They searched the plane, and the trucks that carried it, they went through the office in New York where our producer dropped that package off, they combed the entire cavernous sorting facility, they used pictures of what we had sent, so that searchers would know what to look for.
"They went far and beyond, but they found nothing. Those documents have vanished," Carlson concluded. "As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory either about what happened ...
Source:
Fox News.
Notice the involvement of a "security team". You might say Tucker misunderstood something he was told on the "telephone" (cf.
Mendel's post), but, like I keep saying, this account doesn't seem to be in dispute. The sorting machine hypothesis would, I assume, be part of a "working theory" that the state of the package caused them to rule out -- leaving them with no theory "as of [Wednesday] night."
To me, it sounds like UPS alerted Tucker Carlson about something they themselves perceived as a security issue, not just an unfortunate delay/accident. I assume that they have a way of deciding internally about whether a customer should be told that their package has been merely
misplaced or possibly
stolen. In this case, they decided they had an obligation to their customer to say more than "your package has been delayed" (while they searched). But they couldn't have known that Tucker would immediately go public with it and potentially embarrass them. I'm not surprised that they got much more measured and vague when the story went public.
When the flashdrive suddenly materialized (after that careful search had come up empty, and only after it had been mentioned on air), Tucker and his staff were naturally curious to know what else UPS had learned about what happened. But -- again, no doubt because it was now a public matter -- UPS was evasive:
Obviously, we had some questions about it, but UPS executives did not answer our questions:
"There are no more details. Security is returning it. Apologies again that we were unable to deliver it next day at the service level you requested."
Our exchanges went on like this for hours, and the main question never changed: How did our flash drive get separated from the package that we sent it in? That seemed like something worth knowing. The envelope was securely sealed. We know that. Two witnesses saw our producer seal it and UPS does not dispute that.
Source:
Fox News.
The talk of "service level" is amusingly corporatese. It's now somehow just a delivery that didn't arrive on time. They'll probably give them a refund, etc., but they're no longer interested in helping Tucker solve the mystery.
That's totally understandable. But I don't think the reasonable conclusion
for us to draw is that there was nothing to see here. Clearly UPS were originally much more concerned on behalf their customer than they would have been if the most likely hypothesis was a sorting machine accident. If Carlson hadn't played it up for his viewers, he might now know a lot more about whether someone was trying to interfere with his reporting. Unfortunately, he caused UPS to move the case from "Security" to "Legal" and "PR". They're a corporation. I don't think we have any more reason to trust their publicity machine than we have to trust Tucker Carlson.