The Transportation Security Administration and federal air marshals retaliated against adversaries of President Biden by sticking them on secret scrutiny lists and tracking their air travels, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday, admitting to “widespread abuses” during the previous president’s term.
Several dozen people who were part of protests on Jan. 6, 2021, were put on the TSA’s watchlist “despite there being no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal behavior,” the department said.
Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, also revealed that three current members of Congress were flagged by scrutiny lists, as were at least two dozen Americans who were deemed threatening because they refused to comply with COVID-era mask mandates.
And Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, revealed new details on TSA’s surveillance of then-former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, which began the day after she delivered a high-profile critique last summer of Mr. Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ms. Gabbard, now the director of national intelligence under President Trump, was surveilled on at least five trips in 2024 under what was known as the “Quiet Skies” program.
“Quiet Skies was an unconstitutional dystopian nightmare masquerading as a security tool,” Mr. Paul said.
The Trump administration ended Quiet Skies and its $200 million annual budget, saying it failed to stop any terrorist attack but became “weaponized” by the Biden administration.
Homeland Security pinned blame for the program’s excesses on David Pekoske. He was first appointed to lead TSA in the first Trump administration and was reappointed by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump fired him in January.
Homeland Security said the listing of the Jan. 6 protesters who had no criminal entanglements was particularly egregious. Some remained on the watchlist through June 2021.
“The Biden-era TSA’s actions demonstrate clear political bias. For example, these officials chose NOT to flag individuals who attacked law enforcement, burned down cities, and destroyed property during the widespread and violent George Floyd protests in 2020,” the department said.
It said some TSA officials, including the agency’s chief privacy officer, complained about the listings, but “they were ignored.”
Under Quiet Skies, Air Marshals were assigned to follow suspects around the airport and track them on their flights.
Ms. Gabbard was tracked on five trips, spanning eight flights. That included one trip, in August 2024, that came after she’d been added to the “cleared” list.
Mr. Paul did not reveal the names of the three current members of Congress who were flagged by the Silent Partner Program, but said all were Republicans.
Testifying Tuesday was Mark Crowder, a senior air marshal who said he was checking the logs one day in the summer of 2021 when he discovered his own wife had been watchlisted as a “domestic terrorist” in the Quiet Skies target.
She was alleged to have entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Crowder said that information was wrong — his wife’s disability alone would have prevented her from walking that distance — and to this day, he doesn’t know how she was wrongly identified.
She wasn’t pulled off the list until April 2023, after 13 trips where she was surveilled by Air Marshals, put through extra baggage screening and then given a final screening at the jetway.
“Someone fabricated false claims about my wife’s actions on Jan. 6 to advance a politically motivated agenda,” Mr. Crowder said.
He pointed out that according to the TSA’s view, he was living with a suspected terrorist, yet the agency took no action on what, if it was serious about the designation, should have been considered a major insider threat.
“It’s a sickening violation of her First Amendment rights,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican.
Mr. Paul said TSA documents he obtained showed that the mask-resisters were deemed a “threat to recklessly carry out an act that represents a threat of life or serious injury to passengers and crew.”
One of the mask resisters was added to the deny-boarding list as “an imminent threat to transportation security” — even though the file made clear the person did not have a record in the government’s Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment, usually just referred to as the TIDE database.
Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told senators that the problem runs deeper than Quiet Skies.
He said the government’s no-fly list, which puts people through extra screening or outright denies them boarding, lists people as potential terrorists based on “vague suspicion” sometimes tied to political speech.
And once on a list, it’s an ordeal to get off.
“This is not an abstract issue,” he said. “It strikes at the heart of due process and equal protection. Secret government lists, shared across agencies and even with private actors, should never have the power to confer or deny a person’s liberty without a meaningful way to challenge errors.”
Mr. Paul said that when he tried to prod TSA about its operations, the agency refused, despite the request coming from Congress.
“Secrecy is a problem,” he said.
