OAN Staff James Meyers
1:49 PM – Tuesday, May 20, 2025
GOP Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says that he received records which confirmed that federal air marshals had surveilled the now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard whenever she would fly domestically in 2024.
Biden admiration air marshals would be “reporting back information related to her appearance, and even how many electronics she was observed using.”
Paul (R-Ky.) made the remarks on Tuesday during a Capitol Hill meeting — where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem was testifying about the department’s budget needs for fiscal year 2026.
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“I commend you and the Trump administration for ending all government-sponsored censorship using DHS personnel. Just last night, I received the first set of records from the department regarding Tulsi Gabbard’s placement on the TSA Quiet Skies watch list,” Paul said.
“These documents confirm our suspicions. Federal air marshals surveilled the now-director of national intelligence during domestic flights in 2024, reporting back information related to her appearance and even how many electronics she was observed using. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case,” he added.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) watchlist is utilized by federal air marshals to gain access to follow U.S. citizens and gather evidence “of their behavior” in a move to deter threats and potential terrorist attacks. The TSA is also responsible for overseeing the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), which employs over 4,000 agents.
“As I was traveling, I ended up in 30 to 45 minutes of going through screening every time I would go to the airport to fly,” Gabbard previously told Fox’s “One Nation.” “I noticed air marshals, I noticed K-9 teams. There were things that I saw and noticed that were highly unusual.”
“But the deepest pain and harm and stress that’s been caused by this is that, forever going forward, I will always be looking over my shoulder, wondering if and how my government is surveilling me,” she said.
Paul questioned Noem on Tuesday if she has ever “uncovered any internal communications or activities” relating to the previous Biden administration “being involved in censorship.”
“We have literally found thousands of documents that have proven that they were involved in censorship and policing speech. So we will be unveiling these to this committee and making sure we’re exposing what CISA was doing with a vast majority of its time of certain employees,” she said.
“And some of the discussion I think we’ll have here today is about getting CISA back on mission and some of the reductions in staff that have been over there,” Noem added. “And that’s reflective in the fact that many of them were doing work that they shouldn’t have been doing.”
In 2024, the director of the Air Marshal National Council, Sonya LaBosco, claimed that the agency was being tasked with surveilling anyone who had traveled to Washington, D.C., for the January 6th Capitol protest in 2021.
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