Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) revealed that federal air marshals surveilled now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard during domestic flights last year, according to documents reviewed by the senator’s office.
The Kentucky lawmaker made the revelation during a Capitol Hill hearing on Tuesday involving Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who was testifying about her department’s budget request for the fiscal year 2026.
“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) is responsible for overseeing the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), which employs more than 4,000 agents. Since the 2010 “Quiet Skies” program was enacted in 2010, armed air marshals have been tasked with secretly monitoring passengers, based on travel patterns, known or suspected links to terrorism, and under the previous administration, political activities.
Gabbard previously alleged that she was being surveilled by air marshals while her confirmation process was playing out last year.
“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. I noticed air marshals, I noticed K-9 teams. There were things that I saw and noticed that were highly unusual,” Gabbard told Fox News back in November.
“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 added.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Paul asked the DHS secretary whether she had uncovered any internal communications or activities relating to the Biden Administration’s censorship activities.
“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,” Noem said.
Both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the TSA fall under the direction of DHS.
“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.”
Last year, the director of the Air Marshal National Council, Sonya LaBosco, revealed that the agency was being tasked with surveilling anybody who traveled to Washington D.C. on or before the January 6 Capitol protests in 2021.
“We’re not doing our regular missions where we’re out there looking for the bad guys. So, right now, on most flights, you’re not gonna have Air Marshals,” LaBosco said, adding that significant resources have been spent on following “January 2021 people.”
When asked to clarify, LaBosco revealed that the agency’s “primary mission” was following people who flew into the region in January 2021. “You did not have to go to the Capitol or the rally, and you’ve been put on a specific list that TSA now has assigned Air Marshals to follow these people who have not had any type of criminal investigation, they have not committed a crime, but yet three years later, we’re following the same individuals day in and day out.”
