One of the more outrageous abuses of the politically weaponized Biden administration was the placement of former Democratic presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard on a TSA terror surveillance program called Quiet Skies. It's now time for the Trump administration to consider putting Democratic politicians seeking to parlay with MS-13 gang member and accused wife beater Kilmar Garcia Abrego on the same list.
Let's revisit briefly what was done to Ms. Gabbard, who is now thankfully and richly ironically our Director of National Intelligence.
In April 2024, Biden’s FBI released into the United States a Pakistani man, Azif Raza Merchant, whom the DHS had flagged in April 2024 with the label “TERROR WATCH LIST” and “Lookout Qualified Person of Interest.” Merchant was allowed to enter the US in April 2024 based on a “significant public benefit parole”, even though he had been traveling to Iran and was tagged by DHS for a terrorism watchlist. That parole was set to expire on May 11, 2024. Merchant would go on to attempt to hire hitmen in the United States to assassinate American politicians, including Donald Trump. Merchant wasn’t arrested by the FBI until July 12, 2024, after the FBI was alerted by a confidential informant of Merchant’s assassin recruitment efforts.
In July 2024, the same month Merchant was arrested, Tulsi Gabbard and her husband began to be subjected to intensive screening when they were traveling in and out of airports during international travel. Their boarding passes were marked with a “SSSS” designation, which means “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” This designation means one is subjected to about 45 minutes of intense questioning as to the purpose of their travel, having their belongings scrutinized and generally being made to feel like terrorists.
Bear in mind that at this time, Tulsi Gabbard was a former prominent US congresswoman, a former Democratic presidential candidate, and was an active-duty reserve Army lieutenant colonel holding high level security clearances.
It was also disclosed by an Air Marshal Service official in an interview by Uncover DC journalist Tracy Beanz that Ms. Gabbard was unaware that she was also being tailed by two Explosive Canine Detection teams, a Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), a plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she was on.
Uncover DC revealed that this intense surveillance of Ms. Gabbard began on July 25, 2024, because she had been placed on a TSA surveillance program called “Quiet Skies”, that literally surrounds subjects with human watchers. At any gate Gabbard was in, there were 15 TSA personnel surrounding her. Two TSA whistleblowers also came forward to reveal what was being done to Ms. Gabbard.
What was Tulsi Gabbard’s offense to warrant this level of federal scrutiny and surveillance? As Racket News pointed out in its article, the targeting of Ms. Gabbard by the Biden administration’s surveillance web was “symbolic of the way politicians and intelligence officials have turned the machinery of the War on Terror inward in the last decade.”
Ms. Gabbard’s placement on the Quiet Skies program had nothing to do with any perceived threat this senior Army officer posed but rather was reflective of the political weaponization of our national security apparatus by malign government officials going after their perceived political opponents.
Ms. Gabbard said that she believed she was placed on the Quiet Skies program list because she had made an appearance on the Fox News program, The Ingraham Angle, to criticize the Biden administration’s failure to respond to a diplomatic opening offered by Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky to end the Ukrainian conflict and to articulate her belief that the “military-industrial complex” wanted to continue that war. She said, “This power elite in Washington – they want to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan, turn it into killing fields where this long-term insurgency is supported and they bleed out and kill as many Russians as possible for who knows how long.”
Well, the Biden folks couldn’t let that stand. Let loose the TSA and Air Marshal hounds!
Now, let’s look at Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Reps. Robert Garcia, Maxwell Frost, Yassamin Ansari and Maxine Dexter, Democrats all, who made a much-ballyhooed pilgrimage to El Salvador to demand meetings with (in Van Hollen’s case, successfully) Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a Salvadoran man who illegally entered the United States in 2011, was accused in legal documents by his wife in 2019 and 2020 of savagely assaulting her, was suspected of engaging in human smuggling in Tennessee, and was determined by two separate immigration courts to be associated with MS-13.
MS-13 was designated by the US State Department on February 20, 2025 to be a Foreign Terrorist Organization and/or Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Shouldn’t we now place Sen. Van Hollen and his congressional colleagues supporting terrorist gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia into the Quiet Skies program? Just askin’.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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