Is Tulsi Gabbard on TSA Terrorist Watchlist? What She’s Said

Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump as the next director of national intelligence on Wednesday, claims that she is on a “secret terror watchlist” run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Gabbard, a former Democrat who announced at a Trump rally last month that she was joining the Republican Party, claimed in a video shared in early September to X, formerly Twitter, that she and her husband had been flagged as “a domestic terror threat” in July due to her political shift to the right.

The video came one month after the conservative website UndercoverDC claimed that unnamed “Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers” had revealed Gabbard was flagged by the TSA’s “Quiet Skies” program, which is separate from the U.S. government’s terrorist “no fly list” but subjects some travelers to enhanced security screenings.

“Just before boarding a flight on July 23, my husband and I were pulled aside for additional TSA screening,” Gabbard said in the video. “We were told by the TSA agent there that this was just a random selection. Now, that might have been believable if it had happened just once or twice. But five, six, seven, eight times in a row? There’s no way.”

“Federal air marshal whistleblowers came forward with very disturbing information,” she continued. “They revealed that I had been added to a secret terror watchlist run by the TSA called Quiet Skies on July 23. This is the very same day my husband and I began to be subjected to those in-depth TSA searches.”

Gabbard went on to say that she had “put all the pieces together” and determined that she was targeted by the TSA because she had criticized Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just announced her run for president, during a Fox News interview one day earlier.

“The TSA placed me on the Quiet Skies domestic terror watchlist in what I can only describe as the ultimate betrayal,” she said. “The Harris-Biden regime has now labeled me a domestic terror threat. Why? They see me as a threat to their power.”

Despite the assertions of the former congresswoman, it has not been confirmed that Gabbard has actually been flagged by the Quiet Skies program, with the TSA not publicly commenting on the matter.

Newsweek reached out for comment to the TSA via email on Wednesday evening.

The TSA describes Quiet Skies as a tool used to “reduce the risk on airplanes by identifying passengers deemed to be higher risk according to certain travel patterns and other intelligence-based factors,” while specifying that “the program does not take into account race or religion.”

“Passengers referred to the program may require additional scrutiny for a certain period of time; however, TSA routinely removes passengers from the program sooner than the prescribed period if we become aware of information that indicates the passengers do not represent a risk,” a TSA blog post from August 2018 reads.

Several Republican lawmakers, including Senators James Comer and Rand Paul, have demanded that the TSA release records concerning Gabbard and others allegedly being politically targeted by programs like Quiet Skies.