Watchdog Goes After TSA For Retaliating Against Whistleblower

A nonpartisan whistleblower watchdog group is sounding the alarm about the Transportation Security Administration aiming to punish an employee with the Federal Air Marshal Service who made protected disclosures that unearthed deep-state misconduct.

On Wednesday, the nonprofit Empower Oversight sent a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleging that the TSA “initiated an investigation” into an anonymous whistleblower after the whistleblower disclosed information “regarding the surveillance of Ms. [Tulsi] Gabbard.” The group sent a separate letter to the agency investigator earlier this week demanding that the inspector general probe the U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), which is under the TSA, for “improperly targeting individuals for enhanced surveillance,” including Gabbard, a former Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii.

“I have since become aware that TSA has initiated an investigation into what it considers a ‘leak’ of Sensitive Security Information (SSI),” wrote Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt on Wednesday. “As you know, however, a protected whistleblower disclosure is not a ‘leak.’ Seeking to punish a lawful whistleblower as an illegal leaker is classic retaliation and is itself illegal.”

On Monday, Leavitt wrote on behalf of an agency whistleblower whose wife was included in a roundup of individuals subject to additional surveillance under FAMS’s “Special Mission Coverage.” The designation as a “domestic terrorist” was provoked by her attendance at former President Donald Trump’s rally at the Ellipse in Washington. D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, even though “she was nowhere near the U.S. Capitol complex that day.”

“Ultimately, the whistleblower was able to work with the FBI to have his wife’s name removed from the terror watchlist in the spring of 2023,” Leavitt wrote earlier this week. “Yet clearing his own wife’s name did not remedy the clear abuses of FAMS surveillance or deter further abuses — as the recent Tulsi Gabbard revelations demonstrate.”

Gabbard began being surveilled by the FAMS Quiet Skies program “one day after she criticized the Biden Administration in an interview with Laura Ingraham.” 

Leavitt added Wednesday that Gabbard, a former lawmaker-turned-pundit and frequent critic of the surveillance state, was monitored by Air Marshals on not one or two but eight flights since she criticized the Biden administration on Fox News last month.

Leavitt wrote in his latest letter to the DHS inspector general that “a retaliatory investigation that hunts for whistleblowers in order to intimidate them into silence is exactly the wrong step for the agency to take.”

“Instead, agency leadership should be investigating the abuses on which FAMs are blowing the whistle,” Leavitt wrote.

Read the full letter from Empower Oversight here:

FILE_6880 by The Federalist