Homeland Security said Wednesday that Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen used her position of power to get the Transportation Security Administration during the Biden administration to take her husband off one of its airplane watchlists, accusing her of “corruption.”
The department said Ms. Shaheen, of New Hampshire, secretly lobbied then-TSA chief David Pekoske to drop William Shaheen from the agency’s “Quiet Skies” list, which flags people as being potential associates of terrorism suspects.
Mr. Pekoske, who was ousted by the Trump administration in January, granted the senator’s request and ordered that Mr. Shaheen not be listed in Quiet Skies, the department said. He’d originally been added after he was spotted traveling with people deemed to be known or suspected terrorists.
Secretary Kristi Noem said Mr. Shaheen’s delisting was all the more egregious because at the same time he was being pulled off the list, Tulsi Gabbard, who at the time was a former Democratic congresswoman and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, was listed.
“It is clear that this program was used as a political rolodex of the Biden administration — weaponized against its political foes and to benefit their well-heeled friends,” Ms. Noem said. “This program should have been about the equal application of security, instead it was corrupted to be about political targeting.”
Mr. Shaheen’s blanket exclusion from the list has been revoked, she said.
Homeland Security said others also got special treatment, including athletes, journalists, foreign royal family members and “political elites.”
“For far too long, this program has yielded little to no measurable security impact and lay at the expense of the American traveler,” the department said.
Ms. Shaheen’s Senate office, in a statement, said she made inquiries about her husband because he faced “extensive, invasive and degrading searches.”
“Senator Shaheen sought to understand the nature and cause of these searches. Any suggestion that the Senator’s husband was supposedly included on a Quiet Skies list is news to her and had never been raised before today. Nor was she aware of any action taken following her call to remove him from such a list,” the senator’s office said.
Homeland Security said TSA first flagged Mr. Shaheen in July 2023 as a “co-traveler with a known or suspected terrorist” during flights from Boston to the D.C. area and back.
After he faced enhanced screening, Ms. Shaheen, a three-term senator, asked TSA about it. When her husband was screened again in October she held a meeting with Mr. Pekoske, who then ordered that Mr. Shaheen be added to the “exclusion list” — a special exception to the Quiet Skies program and other special screening.
Homeland Security didn’t say who the travel companion was that earned Mr. Shaheen his listing. Ms. Shaheen’s office also declined to identify the person but said it was an Arab-American lawyer.
The office said the matter happened in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Homeland Security’s timeline does include a second flight in mid-October, but said the first flight that Ms. Shaheen complained about came in July, months before that.
Mr. Shaheen, who served as a U.S. attorney in New Hampshire in the Carter administration, is Lebanese-American.
Quiet Skies is an attempt by TSA and federal air marshals to pay extra attention to airplane passengers who don’t appear on other regular watchlists.
It made news last year when whistleblowers revealed that Ms. Gabbard was added to the list after she criticized then-President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ms. Gabbard is now the Director of National Intelligence.
Sen. Rand Paul, chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said last month that he had obtained air marshals’ documents detailing the surveillance of Ms. Gabbard, which included notations of her appearance and what sorts of electronics she was carrying.
“This is not an isolated case,” said Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.