Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard opened up to The Post’s Miranda Devine about being harassed and followed by federal law enforcement after her name was added to a since-scrapped Transportation Security Administration watchlist.
“I was certain … that it was politically motivated,” Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and ex-Democratic National Committee vice chair, said on the latest episode of Devine’s “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday. “There was no other explanation for it, other than that.
“When I spoke to TSA agents in multiple airports who were just doing their jobs, but who, as they went through this extreme and in-depth search of me — and oh, by the way, my husband was also placed on this domestic terror watch list — they were like, ‘Why are we doing this with you?’” the DNI recalled.
“‘You are still serving as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve. You’re a former member of Congress. This makes zero sense whatsoever.’”
Gabbard and her husband, Abraham Williams, were flagged under the Quiet Skies program, in which federal air marshals would surveil individuals on domestic and international flights who were not already on existing watchlists.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended the Quiet Skies program in June of this year, claiming it failed to prevent a single terrorist attack.
Gabbard’s inclusion on the list was triggered by her attendance at a Vatican event in July 2024 that was organized by a European businessman who was on an FBI watch list, the New York Times reported in January. It is unclear why the businessman was of interest to federal authorities.
As a result, the DNI told Devine, she was subject to intense searches of her clothing and luggage — “sometimes 30-minute long, 40-minute long” before getting on any flight.
“[They would search] the lining of my luggage, after everything was removed; feeling down every jacket that I had, feeling down the seams of every single inch of my clothing,” Gabbard recalled. “Again, these guys were doing what they were told to do. I wouldn’t want them to be fired for not doing their job. But when you look at the consequences again of this politicization of intelligence, this is another example.”
The DNI also said that air marshals were ordered to “surveil me and follow me and look at how many times did I pick up my phone while I’m in flight. Did I talk to any other people? Did I have any interesting conversations? Was there any movement that I made that seemed a little out of the ordinary? How many times do you get up and go and use the bathroom?”
“I didn’t know until later the extent of how many air marshals they required to watch me and who had to type up reports … …from drop off, to move through the airport, to get on the plane, to landing at my destination and out to the curb.”
“The real implication here is people will see me on TV criticizing Hillary Clinton’s foreign policies, criticizing Kamala Harris’ foreign policies,” Gabbard later added, “and then very publicly [see] how the government and the intelligence is being weaponized against me, it can have a very chilling effect.”
Gabbard, 44, also opened up about her drift from the Democratic Party.
“I joined the Democratic Party back in my early 20s because I had to pick one, and what I saw and was attracted to was really the values that I saw Dr. Martin Luther King promoting, the values that President John F. Kennedy, talked about … I saw a party that fought for the struggling, working man and woman in America, those who were just trying to take care of their families and put food on the table and provide a better future for their kids,” she recalled.
“Fast forward to where we are now, where you have people talking about this guy, [Zohran] Mamdani in New York, as the future of the Democratic Party, and he’s a self-proclaimed socialist,” she went on. “You look at AOC, same thing.
“If only the Democratic Party of today had the intellectual honesty to really question themselves about what party would President John F. Kennedy most align with in today’s world that we live in.”
