[Senate Hearing 119-215]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 119-215
EXAMINING THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE
QUIET SKIES PROGRAM
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
__________
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
62-163 PDF WASHINGTON : 2026
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RAND PAUL, Kentucky, Chairman
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma MAGGIE WOOD HASSAN, New Hampshire
RICK SCOTT, Florida RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri JOHN FETTERMAN, Pennsylvania
BERNIE MORENO, Ohio ANDY KIM, New Jersey
JONI ERNST, Iowa RUBEN GALLEGO, Arizona
ASHLEY MOODY, Florida ELISSA SLOTKIN, Michigan
William E. Henderson III, Staff Director
Christina N. Salazar, Deputy Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Andrew J. Hopkins, Counsel
J. Ryan Arient, Professional Staff Member
David M. Weinberg, Minority Staff Director
Christopher J. Mulkins, Minority Director of Homeland Security
Moran Banai, Minority Senior Professional Staff Member
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Ashley A. Gonzalez, Records Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Paul................................................. 1
Senator Peters............................................... 3
Senator Ernst................................................ 15
Senator Moreno............................................... 19
Senator Lankford............................................. 21
Prepared statements:
Senator Paul................................................. 35
Senator Peters............................................... 38
WITNESSES
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
Mark Crowder, Senior Federal Air Marshal, U.S. Transportation
Security Administration........................................ 6
Hon. Tristan Leavitt, President, Empower Oversight............... 8
Matt Taibbi, Editor, Racket News................................. 10
Jim Harper, Senior Nonresident Fellow, American Enterprise
Institute...................................................... 12
Abed Ayoub, National Executive Director, American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee....................................... 14
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES
Ayoub, Abed:
Testimony.................................................... 14
Prepared statement........................................... 68
Crowder, Mark:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Harper, Jim:
Testimony.................................................... 12
Prepared statement........................................... 48
Taibbi, Matt:
Testimony.................................................... 10
Prepared statement........................................... 46
Leavitt, Hon. Tristan:
Testimony.................................................... 8
Prepared statement........................................... 40
APPENDIX
Senator Paul's flash report...................................... 71
Minority response to flash report................................ 80
Committee Report................................................. 83
Redacted documents............................................... 126
Statements from Air Marshall National Council.................... 238
Statement from Council on American-Islamic Relations............. 243
EXAMINING THE WEAPONIZATION
OF THE QUIET SKIES PROGRAM
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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room
342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Rand Paul, Chair of
the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Paul [presiding], Johnson, Lankford,
Hawley, Moreno, Ernst, Peters, Hassan, and Blumenthal.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAUL\1\
Chairman Paul. Welcome. Thanks, everybody, for coming
today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Paul appears in the Appendix
on page 35.
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In mid-2024, as she grew increasingly critical of the Biden
administration and increasingly involved with the Trump
campaign, Tulsi Gabbard noticed changes as she went to the
airport. She had more screening, Federal agents with dogs
showing up for her flights. Other Federal agents followed her
on the plane and reported back on her activity.
When I learned of this, I launched an investigation into
the Transportation Security Administration (TSAs) Quiet Skies
Program and the Biden administration's weaponization of the
watch list against everyday Americans. Under public scrutiny
the Biden administration removed now Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) Gabbard from the program, but they spent the
remainder of their time in office stonewalling any
investigation.
Thankfully, that era is over. President Trump, himself a
victim of government weaponization, set out to reverse the
previous administration's targeting of the very citizens it has
sworn to protect.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has taken
decisive action to eliminate bureaucratic obstacles resisting
transparency. We are finally getting answers, and now we know
exactly why the previous administration fought so hard to keep
us in the dark.
Director Gabbard was surveilled on at least five domestic
flights by Federal Air Marshals (FAM) under Quiet Skies.
Internal records for her targeting show her congressional
portrait and that she was a former Congresswoman from Hawaii.
There was no doubt they knew who they were monitoring.
Multiple concerns were raised internally, and one air
marshal asked a colleague, why the heck is she a Quiet Skies
suspect? If this can happen to a combat veteran, a Lieutenant
Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, and now Director of National
Intelligence, it can happen to anyone. And it did.
Today, for the first time, you will hear directly from a
Federal Air Marshal whose wife was labeled a domestic terrorist
simply for engaging in protected First Amendment activity.
Records show the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) labeled
her as a domestic terrorist for unlawful entry into the Capitol
on January 6th.
But she did not enter the Capitol. She came for public
support of the President, and they knew it. Her phone location
data did not put her inside the Capitol. Facial recognition did
not identify her inside. She had no criminal record and no
history of extremist views.
What they did know is that this Catholic schoolteacher from
Texas supported President Trump and went to Washington to
attend his rally at the Ellipse. That was not enough for the
government. That was not enough to label her a suspected
domestic terrorist. For two years, her family was surveilled
when they flew.
This was not an isolated case. It happened to hundreds of
Americans. It happened because the TSA used First Amendment-
protected activity as a predicate for watchlisting Americans.
That is unconstitutional, of course. First Amendment activity
cannot be the sole basis for watchlisting someone, but sole
basis is an important caveat and it is an opening the TSA
exploited.
Today we will release internal TSA records that reveal how
the agency authorized First Amendment activity to be used to
justify the surveillance of Americans with no evidence and no
recourse. Using broad and vague authorities, TSA deemed
hundreds of Americans as threats to national security simply
for holding opposing political views. The Federal Government
used its investigative authorities, anonymous tips, and
university research institutions to build a flimsy case to put
them on the watch list.
They did not just coincidentally watchlist hundreds of
people who attended the same Trump rally. They did it
intentionally, and obscured the process to create plausible
deniability. For example, documents obtained in my
investigation reveal that TSA relied on data collected by the
George Washington University (GWU) Project on Extremism.
Consider this. First, Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
funds the Project on Extremism, an external partner not bound
by the same laws and regulations as Federal agencies. Then, the
Project on Extremism identifies supposed domestic threats by
meticulously tracking January 6th defendants. DHS then uses the
Project on Extremism reporting as evidence, sometimes the only
evidence for putting someone on a watch list.
But the abuses were not limited to January 6th. TSA also
viewed skeptics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mandates
as threats. Simply removing a mask on an aircraft got 12
Americans watchlisted. Records also show three current Members
of Congress, all Republicans, were included in the companion
Silent Partner Program, either as a sitting member or while
seeking elected office.
A cursory review would have revealed them to be either a
Member of Congress or decorated active or former U.S. military
members. In fact, they were surveilled, likely for activities
that were official duties during their time in the military or
in Congress.
All of this was wrong, and I am glad that these abuses are
beginning to be exposed.
I commend Secretary Noem for ending Quiet Skies, but our
work is not done. We must make sure that this program does not
come back under another name. Every official who directed or
approved surveillance of Americans for protected speech must be
removed from office.
Full transparency must become the rule rather than
requiring a year of investigation. The result will be a process
that respects the Constitution, ends real-life shadow bans
against Americans, and gives all of us the assurance that our
government is focused on protecting us, not on chasing
political ghosts.
I now recognize the Ranking Member for his opening
statement.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS\1\
Senator Peters. Thank you, Chair Paul.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appears in the
Appendix on page 38.
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Throughout my time in Congress, I have heard repeatedly
from my constituents, particularly from members of Michigan's
Arab and Muslim American community, about serious issues with
the government's watchlisting and travel screening practices.
While I appreciate the opportunity to discuss that today, I
first want to raise some concerns about some of the other
critical national security work this Committee is responsible
for, but unfortunately, the Chair of this Committee has not
prioritized.
In a matter of hours, two critical homeland security
authorities are set to expire: cybersecurity information-
sharing protections that protect our economy against
cyberattacks, and authorities that allow Federal law
enforcement to detect and mitigate threats posed by drones.
We were scheduled to discuss these two bills to renew and
improve these authorities two weeks ago, but unfortunately the
Chair abruptly canceled the meeting with absolutely no
explanation.
While there is a two-month extension for both authorities
included in the continuing resolution (CR), that is only meant
to be a stopgap. The Committee needs to do its work to
reauthorize both of these pieces of legislation.
But even though bipartisan leaders in the House, as well as
the Trump administration and a bipartisan coalition in the
Senate, all support extending this legislation for 10 years,
Mr. Chair, you have not held a single hearing on these issues,
and you canceled the only meeting where the Committee had the
opportunity to discuss them. These actions risk making our
Nation less safe.
This Committee should not simply walk away from its
responsibility to actually be a leader in critical homeland
security matters. Similarly, while I share your concerns about
government being weaponized for political purposes, quite
frankly I find it odd that you have chosen to look backward now
that this program has ended, while at the same time President
Trump is openly directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to
prosecute his perceived enemies, by ordering also the closure
of bribery investigations into a political ally who has been
investigated for taking bribes. We also recently saw the
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) openly
threaten the licenses of media companies over First Amendment
protected speech.
Mr. Chair, I hope you will devote this Committee's
resources to conducting oversight of the current
administration, as well.
Turning to today's topic, in December 2023, I published a
report that demonstrated how well-intentioned screening
practices have ballooned into a layered and duplicative system
that sweeps up travelers who may pose no threat to national
security, especially among Arab, Muslim, and South Asian
American travelers. At that time, there were at least 22
different mechanisms that could lead a traveler to receive
extra screenings or be denied boarding. Americans must navigate
this very complex system with no explanation of why their
travel has been delayed or disrupted, and they have no real
opportunity to fully redress what prompted additional screening
in the first place.
Congress does not even have a complete picture of the full
scope of this system and the impact that it has had on everyday
Americans. Almost all of the oversight mechanisms are internal
to the Executive Branch, such as the Privacy and Civil
Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and the Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties (CRCL) Office at DHS.
Unfortunately, with the Administration's attacks on
oversight, those mechanisms have now been gutted, eliminating
one of the few checks and balances that Americans can use to
protect their rights in this process.
That is why, following my report, I introduced, and this
Committee passed, the Enhanced Oversight and Accountability in
Screening Act. It was the first real effort to provide more
transparency and more oversight for this entire system of
screenings that is the topic today. This legislation requires
DHS to reform the redress process and provide Congress with
data on enhanced and secondary screenings by TSA and Customs
and Border Protection (CBP), including their effectiveness.
At the time, I asked, Mr. Chair, you to join me in working
on this legislation, but instead you and the entire Republican
dais voted against this transparency legislation. I am working
to update it now, and would certainly love to have folks on
this Committee join me in re-introducing this updated version
in a bipartisan way.
As I have said countless times before, we must be able to
protect our Nation, but Americans who pose no threat to
national security should not face a maze of travel screenings
and a flawed redress process. We must bring transparency and
accountability to our travel screening practices so we can
ensure the government is effectively protecting our national
security, while also protecting the civil rights and civil
liberties of travelers.
Mr. Chair, I would like to introduce two things into the
record. I want to move to introduce a minority response to the
majority report into the record,\1\ to clarify some of the
information that the Committee has actually received that
requires some clarification.
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\1\ The minority response to the majority report appears in the
Appendix on page 80.
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I would also like to move to introduce my Committee report
from December 2023,\2\ identifying significant problems with
the watch list and screening processes, and calling for
reforms, that again passed this Committee but unfortunately
received no Republican support for the reforms that we are
going to be talking about here today.
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\2\ The Committee Report appears in the Appendix on page 83.
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Chairman Paul. Without objection.
You have to love fake outrage. If there was such great
concern for these Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA) authorities, last week the Ranking Minority
Member had a chance to vote for the CR which extended these
authorities, but he voted no. So, you know, fake outrage is
great, but it is fake.
As far as the reason why we have not gone forward with the
CISA reauthorization, it is because CISA has been associated
with some of the worst and most egregious abuse of First
Amendment. What we are talking about today, with the Quiet
Skies, is First Amendment abuses, so we want to make sure that
no one in government ever uses government again to go to
Twitter or Facebook and tell them to take down stuff that's
protected by the First Amendment. So it is integral, and we
will continue to fight to make sure if CISA is reauthorized, or
any of CISA's activities are reauthorized, that there are First
Amendment protections attached.
Senator Peters. Mr. Chair?
Chairman Paul. Sure.
Senator Peters. You are conflating. This is not a
reauthorization of the CISA as the organization. This is
liability protections that have been in place for 10 years.
Chairman Paul. So it is going to be First Amendment
protections added to that.
And you have opposed it and that is a problem.
Senator Peters. Mr. Chair, this has broad bipartisan
support. The Trump administration supports this
reauthorization----
Chairman Paul. And so we can keep fighting about this.
You had a chance to vote for it.
Senator Peters [continuing]. They had said that is
absolutely essential.
Chairman Paul. So you voted against it.
Senator Peters. And you voted against the reauthorization
that I put up. You were the only objector.
Chairman Paul. You voted against it and now preciously you
are for it this week. All right.
Senator Peters. It has the support of 49 members of the
Senate.
You will have a chance to vote again in a unanimous consent
(UC), Mr. Chair.
Chairman PaulI now recognize the witnesses.
Senator Peters. You are going to have a chance again.
Chairman Paul. It is the practice of the Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to swear in its
witnesses. Will each of the witnesses please rise and raise
your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you will be giving before
this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Crowder. I do.
Mr. Leavitt. I do.
Mr. Taibbi. I do.
Mr. Harper. I do.
Mr. Ayoub. I do.
Chairman Paul. Thank you. Our first witness is Mark
Crowder. He is a Senior Federal Air Marshal with the U.S.
Transportation Administration, with over 20 years of
experience. Before joining the Air Marshals, he served four
years in the United States Marine Corps (USMC), three years as
a uniformed police officer with the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), and three years as a Deputy Sheriff in Florida.
Mr. Crowder, you are recognized for your opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF MARK CROWDER, SENIOR FEDERAL AIR MARSHAL, U.S.
TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
Mr. Crowder. Good morning, Chair Peters, and distinguished
Members of the Committee.
I am going to start by reading a memo that I was advised to
read by my management.
The views I express are my own and should be construed as
not representing the official policy or position of the
Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security
Administration, or the United States. I have also been advised
that whistleblowing is an official duty.
With that being said, I will go into my testimony.
Again, my name is Mark Crowder, a Senior Federal Air
Marshal with over 20 years of service protecting the American
people. In those two decades I have flown millions of miles to
safeguard our Nation. Like so many others, I answered the call
to serve after the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001
(9/11). Driven by an unshakeable resolve to ensure such a
tragedy would never happen again, at its peak the Federal Air
Marshal Service embodied the highest standards of Federal law
enforcement. We are known for excellence in firearms, tactics,
and specialized training.
Today I come before you to report that those standards have
been eroded. The agency's once clear mission has been distorted
by career bureaucrats and political appointees who prioritize
personal advancement over the safety of our citizens. My
testimony will expose how Federal law enforcement agencies,
sworn to protect Americans, have been weaponized to target the
very people it serves.
On July 15, 2021, while serving in the Houston Field Office
Operations Unit, I was monitoring special mission coverage
flights in our area of responsibility. To my shock, I
discovered my wife, Christine, seated behind me, had been
flagged in the FAM system as a domestic terrorist, falsely
accused of entering the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. I was
horrified. I knew with absolute certainty that Christine was
nowhere near the Capitol that day. My wife, who has a
disability that prevents her from walking long distances had
simply exercised her First Amendment right to attend a rally
for President Trump before returning to her hotel.
As a Federal Air Marshal with top secret security clearance
I immediately reported the alarming designation to my
supervisors, noting that according to their system I was living
with a terrorist, a clear insider threat. The Special Agent in
Charge (SAC), William Aupperlee, instructed me to remain silent
and let the investigation run its course. Shockingly, no one
expressed concerns about the potential compromise of classified
information through my household. SAC Aupperlee was later
promoted to senior positions within the agency.
From July 2021 until April 2023, Christine was subjected to
approximately 13 special mission coverages. Each time she flew,
teams of Federal Air Marshals surveilled her. She was barred
from checking in on the airport kiosk, online, and forced to
endure long waits at ticket counters for TSA's verification of
her identification and to take control of her luggage. She was
subjected to invasive secondary screening at TSA security
checkpoints. After the checkpoint she was then searched again
at the jetway by TSA's Advanced Threat Local Allocation
Strategy (ATLAS) teams. This treatment extended to anyone
traveling with her, including her elderly mother and our
daughter, causing them both significant distress.
In one particularly disturbing instance, I was off-duty,
flying armed, with Christine. The FAM team assigned to surveil
her that day had to coordinate with me, an armed Federal Air
Marshal traveling with an alleged terrorist. How could an
agency allow such a glaring operational and ethnical conflict
to persist?
I only learned of my wife's designation because of my
insider role within the agency. How many other innocent
Americans have been falsely labeled as terrorists and
surveilled without their knowledge? How many had their
conversations, travel companions, and devices unknowingly
monitored?
With the assistance of Sonya LaBosco, an Air Marshal
National Counsel, I exposed this injustice and halted
surveillance of my family. At the same time, Quiet Skies
missions and those targeting Americans who attended January 6th
events, including public figures like Director of National
Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, dominated FAM's operations. These
politically motivated priorities diverted critical resources
and genuine security threats, betraying the solemn promises we
made after 9/11--never again.
The events I have described, betrayal of American values,
the weaponization of Federal law enforcement to arrest and
intimidate citizens, exercising their constitutional rights is
unconscionable. Senior officials at the FBI, the Department of
Homeland Security, TSA, and the FAM service should have
recognized these actions as beyond the scope of lawful
authority and intervened.
Someone fabricated false claims about my wife's actions on
January 6th to advance a politically motivated agenda. Those
responsible must be identified, and accountability must be
enforced to root out the corruption and restore public trust in
Federal law enforcement.
Thank you for the opportunity to present my testimony.
Chairman Paul. Next up we have Tristan Leavitt. Mr. Leavitt
is the President of Empower Oversight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
organization dedicated to strengthening public integrity
through research, education, and providing pro bono legal
assistance to whistleblowers. Mr. Leavitt previously served as
a Principal Deputy Special Counsel at the Office of Special
Counsel (OSC) and the General Counsel (GC)--that is a lot of
counsels--at the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
Mr. Leavitt, you are recognized for your opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF HON. TRISTAN LEAVITT,\1\ PRESIDENT, EMPOWER
OVERSIGHT
Mr. Leavitt. Thank you. Chair Paul, Ranking Member Peters,
and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you so much
for having me to testify today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Leavitt appears in the Appendix
on page 40.
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Empower Oversight provides legal representation to brave
whistleblowers across the Federal Government. We are honored to
represent several air marshals, including Senior Air Marshal
Mark Crowder here today.
Mr. Crowder first came to Empower in 2022, through the Air
Marshal National Counsel's indomitable Executive Director,
Sonja LaBosco, seated behind me. He raised concerns that his
wife had been targeted for exercising her First Amendment
rights alone. If they truly considered her some sort of threat,
why wasn't he walled off from seeing this information as he
assigned missions of air marshals around the country?
Despite his disclosures to the Office of Special Counsel,
my former agency, and later to the DHS Inspector General (IG),
no meaningful investigation ever took place. That failure of
oversight is exactly what allows abuses to fester.
Ms. LaBosco contacted us at Empower Oversight again in the
beginning of August 2024, when air marshals wanted to blow the
whistle on another disturbing case, the political targeting of
Tulsi Gabbard through TSA's Quiet Skies program. The facts were
alarming. Ms. Gabbard was added on July 23, 2024, just one day
after she made statements to Laura Ingram on Fox News critical
of Vice President Kamala Harris, who had just become the
presumptive Democratic Party Presidential nominee. Rather than
using her passport photo as required, TSA officials used her
official congressional photo, making clear that they knew
exactly who she was.
These initial whistleblower disclosures were reported by
Wendi Strauch Mahoney on UncoverDC and digitally on the Breanna
Morello show. Despite Empower's experience with the DHS IG
failing to investigate the Crowder situation, we asked them to
investigate here and we also submitted disclosures to the
Congress. Members of this Committee, and others, pressed DHS
for answers, and your persistence, Chair Paul, helped ensure
Secretary Noem became aware of the Quiet Skies program and
ended it.
Ending Quiet Skies was a very important step and well, well
overdue. But that alone does not prevent what happened to the
Crowders. They were not a part of the Quiet Skies program, and
a program like Quiet Skies could always be revived if we fail
to learn the lessons.
The first lesson is very clear--civil liberties cannot
protect themselves. Independent oversight is essential from
bodies like this and others. Whenever government cites national
security to conceal its actions, the risk of abuse rises, and
only oversight can shine the light needed to stop it. In this
case, much more light is needed as it relates to Tulsi Gabbard.
On January 28, 2025, The New York Times published a leak
from the government attempting to explain away Ms. Gabbard's
placement on Quiet Skies. The article claimed that her
placement was related to her attending a conference at the
Vatican, supposedly because of another attendee on the watch
list. But the article admitted that she attended alongside
another former Member of Congress, Mick Mulvaney, who invited
her. If Ms. Gabbard was truly flagged for that reason, why
wasn't Mr. Mulvaney also added to Quiet Skies when he flew back
from the conference at the Vatican?
The government's story just does not add up, and any
credible review must answer those questions. Secretary Noem
announced the review revealed, quote, ``the Quiet Skies program
was used as a political rolodex of the Biden administration,''
end quote. However, she provided few details. Reports indicate
that at least one elected official had her husband removed from
the Quiet Skies list with a single phone call.
These issues demand a full accounting. That is why Empower
Oversight recently called on the DHS Inspector General to
complete its work and make its report public. Normally,
inspector general reports with private information are kept
internal. They have information about personal individuals.
However, given Ms. Gabbard's prominence, the allegations of
political targeting, and the large amount of selective
information the government already leaked, there is a clear
public interest here in transparency. DHS IG has released
similar reports before when public figures were involved.
Accountability cannot be achieved if this is swept under the
rug in a private report.
In addition, the investigation must look beyond Ms.
Gabbard's case. Anyone who abused TSA protocols to target or
protect individuals for political reasons must be held
accountable. A thorough report is necessary to propose
discipline for those who committed misconduct.
Finally, another of the most important lessons is that none
of this would have come to light without whistleblowers. Of
course, it was obvious to Ms. Gabbard that she was subjected to
extra screening, but what she did not know, and would never
have known, is that she was formerly targeted through Quiet
Skies. Only courageous insiders willing to speak up made that
possible.
After their disclosures, and when we brought these things
to the attention of the IG, TSA opened a leak investigation. Of
course, this was troubling. The legal question of whether
whistleblowers may disclose so-called sensitive security
information to the media was resolved over a decade ago in the
case of Air Marshal Robert MacLean. When his case came to the
Supreme Court in 2013, I organized, for Senator Grassley, a
bicameral, bipartisan amicus brief arguing TSA's regulations
could not trump the statutory guarantees of the Whistleblower
Protection Act (WPA). A Supreme Court majority agreed with us,
but TSA still sought to investigate our clients' disclosures as
though they were unlawful leaks. That kind of retaliation
chilled whistleblowers across the government.
TSA backed down when Empower exposed their investigation,
but those kinds of risks remain. Protecting whistleblowers is
not optional. They are the first line of defense against waste,
fraud, abuse, and overreach. If they are silenced, the American
people lose one of the only tools that can help bring abuses of
power into light.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify, and I look
forward to your questions.
Chairman Paul. Our next witness is Matt Taibbi. Mr. Taibbi
is an award-winning investigative reporter and Editor for
Racket News. Mr. Taibbi was a Contributing Editor at Rolling
Stone, won a National Magazine Award, authored four New York
Times best-sellers, and now writes on Substack as one of its
most popular independent columnists in the country, with tens
of thousands of subscribers.
Mr. Taibbi, you are recognized for your opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF MATT TAIBBI,\1\ EDITOR, RACKET NEWS
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you and good morning, Chair Paul, Ranking
Member Peters, distinguished Members of the Committee.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Taibbi appears in the Appendix on
page 46.
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Last year, former Hawaii Congresswoman and Presidential
candidate Tulsi Gabbard was placed in a surveillance program
called Quiet Skies by the Transportation and Security
Administration. She was subject to intrusive searches, followed
by bomb-sniffing dogs, and trailed by three Federal Air
Marshals per flight.
To cover the story I contacted the TSA. They no-commented
the main question about the truth of the story, but added, as
if in mitigation, ``Simply matching to a risk-based rule does
not constitute derogatory information about an individual.''
That is bureaucrat-ese for, ``We can't say if Ms. Gabbard was
in the program, but if she was, don't draw any conclusions,
because we do this even to innocent people.''
Before Quiet Skies was discontinued by this Administration,
it was a symbol of the steep decline of Federal enforcement
since 9/11. The government spent $200 million a year following
up to 50 people a day for a program that in its history never
once led to an arrest or thwarted a single criminal act.
Despite its demonstrated inutility and grave civil liberties
concerns it was re-funded year after year because this is what
our government does now--it gathers information on its own
citizens as an end in itself.
In a week in which the question of whether Federal security
officials always tell the truth to Congress is back in the
news, it is worth noting that it has been 13 years since then
National Intelligence Director James Clapper answered, ``No,
sir,'' and ``Not wittingly'' when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon
asked, ``Does the National Security Agency (NSA) collect any
type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of
Americans?''
Clapper later explained that he had responded in the,
quote, ``least most untruthful manner.''
That episode solidified a principle that holds in America
today. If you lie about mass surveillance programs, even under
oath, you not only get to keep your job, you get to be hired as
a professional truth-teller after retirement as a National
Security Analyst for CNN. If you try to tell the truth, on the
other hand, about the same issues, your options are prison or
leaving the country forever.
In those 13 years, Americans became numb to surveillance.
It was once a core principle that government could not or
should not spy on its citizens without predication. Now much of
the country accepts as inevitable the idea that every move we
make is being recorded and analyzed. We know emails and phone
conversations, at a minimum, are being collected passively, and
mountains of data we leave behind as our lives move online,
from geolocations of cellphones to GPS tracking, to travel,
banking, and medical records, are increasingly fodder for overt
or covert acquisition by Federal analysts. As Google admitted
last week, Federal officials partnered with companies not just
to monitor speech but to suppress it on a grand scale.
Quiet Skies was the paradigmatic example of a program that
could take endless liberties with the Constitution because it
was secret. When you gather information with no intention of
ever going to court, as the TSA did with Quiet Skies, you never
have to justify yourself to a judge. This leads to a lot of
what one court recently called the exact sort of ``exploratory
rummaging'' that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
This is a betrayal not just of the public but of people
like Mr. Crowder, who have been trained for important work but
have been forced to do intelligence work and gather information
fellow citizens instead. As former marshal Robert MacLean put
it to me, ``The air marshal's job is to protect the cockpit and
the pilots. Let somebody else do the intelligence.'' One FBI
agent I interviewed said, ``The distinction between people who
believe bad thoughts and people who do bad things'' has been
``completely lost in our government'' since 9/11.
Once you start down the road of collecting information on
innocent people, it creates the intellectual justification for
doing it again and again and again. All this information-
gathering reverses the natural political order, giving elected
officials undeserved and unearned power over their bosses--us,
the voters.
It is time to stop being numb to this outrage. Let's hope
the elimination of Quiet Skies is just the beginning. Thank you
very much.
Chairman Paul. The Committee now welcome Jim Harper. Mr.
Harper is a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI). His work there focuses on digital
privacy, privacy law, and select constitutional issues. He has
written several amicus briefs in Fourth Amendment cases before
the U.S. Supreme Court and has published articles in a variety
of law journals.
Mr. Harper, welcome to the Committee.
TESTIMONY OF JIM HARPER,\1\ SENIOR NONRESIDENT FELLOW, AMERICAN
ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
Mr. Harper. Thank you, Chair Paul, Ranking Member Peters,
and Members of the Committee for the opportunity to testify
before you today. I am happy to return to a Committee where I
was a counsel for a short time early in my career, under the
chairmanship of Senator Ted Stevens.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Harper appears in the Appendix on
page 48.
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Having established that I am old, I also want to confess to
being slightly embarrassed for all of us that my written
testimony, submitted to you, spends as much time as it does on
the problem of counterterrorism security policy, which still
plagues us nearly 25 years after the attacks of September 11,
2001. I wish that by now we had better systems in place for
assessing risk and calibrating our responses.
I am in the privileged position of working in a think tank
that encourages me to call it like I see it, without reference
to orthodoxies or partisan considerations. That is the American
Enterprise Institute, where I am a nonresident senior fellow.
This morning the President of AEI asked me a lot of questions
about my testimony, and I said, ``You can't ask all these
questions or I am going to have to change my opening
statement!'' But I will proceed.
The testimony I have submitted to you is a sincere effort
to summarize what my study over years has produced in terms of
strategic counterterrorism and the security systems by which a
free country should address a particularly difficult challenge.
Doing security well is an American, nonpartisan interest.
There are partisan valances to this hearing, of course, but
there is opportunity here, because communities and people
sympathetic to both sides of the aisle have now experienced the
negative consequences of watchlisting, including in the Quiet
Skies program. In writing my testimony I kept coming back to
the theme that watchlisting is a security and constitutional
half-measure. Watchlisting is a system for interdicting people
whose activities do not raise a sufficient suspicion to merit
actual interdiction, through full investigation, arrest, and
the levying of criminal charges.
By doling out minor punishments and derogations on freedom
unilaterally, watchlisting defies our constitutional separation
of powers, in which law enforcement is supposed to bring
charges to be adjudicated in a separate judicial branch.
Watchlisting violates due process and derogates from the
presumption of innocence, treating people as guilty of
something without providing them an opportunity to challenge
that assessment.
In my written testimony I place Quiet Skies in a context as
a form of overreaction to terrorism, which, as a strategy,
seeks to trigger victim states into error. The waste of blood
and treasure is the clearest error and a win for terrorism.
Here, a program costing hundreds of millions of dollars to
achieve essentially nothing.
Terrorism seeks to knock victim states off their
ideological moorings and to delegitimize them. You do not have
to believe in a deep state cabal here, but you can recognize
that Quiet Skies and other watchlisting programs open our
government up to the charge, which is delegitimizing.
I also supplied in my written testimony material on
terrorism risk management that was produced by the Department
of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory
Committee in 2006. The DHS Privacy Committee itself was one
effort to create some balance at DHS. The Privacy Impact
Assessment process is another. They have a role not to be
dismissed, but I do not think internal counterweights do enough
to bring balance to security programs. Our tradition is to use
tension among branches of government and among agencies to
bring balance. In the latter part of my testimony I broach a
few methods for improving the institutional and policymaking
dynamics so there would be fewer or no more Quiet Skies
programs.
First, Congress could de-delegate power from the DHS. We
can understand the haste and uncertainty that produced broad
delegation of power in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001,
attacks, but that era is passed. You could specifically
authorize programs that you find to be effective, de-authorize
the ones that you do not see as clearly and cost-effectively
securing our country.
Oversight hearings like this are an appropriate response.
Public and judicial oversight are important checks that help
produce balance. Here, secrecy is a perennial and confounding
problem. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book, Secrecy: The American
Experience, argued that secrecy leaves policymakers less
informed, it denies government accountability, and it sharply
limits public debate about policy and government conduct.
An additional proposal I offer is to have the Congress
recognize travel as a right equivalent to other rights in the
Constitution. Were it recognized clearly as a right, courts
would be in a better position to help administer the issues
that come before it and people would be able to challenge
security programs that threaten their liberties.
Finally, I argue that privatizing at least some parts of
travel security would produce good results. Liability rules,
the insurance system, and competitive pressure are things that
government programs do not have to help guide them.
We are in a time of welcome openness to change at the
Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Noem. Quiet
Skies is gone. The shoes-off policy at airport checkpoints is a
thing of the past. There are signals that the liquids rule and
other overreaction may be reconsidered. Let's see more to
revamp airline security and counterterrorism policy so that
threats are in perspective and directly met while Americans
remain free to travel in possession of all their rights. Thank
you.
Senator Peters. Our next witness is Abed Ayoub. Mr. Ayoub
hails from Dearborn, Michigan, and is a graduate of the
University of Michigan and the University of Detroit Mercy
School of Law. He currently serves as the National Executive
Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
(ADC), an Arab-American civil rights organization committed to
defending the civil rights and civil liberties of all
Americans, including advancing due process and equal
protection.
Throughout his career he has worked to address issues
impacting Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States,
including matters related to discrimination, surveillance,
profiling, and most relevant to this hearing, watchlisting and
screening. Under his leadership, the ADC legal department
successfully assisted and provided pro bono support to
thousands of impacted community members across the country.
You are now recognized for your opening remarks.
TESTIMONY OF ABED AYOUB,\1\ NATIONAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
AMERICAN-ARAB ANTI-DISCRIMINATION COMMITTEE
Mr. Ayoub. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Paul and Ranking
Member Peters for the opportunity to testify. My name is Abed
Ayoub, National Executive Director of ADC. We were founded over
45 years ago by former Senator James Abourezk. Throughout that
time we have worked and assisted countless members of our
community who have directly impacted by government watch list
process.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Ayoub appears in the Appendix on
page 68.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let me start off by saying something that may surprise some
people, but I have sympathy and I feel really for MAGA
supporters, for Republicans, and for anybody that is going
through and experiencing the fallout of the watch list issues.
That includes missed flights, repeat screening, frozen bank
accounts, job consequences, and much more, without notice or a
fair way to challenge it.
I do not need to share their politics to understand that
rights and liberties are not condition on agreement. What they
are experiencing today mirrors what Arab and Muslim families
have endured for decades, a secret designation that follows you
from airport to employer and sometimes to consulate, with no
clear explanation and no reliable fix. That is not a partisan
problem. It is a due process problem. When the government can
quietly tag one group, it can quietly tag any group--left,
right, neither--just depending on who holds power. The answer
is the same for all of us--end the watch list, or at minimum,
implement safeguards that protect our liberties and rights.
Quiet Skies was a total disaster. ADC welcomes the decision
by the Secretary of Homeland Security to shut it down. Retiring
a program that surveilled ordinary travelers without evidence
of wrongdoing is a meaningful step toward fairness. But Quiet
Skies captures only part of the story. It was a window into a
faulty surveillance architecture--secret lists, vague criteria,
and downstream sharing that harm people who have done nothing
wrong.
For decades, the watch list system has too often been a
shortcut for suspicion, aimed at my community members not
because of what we have done, but because of who we are and
what we believe. People get flagged after visiting family
overseas, donating to lawful charities, attending a protest, or
simply for praying. That is not security. That is punishment
for religion and politics.
More than 98 percent of the names on the FBI's 2019
Screening Dataset were Arab or Muslim. Placement on these lists
does not require arrest, charge, or conviction. Instead, it is
based on vague suspicion, often tied to religious practice or
again, protected political speech.
Again, let me be clear. If a tool can quietly target my
community members today, it can target any community tomorrow--
journalists, activists, immigrants, gun owners, union
organizers, pro-life or pro-choice advocates. Once a secret
label replaces proof, the only limit is who is in power. If you
won't end the watch list, then at least cage it with real
notice, evidence, hearings, and strict limits so no American's
faith or viewpoint becomes a reason to be treated like a
suspect.
Placement on the watch list has a direct and dire impact
that reaches beyond the airport. These harms underscore why
there must be reform to allow for redress/removal from the
list, the tracking of screenings, and assurances of appropriate
oversight, because the human and policy costs are real.
The task is larger than ending one program. We have to take
immediate steps to implement due process measures to afford
those on the list an opportunity to be removed.
Many expert, and opinions, many of them here today, have
provided a clear roadmap to fixing these immediate issues, such
as requiring TSA and CBP to systematically track all screenings
and outcomes so we can see where the system fails and who is
being hit the hardest. Second, direct the National Terrorist
Screening Center (NTSC) to report regularly to Congress on
nominations, removals, error rates, and recall of bad data,
with safeguards to protect privacy while exposing patterns of
bias. Third, pair transparency with teeth. Have mandatory
timelines and independent review that can order a delisting.
The most urgent fix is transparency and due process. If the
government is going to restrict your liberties, you have a
right to know why. DHS's Traveler Redress Inquiry Program
(TRIP), provides little information to travelers about why they
are flagged or whether corrections are applied across the
system. Without systematic tracking, bias can go unchecked, and
travelers have no meaningful way to correct errors. Today,
individuals on watchlists often receive no notice, no
explanation, and no meaningful way off the list.
There is room for bipartisanship on this issue, and I am
confident of that. I will meet anyone halfway on this--left,
right, it does not matter--because the watch list is not about
who you voted for. It is about whether the government has to
prove its case when it takes away your rights and limits your
life.
Mr. Chair and Members of the Committee, eliminating Quiet
Skies was necessary, but it is not sufficient. We need to
restore transparency, accountability, and due process to
protect millions of travelers. We stand by and ready to assist
in that effort. Thank you,
Chairman Paul. Thank you all for your testimony. We are
going to start a round of questions, and we will start with
Senator Ernst.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ERNST
Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for calling today's
hearing. For years I have been highlighting examples of
government mismanagement and waste with my monthly Squeal
Awards, and the TSA's Quiet Skies program, unfortunately, was a
prime candidate for such an award.
Two hundred million dollars a year was spent on a program
that was weaponized by the Biden administration to target
political opponents, including patriot veterans like former
Congresswoman, now Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi
Gabbard. The program covered over 180,000 flights since 2018,
and did not stop a single terrorist attack, as many of you
noted.
I thank Secretary Noem for ending this wasteful boondoggle
of a program and ensuring that TSA and DHS resources are used
effectively to focus on keeping air travel safe rather than
spying on and harassing law-abiding citizens.
Mr. Crowder, I will start with you. I am so sorry to hear
about the political targeting by the Biden administration
against your family, and I thank you for your service to our
fantastic country. Your testimony highlighting TSA and Federal
Air Marshal resources being diverted to track and harass the
families of those sworn to protect Americans and make air
travel safer, shows what was wrong with the awful Quiet Skies
program.
But this program is not the only boondoggle that has
existed under TSA and DHS in recent years. Since 2017, the DHS
Inspector General has highlighted unresolved recommendations
about how Federal Air Marshal Service contributions to aviation
security are questionable, so questionable, in fact, that as
much as $394 million is being perpetually misused. Mr. Crowder,
can you share any suggestions for TSA and DHS safety changes
you and your colleagues might have?
Mr. Crowder. You say we have not shown to stop anything.
Back in the 1980s, there were air marshals. There was a
significant number of them, trying to stop hijackings. That
number dwindled down to approximately 33 before 9/11. Had the
agency stayed the course, maybe that would have been prevented.
It is not how many air marshals and how many flights we are on
but the terrorists not knowing which flight we are on.
I do not want to downplay our role in the security of the
Nation. But as I testified, a lot of things were abused with
Quiet Skies. January 6th, things of that nature, need to be
addressed. Does that answer your question?
Senator Ernst. It does. What you are saying, basically, is
follow the guidelines as the Federal Government has laid out
for air marshals, and not get into the business of
intelligence, following, surveilling, those passengers that
might be targeted by the Federal Government. Can that be a
takeaway?
Mr. Crowder. Yes. The abuse for political reasons needs to
be stopped.
Senator Ernst. OK.
Mr. Crowder. It needs to be intel driven.
Senator Ernst. Very good. Thank you. Mr. Leavitt, where are
the TSA and DHS employees who were working on the Quiet Skies
program now? Have they moved into other programs? Does the
agency still employ them?
Mr. Leavitt. Quiet Skies is just one of several programs
that fed into creating what is called special mission coverage.
There are still air marshals being deployed around the country,
of course. This was just one of their several missions. At TSA
headquarters, they still have other reasons, other criteria for
which they are putting people on lists and other things.
So no, we do not have any reason to believe that any staff
have been laid off or anything because the Quiet Skies program
was finished. They just divert in other work, and we hope that
it is work that actually protects the American homeland.
Senator Ernst. Wonderful. I want to thank all of our
witnesses for being here today and sharing those personal
stories. I think it is very important.
I want to just take, in the remaining time I have left, to
once again thank Secretary Noem. Over the weekend, while I was
at home, in Southwest Iowa, I ran into a U.S. Marshal that had
been part of the apprehension of an illegal migrant that had
killed a young Council Bluffs woman nine years ago. He had fled
to Honduras, back to his home country. Through Secretary Noem,
DHS, and through Secretary Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State,
through those two departments they were able to extradite that
man from Honduras, and he is here, seeing justice, finally,
after nine years. I want to thank the Administration for doing
that.
But when I ran into this U.S. Marshal over the weekend he
said, ``Rarely do we ever see justice,'' and in this case we
are seeing justice because of the Administration and their
follow-through. Thank you for allowing me that, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Paul. Senator Peters.
Senator Peters. Mr. Ayoub, one of the issues that I have
heard again and again from people in the community and others
is just how broken the redress process is for people who
believe that they are unjustly or mistakenly caught up in the
watchlisting system. Mr. Crowder, I understand your wife, my
understanding is not on Quiet Skies, she was put on the watch
list, the Terrorist Watch List program. The redress process is
really important. We still have that program in place, and we
need to have reforms, which was part of the work I have been
doing and the legislation that I had that we did pass out of
Committee to deal with redress.
But given your experience working with individuals who
believe that they are on the Terrorist Watch List, what
recommendations specifically do you have for this community?
What should we be doing right now so it does not happen to Mr.
Crowder's wife in the future, it does not happen to the folks
that you hear from regularly and I hear from regularly back in
Michigan?
Mr. Ayoub. Thank you for that. Look, the redress process
and the DHS TRIP program is flawed. It does not always work, it
does not give you the reason why you were put on a list, and it
does not give you a final decision. You fill out your
information online, and you get a letter back saying some vague
language, like, ``We received it. We can neither confirm nor
deny that you are on a list.'' And it is not always effective.
We need to work to find ways to expand that due process,
expand the option of being removed from the list, look at what
existing programs are there that we could take advantage of
which could review individuals coming in. You want to be
proactive. If somebody is on the list, again, set up a
proactive way for them to reach out and be removed.
My colleague at the end, who is a U.S. Air Marshal, who has
far more access to being removed, it still took him a couple of
years to be removed. Imagine a regular individual going through
the same thing. It is going to take much longer.
What we have learned through our practice is when we can
identify that one piece of information or that one agent that
placed that piece of information in there, and then have a
conversation with them, and interview the client. Once that
piece of information is removed, then the issue is gone.
But it is going to be impossible to do that for two million
people. There are just not enough agents and resources to go
around. Finding a streamlined way, a streamlined due process
measure, maybe building on DHS TRIP, that should be first and
foremost, in dwindling down the list. Then also possibly maybe
going through a list to at least purge the names of folks that
have died, or children that are like four or five years old.
Remove those names so you are working with a cleaner set of
data to begin with.
Senator Peters. Right. I have certainly heard a lot from
community members about the negative experiences, as you have
mentioned here, with the screening system. But just like
today's testimony, which is powerful and I appreciate the
testimony, these are anecdotal accounts, and we could come up
with an awful lot of anecdotal accounts. One of the
recommendations in our report, and a big part of my bill, was
requiring better and more complete data from CBP and TSA on all
their screening practices, because there are like 20-plus
programs. We are talking about one that has gone away. We have
still a whole lot more of these things that are out there, that
need to be addressed. This is a big issue.
My question for you is, do you think having better data,
exactly what is happening to understand whether these processes
are effective and whether there is bias, intentional or not,
political, whatever it may be, we need data. What is your sense
of that?
Mr. Ayoub. Absolutely. I think there should be data. We
should be able to look at that list and determine why this
person was added. Then at the end of the review you will find
out, OK, was this group of people, do we have this many
individuals added because they are Trump supporters, or because
they are Democratic Party supporters? We need to be able to
read that. We need to be able to know why they are on there,
who they are, what trends, and to determine what mistakes are
being made. Because again, just depending on what
administration is in office, who is going to be targeted. Our
community, for the past quarter of a century, for the past
three decades or so, were thankful enough to be targeted by all
administrations. We can tell you the experiences through
Republican and Democrat administrations.
But the reality is there are trends. There is bias. There
are folks on that list that need to be removed. Expanding that
option, expanding the way to do that, and having those data
points, having that dataset will also help develop policies and
strategies moving forward to enhance and make the security
process and the screening process better.
Senator Peters. Yes, I would just like to followup, because
this could happen in all administrations, both parties,
whatever. This is a problem. We have to make sure there is full
transparency, there is oversight, regardless of who is in
office.
Most of the oversight in these systems currently is handled
by internal DHS offices. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as well
as inspectors general, who oversee this. However,
unfortunately, this administration has basically gutted all of
the oversight, so we do not have the oversight anymore. Can you
describe the consequences of eliminating internal oversight
will have on American civil rights, and civil liberties with
regard to screening and watchlisting? So all of the issues that
are being raised by everybody here today, we have to make sure
that we are guarding against that.
Mr. Ayoub. Look, oversight is very important. The issue was
bad with a functional CRCL office at DHS, and you can imagine
it would be a lot worse with no oversight. So having that
office, having some sort of mechanism there is important.
Chairman Paul. Senator Moreno.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR MORENO
Senator Moreno. Mr. Chair, as I mentioned to you yesterday,
I really appreciate you putting on this hearing. I think it is
really important. I think if the American people read
everything that was provided for this hearing, their minds
would be blown. I think some of the stuff that is in here is
sensitive information, which we should maybe think about maybe
daylighting that, because I have never read something more
outrageous than reading that memo. So it is pretty crazy.
You mentioned just now to my colleague from Michigan that
the oversight is essential. How did oversight work out in the
last four years of the Biden administration?
Mr. Ayoub. It didn't really work out.
Senator Moreno. So it is not a question of oversight. It is
a question of intent. Because here is the reality. I think
Americans would be appalled to know that their government was
spying on them. Not just spying on them. Paying people like Mr.
Crowder, who, you did not take the job to go walk around
airports, monitoring bathroom habits and coffee habits of
American citizens. Yet your government was paying you to do
that, to spy on American citizens, violating the Fourth
Amendment, shredding the Fourth Amendment.
One of the things that I had to do to become a U.S. citizen
was learn a lot about Americana history. I had to read the
Constitution. My mom convinced me that this citizenship test
was going to be impossible, so I memorized it. Everybody talks
about what Joe Biden says is the thing. The thing, you know,
life, liberty, and he couldn't even repeat it so he called it
``the thing.'' But after the end of that sentence there's a
line that says that government is deriving its just powers from
the consent of the governed--deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed.
Mr. Ayoub, do you think that over the last four years of
the Biden administration that they derived their just powers
from the consent of the governed? Do you think Americans knew
that they had somebody stalking them at airports and bathrooms
and coffee shops and watching who they were talking to on
airplanes?
Mr. Taibbi. Senator Moreno, thank you for the question. No,
I do not think so. In fact, as a reporter in the last four
years it has been very frustrating investigating not just
programs like Quiet Skies but also issues like censorship. It
seems like there are only three ways that you can get important
information. One is through whistleblowers like the ones
represented by Mr. Leavitt. Another is through investigations
like the ones by this Committee. The third is if an eccentric
billionaire decides to hand over a ton of material to a
reporter. It has become almost impossible to get information
about these abuses.
I think what I was trying to get at with my opening
statement is that particularly in the last four years the
government has taken the position of the citizenry, they are
all basically suspects until proven innocent. It should be the
other way around.
Senator Moreno. That should be the other way around. That
is the foundational principles of this country. That is not up
for debate. There is no law that we need to pass. That is in
our Constitution, in our Bill of Rights.
Mr. Crowder, I am going to shift to you for a second. I was
out of the meeting. I had to go to a Banking session so I
apologize. Could you point out your wife real quick for me? Has
anybody from the U.S. Government apologized to your wife?
Mr. Crowder. No, sir.
Senator Moreno. So they have not even bothered. Nobody in
the government has bothered to pick up the phone, send a letter
saying, you know, we are very sorry.
Mr. Crowder. Nobody.
Senator Moreno. Let me say that to you on behalf of the
U.S. Government. We apologize for what happened to you. It
should never have happened to any American citizens. It is a
total and complete disgrace, that the previous administration
weaponized this.
You mentioned, Mr. Crowder, this is a result of 9/11. How
many American citizens were involved in the plotting of 9/11?
Mr. Crowder. Zero, to my knowledge.
Senator Moreno. So what problem are we trying to solve?
Meaning, the auspices of this. Look what happened. We can never
let another 9/11 happen. Why the hell are we having Americans
surveyed at airports and on airplanes?
Mr. Taibbi, you mentioned something else. During the COVID
era, let's not forget how insane that was. Do you remember what
that was like? Like you get on an airplane, you had the mask
on. We saw people dragged off airplanes because they were not
wearing a mask. Dragged. Like humiliated by the police, dragged
off for the offense of not having a mask on. But when they
served you, you could take your mask off to eat, because it was
the most polite virus ever in the history of humanity. It said,
well, you are eating so I am not going to infect anybody right
now, but when you are done I am going to go back to the
infectious part. Those of us who had some level of like, hey,
this is just stupid, said we are not going to wear a mask, and
that put you on a No Fly List. That got you banned from flying.
Could you explain that?
Mr. Taibbi. Actually, Senator, it is worse than that. My
understanding is that just for supporting a group that
protested the wearing of masks on airplanes you could be placed
on a No Fly List or on a watch list by the TSA. That is in
addition to the J6 category, which included people who were
just suspected of traveling to the National Capital region, not
even of going into the Capitol.
Senator Moreno. I know I am over time. Let me just make
this comment. Mr. Chair, you mentioned this to our Ranking
Member. He is not here to listen to this, but maybe he would
not want to. He has a choice, right, to extend CISA 2015 by
voting yes for this continuing resolution today. But it is so
important to him to hijack Republicans that even he is willing
to say, ``Well, this is not that actually important to me.'' I
also find it decently ironic that when they had control of the
House, the Senate, and the White House that the report that he
issued, he could have put that on the floor, right? I am not
wrong there, right? He could have put that on the floor and
passed that.
Chairman Paul. That is a good point because this is in
response to my wanting to put First Amendment protections on
the CISA extension. CISA was the agency--and this is not the
authorization for the whole agency but for some of their
powers, and I said yes, we can let it go through, but let's add
First Amendment protections to it. Why? Because the First
Amendment protections were in another department of government,
some through CISA, DHS, some through the FBI, that Mr. Taibbi
knows a lot about because they were meeting with Twitter. A lot
of Americans still do not know this, that the FBI was actually
sitting in meetings with Twitter officials, that CISA was
sitting in meetings.
What I have said is if we are going to reauthorize CISA,
which a lot of people want to reauthorize this particular
authority, let's reauthorize it with an amendment that simply
says government officials are not allowed to meet with them to
take down constitutionally protected speech. If it is illegal,
they can meet with them and warn them something illegal is
happening on their social media. But things that are not
illegal, that are protected by speech, why not put it on a
must-pass piece of legislation? That is the only way we are
ever going to get it beyond the other side is to do it.
So you are right. It is fake outrage. They are outraged
about this particular authority expiring, but they have every
chance to, and they will have another chance today, to vote to
reauthorize it, and it will be part of the continuing
resolution to reauthorize this particular facility.
Senator Moreno. But just super quickly, and I apologize,
last year, when you were not Chair, the Ranking Member could
have put that bill on the floor, and chose not to. Is that
correct?
Chairman Paul. Yes. Senator Lankford.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD
Senator Lankford. To the witnesses, thanks. Thanks for the
work you are doing to be able to continue to be able to protect
the civil liberties of all Americans and for your service to
the country. We are grateful, as a Nation, to be able to have
folks that are actually engaged in these ideas.
All of us who flew on a plane during the time of COVID
remember full well the experience of the mask on, mask off. I
will never forget a particular flight that I was on, that
literally the flight attendant patrolled up and down the aisle
the entire time, like a prison guard, watching for anyone that
lowered their mask at any point or that got onto children who
were with a pacifier or with someone who has a crying baby, and
to try to figure out some way to be able to cover that up. This
is bizarre, to be able to think about that, but to be able to
think about our own government at the time was also trying to
find people that disagreed with policy during that time period,
and would say, ``We want to try to find some way for you just
not to fly, because you disagree with us,'' becomes an entirely
different level.
For Mr. Crowder, let me ask you a question on this, and Mr.
Leavitt, if you want to be able to jump in, as well, you can on
this. How did they make decisions regarding the threat level of
individuals on the mask mandate issue? Did they have a ranking
for that? How did they determine what is the level of threat
for an individual?
Mr. Crowder. I am going to defer to you.
Mr. Leavitt. OK. We do not know, and that is the problem,
because things like this are secret, right. They are not the
sort of thing that everyday Americans have insight into. They
are not the sort of thing that air marshals, even flying back
and forth in these flights, have insight into. They are clearly
not the sort of things that you have insight into.
Senator Lankford. Right.
Mr. Leavitt. So it begs the question then, who was writing
this stuff and how are we supposed to trust that it has any
basis? Clearly, people just expressing their concern about
masks is outrageous for them to be put on a watch list.
Senator Lankford. Yes. So going back to some of the things
Mr. Ayoub was saying. Someone who is visiting family in
Pakistan, someone who was a missionary that was flying back and
forth to a country that was deemed inappropriate to be able to
fly back and forth to. Was there a process to be able to
actually have a human engaged in that decisionmaking to be able
to say, ``Hey, this person is visiting family members. ``This
person was a missionary,'' whatever it may be. Was there a
human involved in that or is it just a trigger, you were in a
certain city, at a certain place, so you are on the list?
Mr. Crowder. Again, I can only testify to my wife's
situation. I had specific knowledge she did not enter the
Capitol. How she got on that list, who said that she entered
the Capitol, I do not know. That is well above our access.
Mr. Leavitt. I will add to that. The TSA has tried to say
this is just a rule-based program, right, and they give the
impression almost that like some computer is just assessing
flight bookings and then spitting these out. But someone made
the decision to put, for instance, Tulsi Gabbard's
congressional photo on there, rather than her passport. There
was an individual involved, and frankly, somebody needs to
figure out who that is and ask them a lot of questions.
Senator Lankford. Yes. There are other Members of Congress
that have also been placed on the list, as well. We do not know
why or what the reason was. It was just they are a threat, and
so they have to be able to be on this list.
TSA has policies that prohibit active collection of
information about people. TSA is receiver of information, not a
collector of information. This is clearly TSA trying to be able
to collect information. Was TSA in violation of the law,
because they are not managing information given to them, they
were shifting into the collection mode.
Mr. Leavitt. I will take a stab there. TSA has broad
authorities, right, and so they do not treat this as
intelligence, right. They do not say that it is intelligence,
as though they observed you doing something. They are just
deploying the asset. I think back to one of the points that has
been made here, Congress has given TSA pretty broad authority.
That might need to be looked at being constrained more further.
Senator Lankford. Mr. Harper, do you want to be able to add
to that?
Mr. Harper. Yes. I will not be able to cite you chapter and
verse, but the authorities in the Aviation and Transportation
Security Act are very broad. Your intuition is correct that TSA
should not be an intelligence collection agency. But if it
decides it is going to go off in that direction, the language
is so broad it can go off in that direction. That is why one of
my recommendations is to bring TSA and other DHS authorities
within bounds that Congress sets tightly.
Senator Lankford. Mr. Harper, you had also mentioned
something about a right to travel and to clarify that. Tell me
what you mean by that.
Mr. Harper. I think we intuitively feel we have a right to
travel, and there are cases from the Supreme Court that say of
course, you have a right to travel. You can move from one State
to another and they cannot deny you welfare benefits when you
get there. There are other cases where a man in San Francisco
wanted to fly to Washington, D.C., to meet with his
representative, and in this case the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals found that you do not have a right to travel on your
preferred mode of transportation. He did not want to go through
all the security nonsense, and so challenged there. They said,
no, you can take a train, or you can drive if you want to go to
Washington, D.C.
A clear right to travel--Americans believe they have it,
but the courts have not accorded it to them--would give them a
position when they went to court where they could do discovery,
and some of these things could be turned up. We could learn
more about the programs. I think courts would balance well.
Obviously, a court is not going to throw out a program that is
probably cost effective. They will say, ``Yes, no, in this case
you do have this right, but the right is subject to regulations
that allow for security.'' But the right does not give way to
regulations and programs that do not do anything, the
regulations and programs that do not actually produce cost-
effective security.
I am glad you asked about it--I would like you to give it
more consideration. Congress can weigh in on that and say,
``No, this intuition of Americans, that is somewhat backed by
courts, can be made a full right. We think it is in Congress.
Let's have the courts treat it as such.''
Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Paul. When I traveled during the pandemic, we all
travel several times a week, there were many flight attendants
who were very nice, very pleasant, very sympathetic, and were
just like me, unhappy with the mandates, and really did not
want to go overboard. They would pass me notes, sometimes
secretly, saying they were supportive. They did not want
anybody to know they might be supportive of things I was for.
But it also brought out the inner Karen in people. This
exists in a significant number of people in our society, the
idea that given a little power, they really like it. I never
was a policeman, but I wish I were. Just the idea of all of
this power. I have power over it. If you say a word to me, you
can be put on the list.
In fact, I have a TSA document, somewhere here in my
collection of documents, that says that disobeying a public
health order is equivalent to, saying I am going to take the
plane down. I mean, you are a threat to the plane. You have now
become a threat to the flight attendant. That just brought out
the inner Karen in a lot of people, and it became really
unpleasant.
I hated to fly every week and I am not somebody who is
really that confrontational. I do not like that. That is why I
do not like it. I do not like to have a confrontation. But, you
would have, ``Sir, sir, you are not eating your peanuts fast
enough. You need to put your mask on in between each peanut.''
I mean, literally, that was happening on flights.
The ludicrous nature of there being any science related to
that, that all of us with our masks off for 20 minutes while we
are eating is somehow going to protect us from having it on for
40 minutes when we have it off 20 minutes. It turns out that
none of these things had any science behind them. None
whatsoever. Most of the masks they were recommending were masks
that were ineffective. Cough masks were entirely for show and
completely ineffective. Yet the head of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) was wandering around with Washington Nationals
cloth mask on, as if it were of any value.
But I think it is important to know how we got here. So
Quiet Skies, you are right, Mr. Leavitt, we got rid of Quiet
Skies, but I am not sure that helps Mr. Crowder or Christine.
We are still not sure exactly how they got on the list. My
suspicion is if she just shows up on the list, I am wondering
if somebody who does not like you saw her social media that she
was in Washington on January 6th, did not like your politics,
and says, ``I am going to call the Tip Line.'' You would have
never known about it until everybody started harassing her. But
you, to this day, do not know how she got on the list, right?
Mr. Crowder. That is correct, sir.
Chairman Paul. So that is a real problem. What we are
taking is, let's say I am of a different political persuasion.
I may not know your wife, but I work with you, and I heard you
say something about your politics, and I am of a different
political bent. Why don't I just call in the Tip Line and say--
because I heard you say she was there on January 6th. But she
was at the White House, not the Capitol. Not as if it is really
a huge distinction, but there is a distinction. So maybe just
out of spite somebody does it. Don't we have to have a way to
fix where someone does not like you and puts you on the list?
Or maybe somebody has an animus toward Arab Americans and just
makes his list. I do not think we are nearly done with trying
to fix this problem yet.
There is also this silent program, Silent Partner program,
where one of them was if you are traveling from Greece and you
do not have a Greek name, and you have been to Turkey, or you
have been to Syria sometime in the last 10 years, well, what if
that trip to Syria was because you were part of the armed
services? Is there not somebody with a brain that is actually
looking up and saying, ``You were in the armed services while
you were there,'' or have a relative there, frankly, and have a
good reason to have gone there. But I do not think anybody has
taken the time to do it, because there are just so many damn
people to put on these lists, and then it is so hard. But half
the time you do not even know if you have been named. I mean,
you were fortunate. You were in a unique position, and I thank
you for coming forward, because you were in a unique position
that you knew this had happened. This had to have happened to
dozens, if not hundreds, of other people.
With regard to secrecy, Mr. Harper mentioned this, I want
to reiterate how much of a problem this is. We cannot analyze
whether programs work because they simply say, ``It is secret
and you do not deserve to know.'' I have been asking, as the
Chair of this Committee, a couple of simple questions. Like I
say, I travel all the time, so I get the good and the bad, and
a lot of it the bad of travel. I get stopped once every two to
three weeks, and I do not think I am being selected. But I get
selected by the machine for random pat-downs. I have been
through the magnetometer. If I have made it through that, and I
do not have any metal on me, I want to know, now that I have
been selected and I go through the advanced pat-down and the
whirly-gig machine, how many weapons and knives are you
finding? They sent me some long answer, but they did not answer
the question. I want to know how many. I think it is zero.
Because I have already been through the magnet. I do not have a
knife or a gun. What are they finding when I go through?
The other thing is, when you go through the--I call it the
whirly gig machine--you go through there, it always finds
something that needs to be patted down, so I get a pat-down
too. But it never finds anything. It must not be a very good
machine if I get patted down every time, and there is never
anything there. I suspect that that machine is actually
targeting not me personally, but doing a random check to do a
pat-down on me by indicating that something there is not there.
They will not admit they are doing that, but I suspect they are
doing that. But it all goes back to secrecy. They do not want
to reveal the State secrets, even to the people who are
supposed to be overseeing the State secrets.
To give you an example of how bad it is, this is not in
just this area. I have been wanting to read the Church
Committee report from 1976. It will be 50 years next year, and
it will be released to the public, but I am not allowed to read
it, and some of my colleagues are preventing me on the
Intelligence Committee. They jealously protect this
information. Typically the people on that committee, with a few
exceptions, are in favor of more intelligence power and opposed
to more scrutiny.
But there is supposedly a classified annex. I want to read
it, and I am being prevented from reading it. They have told me
now I can individually read it, and it is a box. It is a room
full of boxes. They will not designate exactly what is what,
and there is no index. But I can go read it. I cannot read the
whole entire--I would need a whole staff. I would need
historians and other people interested in the Church Committee.
But the Church Committee was critical of too much power to the
intelligence agencies. Now I want to read something and I am
being stymied 50 years later. So secrecy is a problem.
To Mr. Ayoub, the whole idea of accountability, of course
we need to find these things out. Most of the programs in
government--and it just does not go to this--most programs in
government that are authorized for a purpose are never
reviewed. We have legislation that says if it does not get
reauthorized it goes out of existence. It should disappear.
Reauthorization, and I know Senator Lankford has been very
active in this, reauthorization should be about does it work.
We have like 82 housing programs. Everybody gets this idea, I
want to help the homeless. We have already done it 82 times.
Why don't we study the other 82 programs to find out if any of
them work before we reauthorize a new program?
With regard to where we go from here, we are not done with
this. I am still appalled by the idea of outsourcing this to
universities. So we pay the universities. Universities have no
scruples whatsoever. George Washington University here in D.C.
has a project on extremism. Is extremism showing up on January
6th to support President Trump? I mean, really, we have to be a
little careful of who we are giving the keys to this. I think
they did go after those people.
The evidence is that the people on the mask list--there is
a terror mask list, apparently, so the people on the terror
watch list for not wanting to wear masks--I do not think they
were removing their masks. I think they were talking about it
online. ``Let's not wear our masks. Let's take our masks off on
the plane and have civil disobedience.'' But we are still
trying to get to the bottom of that because we do not actually
have the names of the people on the list. That is all being
hidden.
I suspect there are also hundreds of other people that were
put on a list because they were resistant to dictate from
someone on a plane, to a flight attendant saying, ``Wear your
mask higher. You are showing a nostril. Hike up your mask a
little higher.'' I think a lot of those people were put down as
potential disasters for the plane, dangerous people, and not
necessarily for masks because they didn't want to list them all
masks.
But we have to do more. Every one of these programs has to
be looked at. You have to have recourse. You have to redress. I
think that we cannot just stop here. We have to look throughout
government, more transparency, more sunlight.
I am going to throw it back to Senator Moreno, I think has
another couple of questions.
Senator Moreno. Yes. Mr. Taibbi, you have been around the
block, as they say, around the globe. You have seen
authoritarian governments. What would be the American foreign
policy reaction to a country that receives foreign aid, foreign
assistance from the United States that did this to their own
citizens?
Mr. Taibbi. Senator, I would hope that we would look
negatively on any country that mass-collected information on
innocent citizens.
Senator Moreno. Surveilled their citizens?
Mr. Taibbi. Surveilled their citizens.
Senator Moreno. Put them on a watch list?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
Senator Moreno. Prevented them from traveling?
Mr. Taibbi. Right.
Senator Moreno. Had a presumption of guilt, not a
presumption of innocence? We would probably call them in and
say, ``Hey, we can't continue this relationship because you are
oppressing U.S. citizens.'' Would that be accurate?
Mr. Taibbi. Yes, I think that would certainly be accurate.
I know that we have raised questions about surveillance of
journalists in other countries in the past.
Senator Moreno. When that was happening, as the Chair just
said, literally FBI agents sitting down with private companies,
saying, ``You must remove this person from social media.''
``You must go knock on their door.'' Some of the stuff we are
seeing in the United Kingdom (UK), which I am very proud of the
fact that our Vice President is speaking out against what the
U.K. is doing to their own citizens, like persecuting them for
social media posts. Yes, that is pretty outrageous, right?
This was happening over the last four years of the Biden
administration. You would say in the history of the United
States of America, we have never seen more of a tilt toward
authoritarian rule than we did under Joe Biden, between firing
people who would not get vaccinated, you could not get a job,
you were somehow a bad person, we were masking two-year-olds,
we were forcing the injection of an experimental, I will
generously call it a vaccine. If you did not do that, and if
you did not carry proof of that with you, then somehow you were
a bad person. That was a pretty dark four years in the scheme
of American democracy. Would you agree?
Mr. Taibbi. I would agree, and there was also a radical
shift in attitudes in this country toward whether or not we
should have laws against things like hate speech. There used to
be a small minority of people who believed that. Now it has
become almost a majority of people who believe that.
You mentioned the U.K. I interviewed somebody last week who
was arrested for speech over there. To the Chair's point, they
have a system that allows people to make complaints that result
in criminal arrests of people for social media posts. That
could have been our future here, so that is deeply concerning
to me.
Senator Moreno. I will jump to you, Mr. Harper, and I will
let you answer this one. Do you think, in the scheme of things
for Americans, I think Americans would think that their
freedom, their liberty, their constitutional rights given to
them by our founders is important. Just a quick question if you
can answer it. Do you think that is important, really important
to American citizens?
Mr. Harper. It is.
Senator Moreno. Do you think that it is ironic that
Democrats, that chase cameras, saying that President Trump is a
threat to our democracy, are not even here? I think the record
should show, Mr. Chair, who attended this hearing and who did
not attend the hearing. Because you cannot go out there and go
on camera and say that President Trump, the person who ended
the Quiet Skies program, the person who is reforming what has
happened under the Biden era, there is nobody being threatened
or being fired for not taking a vaccine. In fact, restoring
individual liberty, and yet do not even bother to show up to a
hearing, which I think this hearing--and I said this to you
yesterday, Mr. Chair--is the most outrageous thing I have ever
seen in Washington, D.C. Yet they cannot even bother.
I think it is one of those things where you decide what is
important. Like when you are a United States Senator you can
decide what is important. I can be in this hearing. I can be in
another hearing. I can be at a fundraiser. I can be golfing. I
can do whatever the heck I want, and that is kind of the crazy
part about being a Senator. You do not actually have to show up
to win, but you do. The fact that the Democrats basically,
virtually boycotted this hearing, gives them zero credibility
when they say that this President is moving this country toward
an authoritarian. Do you want to comment on that, Mr. Harper?
Am I wrong?
Mr. Harper. Your question on the perspective, your question
gave, if this were happening in another country what would we
say about it? Very powerful, because Keir Starmer in the U.K.
is saying everyone is going to have a digital ID, a national ID
program. In the United States we oppose that. The Real ID Act
of 2005, continually failed to be implemented, and hoorah for
us, because it should not be. It should be repealed.
Financial surveillance is a product of United States law
that we export around the world. If you took off the label,
Bank Secrecy Act, and put a Chinese label on it, you would say,
``Aha! That is China!'' That is what we do, and it is what the
United States has in the Bank Secrecy Act, again, that we
export through the Financial Action Task Force. There are so
many issues that we could get to, but that insight: We should
not be doing it here. We should be leading in the United States
on civil rights and civil liberties. So all of the things we
have talked about, the transparency, anti-secrecy, no to a
national ID. The perspective of your question was really
important and helpful, I think. Thank you.
Senator Moreno. Mr. Chair, just one request, from my
perspective. There has been almost no accountability to what
the government did to the American people during COVID, like
almost no accountability. People closed schools, who made kids,
little kids, get vaccinated, masked. Can you imagine what that
impact is going to be? You have kids, what the impact is going
to be long term on 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds that were forced to
be masked for 5, 6, 7 hours a day? No accountability.
Look, the most accountability was that the American people
fired Joe Biden, thank God, and prevented Kamala Harris, which
would have been even worse.
But we do have the ability to go into the current
Administration and say who, within Homeland Security, still has
a job that perpetuated these policies? Because my mindset is
anybody, especially the person that wrote that memo, that
literally made my hair stand up, how is that person still
employed by the United States government? I think we need to
ask that question, while we have an administration that
actually wants to protect civil liberties, that actually wants
to protect the American people. We cannot just ignore this.
Again, there are a lot of things that have happened, that
scene, about eight months here in D.C. But this report was so
outrageous, and the fact that my Democratic colleagues have no
interest in listening to this says it all.
Thank you again, Mr. Chair, for holding this very
important, and thank you for all the witnesses for being here.
Again, Mrs. Crowder, truly apologize for what you went through.
It is completely insane, not just to you but to anybody who had
something like that happen to you.
Chairman Paul. Part of oversight is not vendetta or
revenge. It is removing people who abuse the civil liberties of
Americans. So far the court has been consistent in upholding
the President's right to hire and fire people in the Executive
Branch. I agree with you completely. Because we need to make
sure that these programs do not come back again.
The issue of anonymous accusation reminds me of a scene
that I saw in Venice. There is a lion's mouth, Bocca di Leone,
and the Doge was like the kind of Venice, and you could
anonymously just put it in there. But you could lose your head
or be imprisoned for life by an anonymous tip.
One of the evolutions beyond that is sort of the idea of
due process, that you cannot just be secretly accused of
things. I think there is a real danger to that, and I think
that is what happened in this case. If this is somebody who
works still as an air marshal, that person does not need to
work as an air marshal, if it was a colleague or somebody that
tried to get your wife in trouble. Somebody did it. I have a
feeling that it is malicious, actually. I do not have
information on that, but we want to get to the bottom of that.
The people who created and ran all these programs, of course we
do.
I think your point is well taken on human rights. We have
all kinds of strings that are supposed to be attached to human
rights. If you are not a democratically elected government--I
have tried using that one before, because there are many coups
that occur around the world. We keep sending them. Egypt still
lives under a military rule after a coup. Technically, they are
not supposed to--there was something called the Lahey
Amendments--they are not supposed to get foreign aid now, but
we do it anyway. We just exempt them from the Lahey Amendments.
But things that we enforce in other countries we certainly
should enforce on others. There are big categories of people--
Arab Americans, Muslin Americans--who have been abused by this
stuff. But it really is not always just either the color of
your skin or the color. It could be the shade of your ideology.
You could be a home-schooler or Donald Trump supporter. You
could be all kinds of things that may be outside some sort of
mainstream. To target those people is anathema to what our
country stands for.
I appreciate everything all of you have done in this. I
appreciate your testimony today. I would like to enter into the
record\1\ a set of redacted documents produced to the Committee
as part of this investigation. I would also like to enter the
statements\2\ for the record from the Air Marshal National
Council and other stakeholders. Without objection, these
records will be entered into the record.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The redacted documents entered in the Record appears in the
Appendix on page 126.
\2\ The statements submitted for the Record appears in the Appendix
on page 238.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chairman Paul. Senator Moreno, do you have any more
questions? We have one Senator that wants to come and ask a few
questions, so I am going to wait another minute or two. Do you
have anything else?
Senator Moreno. No. Mr. Leavitt, you are an attorney. I am
not. I will ask you this question. If Congress passed a law,
called the Quiet Skies law, what would the Supreme Court say?
Mr. Leavitt. They have the same substance.
Senator Moreno. Same substance. In other words, if we
passed a law that said that the U.S. Government can surveil
American citizens who they suspect, without any evidence, of
maybe committing a crime, and we passed that law, and we all
cheered and we passed it, super bipartisan, and we threw a big
party, and had a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the law, and photo
op, what would the Supreme Court say?
Mr. Leavitt. Two thoughts. One, we have seen passed laws
that are not that different from that maybe, right, and so it
is hard. There is a balance, a policy balance. It is possible
the Supreme Court, if it is not nearly tailored enough, would
invalidate that.
Senator Moreno. Because it is unconstitutional. Because we
have a presumption of innocence in this country. Because if I
decide not to wear a mask on an airplane because the rule is
insanely stupid, I should not be prohibited from ever flying
again. If I want to travel to Washington, D.C., and I want to
do whatever I want to do in Washington, D.C., that is well
within the bounds of the law, that does not give any
administrative agency the right to decide I cannot fly
somewhere else. It does not give the government the right to
have somebody follow me and creep me out in a bathroom and
decide whether I am getting too many sugars in my coffee, or if
I am going to the wrong yogurt place. That report should not be
published inside some sort of official government document.
Because, Mr. Chair, there is a difference between somebody
who has power, because it is given to them, because of some
administrative thing. There is somebody that has real power,
somebody who has a badge, who has a gun, who has the ability to
arrest you, who has the ability to take your civil liberties
away. That is what happened over the last four years, and
Americans should be equally outraged about all this. This
should not be partisan.
Chairman Paul. But I would interject, and I think it is
longer than that, and I think one of the witnesses mentioned
this. This fear really originated after 9/11. When they passed
the Patriot Act, one of the things in the Patriot Act said that
the government could go to your local library and give a secret
warrant--it is not a Fourth Amendment warrant; it would be a
FISA warrant--and they could get all of the different books
that I read when I go to the library. All those could be a
confiscated list. But they went even further. They said that
the librarian, that you will put the librarian in jail if she
reveals to me that the government is looking at my reading
list.
We did a lot of things out of fear, and that fear from 9/
11, look, there was anger that was justified. There was a war,
I think in many ways also justified. But we let down our guard
on our constitutional liberties, and it is in times of fear you
have to be most careful about them. We probably have a million
Arab Americans in Dearborn. We probably have 10 million Arab
Americans that are part of our country. Many of them are
citizens. We even have Columbian Americans. They all deserve
the same protections. That is many of the reasons why they came
here.
Senator Moreno. But it is decently ironic that the
Democrats looked the other way while our border was open to 10
million illegals cross our border.
Chairman Paul. I will grant you that.
Senator Moreno. I will turn things over to my great
colleague from Missouri.
Senator Hawley. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr.
Chair. Thanks for holding this hearing, No. 1, but thanks for
waiting for me, as well. Thanks to all the panel for being
here.
Mr. Crowder, I want to start with you, and I apologize if
you already covered this. I have been going back and forth to
other hearings today. But I just want to ask you, coming back
to your wife, did you find out, how did she get added to that
database? Why was she flagged in the first place? Who did it?
Do you know? I mean, at what level was the decision made?
Mr. Crowder. That is still something we do not know. It has
been unanswered after many attempts by several people.
Senator Hawley. Is it your sense that it was an individual,
this was a human decision, or is this some kind of an automated
thing, based on information they collected about her, personal
information, the fact that she was in D.C. on January 6th, that
they tagged her? Too bad, she is on the list for years.
Mr. Crowder. Your guess is as good as mine. She was
obviously in the area on January 6th. Whether that prompted
somebody to just put her on the list or something else, we do
not have the answers.
Senator Hawley. Yes, it is just unbelievable. It is a
sickening violation of her First Amendment rights, obviously. I
want to thank you for your service, and thank your wife for
what she has endured. You should never have had to go through
it. To be honest with you, what we saw in the aftermath of
January 6th, the effort to persecute the President's political
opponents, President Biden, that is, it is just unbelievable.
I want to ask you, Mr. Leavitt, if I can, just on that
subject, tell me a little bit more about how the Biden
administration used the Quiet Skies program, which had existed,
obviously, for long before then, but really started using it to
target political opponents. It seems like they found, in this
program, a great opportunity to start turning the screws down
on people that they did not like, including, just ordinary
folks like Mr. Crowder's wife. She was not running for office,
I mean, she was not running against Joe Biden. But yet, my
gosh, she found herself targeted. Is this the United States of
America or not? Talk to us about your understanding of how this
happened.
Mr. Leavitt. After January 6th it is clear, and you see
this across a lot of agencies. We have seen this from FBI
whistleblowers we represented. The Federal Government took a
stance which was that a lot of people with certain political
views were threats to our Nation. That certainly manifested
itself in lots of ways, and one of those was these different
types of travel lists. People who were there on January 6th, as
has been mentioned, people that maybe were members of a group
or expressed concern about wearing masks in public because of
their effectiveness, were all put on lists like these. The most
still-unanswered example is Tulsi Gabbard being added to a list
after she criticized Kamala Harris, and again, the TSA's self-
serving--I can't say TSA--someone in the government's self-
serving leak to The New York Times said, ``No, no, no, it is
OK. It was because she was associated with this person at the
Vatican.'' She went to a conference there. But it clearly says
Mick Mulvaney went, as well. Many of you know Mick Mulvaney. He
did not get added to a Quiet Skies list when he flew back to
the United States. So it just puts the lie to the fact that
this was the justification.
Whenever you have secrecy, we are talking about all the
civil liberties concerns, but whenever you have secrecy there
is also the additional threat that it will be used in secret
ways to target people that go above and beyond just, we all
have to endure it. It is part of being safe in America today.
That is targeting. That is weaponization.
Senator Hawley. It is kind of incredible, is it not, that
after all these years, to come back to Mr. Crowder's wife, we
still do not have any idea exactly how she got added or who did
it. There is the evasion of accountability. You cannot go and
say, ``Well, you are fired. You did that. That is an abuse. You
are gone.'' It is the classic bureaucratic deep state. ``Oh,
well, we don't know. We don't know quite how it happened.'' It
just so happens, though, that everybody who looks like they may
have been politically of a different mindset than the last
President gets targeted. Who gets the FBI knocking at their
door early in the morning? Is it people who are Biden voters?
No. Amazingly, it is not. It is people who go to school board
meetings and ask about masking policies. Who gets the FBI's
SWAT teams at their door? Oh, it just happens to be pro-life
folks, who had the audacity to exercise their First Amendment
rights by walking on a sidewalk. It is unlike anything I think
we have seen in this country's history.
Mr. Taibbi, if I could just come to you. Will you help
contextualize this? We saw, and you reported on this, we have
seen abuse across a range of agencies. It was not just Quiet
Skies. It was the FBI. It was the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS). It was agency after agency. It was DHS, right. It was
agency after agency. Just fill in the blanks here for us. Help
us understand how this, what we are talking about today, is
sadly just one piece of a massive, seemingly whole-of-
government approach to try and delegitimize anybody who
disagreed with the last administration.
Mr. Taibbi. Sure, and thank you, Senator Hawley. Just to
Mr. Leavitt's point, there are a lot of similarities in the
statements of the FBI whistleblowers that empower or are
represented in some of the air marshals that I talked to about
this story. Both complained. For instance, there are FBI agents
who just sat in vans outside the homes of people who might have
been at J6, people who were pulled off details, trying to catch
child pornographers to do that kind of work, who were extremely
frustrated to be forced to be collecting information on
innocent people.
The same thing with Federal Air Marshals who, their job is
to prevent terrorists from storming cockpit doors on airplanes.
That is a very important job. But we are putting marshals in
the backs of airplanes, where they cannot do any good at all,
and having them listen to conversations of, a former
Congresswoman from Hawaii, and checking how many times they go
to the bathroom. It is a total misallocation of resources, and
it is politicized information gathering.
Again, I think it is a betrayal of both the people in these
services and the American citizens.
Senator Hawley. Yes. Very well said, and I just have to
say, I appreciate you holding the hearing, Mr. Chair, because I
think we have to expose this so that it never happens again.
The nearest thing I can think of in our country's history is we
briefly, in 1798, toyed with trying to outlaw political
dissent, the Alien and Sedition Acts. That unhappy episode was
resoundingly rejected by the American people in the election of
1800. That was a long time ago now. You would think that we
were past that. And really, what we have seen in the last four
years is unlike anything since that period, and much worse
because the Federal Government is much more powerful than it
was in 1798--the ability to prevent travel, the ability to
monitor conversations.
I can just think, off the top of my head, you had the
Federal Government telling the big tech companies they have to
take down and censor normal Americans who comment on COVID, who
comment on masks, who comment on a CRT in the classroom. You
have the FBI designating parents who go to school board
meetings as terrorists. You have the FBI targeting pro-lifers.
You have the FBI recruiting spies into Catholic parishes. You
have the Quiet Skies program. I mean, that is just all off the
top of my head. That is like six things. It is unbelievable.
We talk about Never Forget. We have to never forget this
and make sure it never happens again. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Paul. Thank you. An investigation is not over. We
are, today, announcing that we will be investigating the
Project on Extremism at George Washington University. We want
to know whether or not they were doing research on people not
wearing masks or against wearing masks, whether they were doing
research on people who attended January 6th, whether Christine
Crowder came from George Washington information that was sent
over, or whether it came from someone specifically making up
something about her.
We are going to get to the bottom of it. We are going to
keep asking questions. We are going to find out who did this
and who caused such a great disruption to your life for several
years. You are the one we know about, and we are going to try
to get to the bottom of who did this.
But this is the tip of the iceberg. We hope that anyone who
is interested in this will continue to give us information,
that more people will step forward. Those of you who are
interested in reform participate with us in finding legislative
solutions to try to make sure this never happens again.
With that I would like to thank our witnesses for joining
us here today to share their testimony and expertise with the
Committee. The record for this hearing will remain open until 5
p.m. on Friday, October 3, 2025, for the submission of
statements and questions for the record.
The hearing is now adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 11:38 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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