(The Center Square) – New Hampshire’s Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen intervened to keep her husband from being put on a terrorist watch list, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Noem, the former Republican governor of South Dakota, said the Biden administration was “politicizing” a federal program that monitors air safety.
In a statement, Noem said William Shaheen traveled with a “known or suspected terrorist” three times in 2023 and was added to the Transportation Security Administration’s Quiet Skies domestic surveillance list, but said the senator used her political influence to get her husband a “blanket exemption” from the travel restrictions.
Noem also criticized the Biden administration’s “inconsistent” use of Quiet Skies and other watchlisting programs, which she said bypassed security policies “to benefit politically aligned friends and family at the expense of the American people.”
“It is clear that this program was used as a political rolodex of the Biden administration – weaponized against its political foes and to benefit their well-heeled friends,” Noem in a statement. “This program should have been about the equal application of security, instead it was corrupted to be about political targeting.”
“The Trump administration will restore the integrity, privacy, and equal application of the law for all Americans, including aviation screening,” she added.
A timeline provided by Homeland Security said William Shaheen, a Lebanese-American attorney active in the Arab-American community, was “randomly selected” for surveillance for two flights in July 2023 from Boston to Washington. Shortly after, the senator’s office made an inquiry to the TSA about her husband being subjected to enhanced screening.
Then in October 2023, Shaheen was flagged a second time as a traveler with ties to a suspected terrorist, and the senator’s office made a second inquiry, DHS said. Shortly after, the TSA put her husband on the exclusion list. Shaheen’s husband was removed from Quiet Skies two days after she contacted David Pekoske, then the TSA administrator, Noem says.
In a statement, Shaheen’s office denied the senator intervened to get her husband removed from the list but acknowledged that she did contact the TSA after learning he had been subjected to “extensive, invasive and degrading” searches at airport checkpoints. The statement said the purpose of her inquiry to the TSA was “to understand the nature and cause of these searches.”
“Any suggestion that the senator’s husband was supposedly included on a Quiet Skies list is news to her and had never been raised before yesterday, nor was she aware of any action taken following her call to remove him from such a list,” the statement said.
Shaheen, a three-term Democrat and former New Hampshire governor first elected to the Senate in 2008, announced in May that she won’t be seeking another six-year term in next year’s elections.
The TSA’s Quiet Skies program has long drawn criticism for its surveillance of American citizens. Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s director of national intelligence, said she was on the list as recently as last year.
