Thread by @tristanleavitt

🚨🧵 @EMPOWR_us has confirmed from whistleblowers that @TulsiGabbard was under Quiet Skies surveillance on not just one, or two, or even three flights... She has had Air Marshals there to monitor her on EIGHT FLIGHTS since her July 23 interview with @IngrahamAngle.

Furthermore, TSA is mobilizing a retaliatory investigation into who made these protected whistleblower disclosures. I wrote to @DHSOIG this morning asking him to ensure these whistleblowers are protected.

Our letter to IG Cuffari highlights that just because TSA considers some information "Sensitive Security Information," or SSI, does not trump the Whistleblower Protection Act.

The Supreme Court considered this exact issue in 2015 in DHS v. @rjmaclean. MacLean made disclosures to the media of information he reasonably believed was a "substantial and specific danger to public health or safety." TSA argued its regs on SSI prohibited the disclosures, but the Supreme Court ruled the whistleblower protections Congress established in law took priority over TSA regs. If an agency could simply erase statutory whistleblower protections by creating its own rules or regulations to circumvent them, every agency would do that.

Here, whistleblowers reasonably believed that assigning three Air Marshals and countless other in-airport resources to EIGHT FLIGHTS of @TulsiGabbard's is a gross waste of funds and an abuse of authority--especially after they surely realized after the first flight that she poses a threat to no one. (Except America's enemies--she is, after all, a colonel in the Army Reserves! 💪🏽)

The Whistleblower Protection Act doesn't limit who most federal employees can make their protected whistleblower disclosures to, so they can go to the OIG (as we have), to Congress, to a professional association like @FAMS_AMNC, or to the press (as @rjmaclean did).

Rather than opening a "leak" investigating to try and intimidate whistleblowers, TSA should be trying to figure out how on earth @TulsiGabbard got added to their Quiet Skies list--and why they haven't taken her off after EIGHT FLIGHTS.

We will be meeting with @DHSOIG imminently to ensure they help protect these whistleblowers. More to come!

The whole Quiet Skies program seems like a civil liberties nightmare anyway.

Over four years the OIG examined, the found Quiet Skies confirmed precisely zero passengers as aviation security threats. I can think of far better uses for the hundreds of thousands of dollars DHS puts into this. (Like, say, ensuring a major party's political nominee is protected from attempted assassination the day after an Iranian asset is arrested for plotting a murder-for-hire?)