Complaint against Maxine Waters highlights Congress taking advantage of US air marshals

The context being that lawmakers in DC have begun exploiting the Federal Air Marshal Service protection program enacted after 9/11. This uptick in security requests happened in the wake of the January 6th Capitol riot. A statement by the TSA confirms this is an ongoing thing.

She told Fox News:

"Air marshals can only be assigned to high-risk flights. That means flights that have been deemed through our vetted process that have a security risk. When these processes are violated and they're taken advantage of and they are just tossed to the side now as if they don't matter, we're really looking into creating a major problem for ourselves in the aviation domain."

What’s happening is politicians are adding extra marshals just because they feel like it. Sometimes these VIP people don’t even show up on their (business or personal) flights they assigned this extra protection to.

Fox names Congresswoman Maxine Waters as one of the worst offenders. A formal complaint was filed against her for a April 17th flight from DC to Minneapolis, amid the Derek Chauvin trial. The one where Waters incited a crowd to get more aggressive in their street protests if they didn’t get the convictions they wanted, which in turn threatened to complicate jury proceedings.

As earlier reported, Maxine Waters already had an armed police escort to this personal occasion where she demonstrated against law enforcement. But new information reveals that Maxine Waters created a “gap in National Security” because a High Risk flight had to take off with no armed law enforcement on board.

That happened because of the excessive demands of Waters.

"That was not an official business trip. We still don't have any justification as to why government resources were utilized to fly Miss Waters out to Minnesota,” said Sonya Hightower.