Amid the ongoing partial government shutdown, former US Attorney General Bill Barr found himself navigating through the exasperatingly long security lines at Houston’s airports. Caught in the same predicament as thousands of other travelers, Barr, now 75, was spotted at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Wednesday, where security wait times stretched between three to four hours.
The sight of Barr, who once served as the chief legal advisor to President George H. W. Bush, blending in with the crowd, highlighted how even his past high-ranking position offered no special privileges to bypass the tedious security checks. Social media buzzed with images of him standing patiently in line.
Both Bush Intercontinental and Houston’s Hobby Airport have been particularly affected by the partial shutdown, which has resulted in TSA officers working without pay since February 13. This situation has caused a surge in absenteeism among TSA staff nationwide, with Bush and Hobby experiencing some of the highest call-out rates.
Bush Airport and Houston’s Hobby Airport have had some of the worst security jams after the partial shutdown left TSA officers working without pay since Feb. 13.
That’s led to soaring call-out rates among officers at airports across the nation — but Bush and Hobby have both had some of the highest rates, with nearly half of TSA staff at both travel hubs calling out sick in recent days.
At Bush, that led to the airport’s five security terminals being reduced to three — causing a line that snaked across three floors and lasted upwards of four hours.
Those dreadful conditions have persisted into the week, with Bush having four-hour waits by Wednesday and Hobby having hour-and-a-half waits, according to CBS News.
ICE Agents have been deployed to help bolster the desperate TSA, which has also seen about 450 officers quit altogether.
The shutdown comes as Democrats — and even some Republicans — have refused to budge on Department of Homeland Security funding unless it includes reforms to ICE and Border Patrol in an attempt to rein in President Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown.
Barr is no stranger to finding himself caught in the middle — this time literally — of a Trump political firestorm.
He served as Trump’s attorney general after Bush, and found himself in the thick of the Mueller Report fray after submitting a 2019 letter that exonerated the president of election interference — even while Mueller declined to fully absolve the president.
But Barr ran afoul of the president the next year after he found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election that sent President Biden to the White House.
Some conservative commentators delighted in the sight of Barr being trapped among the Houston security lines.
“It warms my heart to see deep state Bill Barr looking miserable in a TSA line,” right-wing YoutTuber Benny Johnson wrote on X.
