Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr was among thousands of people streaming through security at Houston’s airport amid the ongoing partial government shutdown.
Barr, 75, was photographed standing among the crowds at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Wednesday, where TSA lines stretched for three to four hours.
Apparently Barr’s tenure as the airport’s namesake official – President George HW Bush – did not give him the right to escape security lines, photos on social media showed.
Bush Airport and Houston’s Hobby Airport experienced the worst security congestion after partial closures left TSA officers working without pay since Feb. 13.
That led to an increase in calls among officials at airports across the country — but Bush and Hobby both had high rates, with nearly half of TSA workers at both transit stations calling in sick in recent days.
In Bush, that led to five airports being reduced to three – creating a line that spanned three floors and lasted more than four hours.
Those bad conditions continued for a week, with Bush waiting four hours on Wednesday and Hobby having to wait an hour and a half, according to CBS News.
ICE Agents have been deployed to help bolster the desperate TSA, which has seen about 450 officers leave altogether.
The shutdown comes as Democrats — and even some Republicans — have rejected funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless it includes changes to ICE and the Border Patrol in an effort to tighten President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Barr is no stranger to finding himself caught in the middle — this time literally — of Trump’s political storm.
He served as Trump’s attorney general after Bush, and found himself embroiled in the Mueller Report controversy after submitting a 2019 subpoena that cleared the president of election meddling — even though Mueller refused to fully exonerate the president.
But Barr clashed with the president the following year after he found no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election that sent President Biden to the White House.
Some conservative commentators were glad to see Barr locked in between Houston’s safety lines.
“It breaks my heart to see a serious Bill Barr looking sad in the TSA line,” wrote YouTuber Benny Johnson on the right of X.
