Nancy Mace curses, berates confused officers during airport meltdown: Police report

Nancy Mace, the A Republican congressman from South Carolina unleashed a tirade against law enforcement at Charleston International Airport on Thursday, WIRED has learned.

According to an incident report obtained by WIRED under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, Mace verbally abused police officers, repeatedly making derogatory comments towards them. The report says that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor told officers that Mace had treated their staff similarly and that they would report her to their superiors.

According to the report, officers from the Charleston County Aviation Authority Police Department were tasked with meeting Mace at 6:30 a.m. to escort her from the curb to her flight and were told she would arrive at the ticketing area in a white BMW. According to the report, they were told around 5:30 that she was late; they never saw the car coming.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the report said, the dispatcher told officers that Mace was standing at the entrance for the Known Crewmember program — a trusted access lane with a smaller checkpoint overseen by the TSA and intended for flight crew members.

When agents quickly found her, according to a supplemental incident report filed by one of the agents, the congresswoman immediately “began cursing loudly and making derogatory comments to us about the department. She repeatedly stated that we were ‘damn incompetent,’ and ‘this is no way to treat a goddamn American representative,'” the report said.

As officers escorted her to her gate, she brought a South Carolina Senate colleague into the fight, according to the report.

“She also said we would never treat Tim Scott like that,” an officer charged with supervising Mace said in the report.

“The entire walk to gate B-8 she was cursing and complaining and often doing the same on her phone,” an officer wrote in the report. In the main incident report, an officer notes that Mace was yelling into her phone, either during a phone call or while dictating text messages. “After standing near the B-8 for several minutes as she continued her tirade, she finally boarded the plane.”

After Mace’s flight took off, the report said, an American Airlines gate agent approached the officers. According to the report, “he stated that he was in disbelief at her behavior. He suggested that a U.S. representative should not be behaving the way she was.”

The report further states that agents contacted a TSA supervisor, who told the agents “that he was very upset with the way they were behaving at the checkpoint.” This supervisor, according to the report, told the officers that Mace had “spoken similarly to several TSA agents” and that they would “file a report with his superiors regarding her unacceptable behavior.” TSA agents are currently not being fully paid due to the ongoing government shutdown.