Nancy Mace curses confused cops in airport crisis: Police report

Nancy Mace, A South Carolina Republican congressman went on a rampage 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, Mays cursed at the police officers and made repeated derogatory remarks toward them. The report says that a TSA supervisor told officers that Mace had behaved similarly to their employees and that they would report him to their superiors.

According to the report, Charleston County Aviation Police Department officers met Mays at 6:30 a.m. to escort him from the runway to the flight and were told he would arrive at the ticketing area in a white BMW. Around 6:35 they were told he was running late, the report says. They never saw the car arrive.

Shortly before 7 a.m., dispatch told officers that Mace was in the Known Crew Program entrance — a secure access line with a smaller checkpoint overseen by TSA and reserved for flight crew members, the report said.

When officers quickly located him, according to a supplemental incident report filed by one of the officers, the congressman immediately “began making obscenities and derogatory comments to us about the department. He repeatedly stated that we were ‘damn incompetent’ and that ‘this is no way to treat a goddamn representative of the United States.’

As officers escorted him to his gate, he dragged a South Carolina Senate colleague into the fray, according to the report.

“He also said that we would never treat Tim Scott like that,” one of the officers tasked with escorting Mays said in the report.

“The entire walk to gate B-8 he was cursing and complaining and often doing the same on his phone,” one officer wrote in the report. In the original incident report, an officer notes that Mays was yelling into his phone, either dictating during a phone call or text messages. After standing in the vicinity of the B-8 for several minutes and continuing his shooting, he finally boarded the plane.

The report states that after Mace’s flight took off, an American Airlines gate agent approached the officers. According to the report, he “stated that he was in disbelief at her behavior. He implied that a representative of the United States should not behave the way he did.”

The report goes on to say that the officers checked with a TSA supervisor, who told the officers, “He was very upset with the way he was acting at the checkpoint.” According to the report, the supervisor told the officers that Mace had “spoken to several TSA agents in the same manner” and that they would “file a report on his unacceptable behavior to his superiors.” Due to the ongoing government shutdown, TSA agents are currently not being paid in full.