Loeffler’s Husband Entangled in Secret Gov’t Surveillance Operation
Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband is renting out an airport hangar to the U.S. Marshals Service for what appears to be a domestic surveillance operation—at a very nice profit—in a deal shrouded in secrecy.
That operation, a nationwide cell phone monitoring campaign first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2014, provoked outcry from Loeffler’s colleagues from Oregon last year, after local media discovered that a Marshals Service plane had circled for hours over an anti-racist protest in Portland on June 13.
Three days later, flight records show that exact plane touched down at Fulton County Airport in Atlanta, Georgia—where the Marshals Service leases space from Fulton County Hangar Services, part of the vast business empire run by Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher. The federal government renewed its rental relationship with the company the same month.
The hangar at 4165 South Airport Rd. Northwest, which Loeffler identified as one of her husband’s holdings in her first financial disclosure after her appointment to the Senate last year, sits along a scarred service route at the Fulton County Airport, off the main artery of Martin Luther King Drive.
The General Services Administration, which rents space on behalf of other federal agencies, confirmed to The Daily Beast that it has paid Fulton County Hangar Services almost $250,000 a year for the location since 2014, when Loeffler was still an executive at her husband’s company, Intercontinental Exchange, which also owns the New York Stock Exchange. The GSA added that it extended the lease for another three years last summer.
But the details of the arrangement are enveloped in layers of government and corporate opacity. Fulton County Hangar Services is a registered federal contractor, but its contracts are not available to view in any public database. The System for Award Management, a government search engine for tracking D.C.’s business dealings, classifies the information on the company as “restricted.” When pressed by The Daily Beast, the GSA declined to answer what agencies are stationed at the hangar and for what purpose, citing the “mission sensitivities of the federal tenants at this facility.”
The Federal Aviation Administration operated out of the hangar until November 2019 but told The Daily Beast that it is now a U.S. Marshals installation.
The Marshals Service refused to answer questions about its presence and activities at the hangar, and neither Loeffler, Sprecher, Intercontinental Exchange, nor Fulton County—which owns Fulton County Airport and leases hangars there to private tenants—responded to repeated requests for comment.
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