Avril Haines: Nominee Currently: John Ratcliffe
The director of national intelligence serves as the president’s primary intelligence adviser and leader of the U.S. intelligence community. The DNI historically hasn’t been a political role, but under Trump, it has been held twice by loyalists who used their authority to advance Trump’s claims that he was the target of a conspiracy by intelligence officials. Under Biden, the DNI is expected to revert to the norm and act as a manager and setter of priorities for the agency.
Avril Haines
Former deputy national security adviser
Haines served as deputy national security adviser during President Obama’s second term and before that as the first female deputy director of the CIA. She also was deputy counsel for national security affairs in the White House Counsel’s Office in the Obama administration. She would be the first woman to head the intelligence community.
Source: Washington Post Reported by Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima.
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2021-01-21 Senate confirms Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, the first Biden Cabinet nominee confirmed Haines’ confirmation as the first woman to lead the US intelligence community, which was approved in the Senate by 84 to 10, continues a recent Senate precedent of confirming Cabinet nominees the day a new president is sworn in, though Biden is getting fewer nominees approved quickly than his predecessors. The Senate confirmed two of former President Donald Trump’s on his first day, and even more for former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.Biden may struggle to get additional nominees confirmed quickly, as those confirmations could be stalled until Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer cut a deal on a resolution outlining how they’ll share power in the Senate, GOP and Democratic senators said Wednesday.
2021-01-20 CIA Whistleblower: Biden Intel Pick Avril Haines Approved Obama Drone Strike Kill List, Hid Torture She was President Obama’s top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013 and CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015, where she authorized using drone strikes to carry out targeted extrajudicial assassinations. “We know that in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list, and people were subsequently killed by drone, including American citizens,” says CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush-era torture program and was the only official jailed in connection to it. He also discusses Haines’s handling of CIA agents who illegally hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to thwart its investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program that used torture methods like waterboarding.
2021-01-20 DNI nominee Avril Haines pledges to submit unclassified report on killing of Jamal Khashoggi “Ms. Haines, if you are confirmed, you have an opportunity to immediately turn a page on the excessive secrecy and lawlessness of the outgoing administration,” Mr. Wyden said at the hearing. “Congress passed a law requiring the DNI to submit to Congress an unclassified report on who was responsible for the brutal murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. If you are confirmed, will you submit to Congress the unclassified report required by the law?”“Yes senator, absolutely, I will follow the law,” Ms. Haines responded.
Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, vanished upon entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, and it was soon determined he was killed inside. He was 59.
2021-01-19 Biden Pick For Intel Chief: ‘Biggest Challenge Is Building Trust And Confidence’
2020-11-23 Biden to nominate Avril Haines as next director of national intelligence; she would be the first woman to hold the position If confirmed, Haines, nominated to be Biden’s director of national intelligence, will confront not only the menace of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the threat of Russian disinformation, and the aftermath of a sweeping cyberattack on U.S. government agencies. She will also face an energized domestic network of white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and far-right militia members who experts fear are planning more violence against government officials.
While DNI’s main focus is on foreign threats and intelligence, the office does have some purview over domestic terrorism, mostly via its oversight of the FBI and a supporting role for the National Counterterrorism Center, which is charged with integrating domestic and foreign threats and sharing assessments across the government.
White supremacists and other like-minded extremists conducted 67% of terrorist plots and attacks in the United States in 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. It also noted anarchist, anti-fascist, and other like-minded attacks and plots comprised 20% of U.S. terrorist incidents in 2020, an increase from 8% in 2019.
2013-06-26 Avril Haines, The Least Likely Spy the top lawyer for the National Security Council. On this morning, she was laboring over the “playbook,” President Obama’s massively complex and bureaucratically contentious effort to reform the administration’s lethal drone program. But the truth is, it was only a slight departure from Haines’s typically relentless work routine. Since becoming the National Security Council’s legal adviser in 2011, she had been working on a wide array of highly complicated and legally sensitive issues—generally until 1 or 2 in the morning, sometimes later—that go to the core of U.S. security interests. Among them were the legal requirements governing U.S. intervention in Syria and the range of highly classified options for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program. All the while, Haines was sometimes summoned in the middle of the night to weigh in on whether a suspected terrorist could be lawfully incinerated by a drone strike.
Earlier this month, Obama selected Haines to be deputy director of the CIA, where she will serve under the new CIA director, John Brennan.
But in another respect, it was a surprising choice. Ask around about Haines, and colleagues will often describe some character traits not usually associated with the CIA—or, for that matter, with rapid ascent inside the Beltway: a sweet personality, humility bordering on shyness, a deep empathy for others. “She may quite literally be the nicest person any of us have ever met,” says Deputy National Security Adviser Benjamin Rhodes, who has worked closely with Haines.
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