Biden administration: DNI

Avril Haines, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to helm the U.S. intelligence community, is a national security professional described by her colleagues as hard working, experienced and willing to speak unvarnished truth to power.

But she’s a nominee who has quickly encountered pushback from the left over aspects of her record.

Haines, a deputy national security adviser to former President Obama, has perhaps one of the most unusual and eclectic résumés one can come across in government.

She has degrees in physics and international law. She rebuilt and flew a plane and owned an independent bookstore and café in Baltimore named after her late mother before serving in powerful roles across government in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. She has worked in the State Department, White House and at the CIA.

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Haines is expected to withstand scrutiny during the Senate confirmation process for her role in the drone program, as well as her approval of a CIA review board decision in 2015 not to discipline agency personnel for intruding in computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Haines was also part of the team that redacted the committee’s report on the program.

Those actions have drawn harsh criticism from progressives.

“It’s incredibly concerning that somebody who tried to keep Bush-era torture under wraps and then covered for people who were spying on the Senate’s investigation on that torture would be elevated to such a position, especially under a Democratic administration,” said David Segal, founder of the progressive group Demand Progress, who opposes Haines’s nomination.

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Haines also triggered criticism on the left for her endorsement of Gina Haspel, who was involved in the CIA’s torture program, to be confirmed to be the first female director of the agency under President Trump.

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Those who worked with Haines in government have been perplexed by the scrutiny of her record and say it is misplaced. They note that she was a vocal advocate for human rights. Toward the end of Obama’s second term, her proponents note, Haines was instrumental in raising the refugee admissions cap when she was deputy national security adviser.

“She is so humane that she sees every governmental action from the perspective of the person on the receiving end,” said Harold Koh, who served as the State Department’s legal adviser from 2009 to 2013.

  The Hill

What about the people on the receiving end of Gina Haspel's torture program?

A Biden-Harris transition official said Haines “strongly” opposed the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and worked to ensure there were only “minimal redactions” in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public report on torture.

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Haines is also likely to face questions about her corporate ties. She was a principal at WestExec Advisers, a Washington consulting firm cofounded by Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of State, and reportedly worked for Palantir, the data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel. House Republicans have already sought to make Haines’s and Blinken’s work for WestExec an issue, and progressives have raised concerns about their corporate ties as well.

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Former officials say that one of Haines’s most pressing tests will be demonstrating that politics is not influencing intelligence, in addition to repairing the relationship between intelligence community and political leaders following four years of the Trump administration, where officials were publicly admonished by the president when they provided assessments contrary to his viewpoint.

I guess we'll see. If she gets confirmed. And I expect she will.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.