From the CLIA (Central Lack of Intelligence Agency) with Love: The Terrifying Tale of One Avril Haines
Like a bad nursery rhyme, this self-aggrandizing "surveillance architect" thought herself superior to her fellow agency rats. Anointed squirrel supreme (by whom we know not), she proved a bit nutty.
Meet Avril Haines, our Faces of Tyranny award winner for this week ending May 19, 2024.
In the national security and espionage world, one unlikely name somehow rose to the top: Avril Haines. She comes from a privileged New York upbringing on the cushy Upper West Side, which has been home to the wealthiest liberal elites since the 1860’s. (Fun fact: Yoko Ono, Howard Stern, Annie Liebowitz, and Anna Wintour, amongst so many others called this neighborhood home at one time or another.) She would go on to obtain degrees in physics and law and work a variety of odd jobs including attending a judo institute in Tokyo, working various bookstores and coffee houses until the intelligence community found her.
Beginning in 2001, Haines would enter government service and climb the ladder of success within the intelligence community (IC), eventually rising all the way to the top, with stints in the Obama and Biden White Houses on the National Security Council (“NSC”) leading to her appointment as Director of National Intelligence (“DNI”).
But that wouldn’t be the pinnacle of her success, but rather the environment where her idiosyncrasies of character, and questionable judgment would be brought to life.
Haines was born in NYC and raised in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Her father was a biochemist and her mother a painter. Following a batter with tuberculosis, Haines mother would pass away from the disease and leave Avril and her father alone when she was 15 years old. Despite this very difficult loss, she would go on to graduate from the elite Hunter College High School, after which she would spend a year in Japan enrolled in an elite judo academy (the Kodokan).
Upon returning to the United States in 1988, Haines studied physics at the University of Chicago and repaired car engines as a part-time mechanic. She graduated with her bachelor’s in physics in the early 90’s. Haines's personal life during this time later came under hilarious scrutiny.
Later she would take up flying lessons in New Jersey, and at one point required an emergency landing in Newfoundland while trying to cross the Atlantic in a tiny plane. Haines moved to Baltimore, Maryland, and pursued her post-grad physics degree at John Hopkins University but dropped out to buy a bar with her future husband that’d been seized during a drug raid. Together, they breathed new life into the building and turned it into a café-bookstore named after her mother, that staged frequent erotica nights. Haines eventually abandoned her hipster dream come true of owning a former drug den-turned independent café-bookstore to go to law school.
In the late 90’s, Haines enrolled in Georgetown Law and graduated with her J.D. in 2001. Later that same year, Haines became a legal officer at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. From 2002, she worked as a law clerk for United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Danny Julian Boggs.
The State Department and Intelligence Community
In 2001, Haines would begin her meteoric rise with a job as a legal officer working for the Hague Conference on Private International Law. At the time, she likely could never have imagined the doors that job would open.
In 2003, Haines worked in the Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser, first in the Office of Treaty Affairs and later in the Office of Political Military Affairs, until 2006. From 2007 until 2008, Haines was the Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority Senate Democrats under then-chairman Joe Biden when she worked for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
In the coming years, Haines would work at the State Department as the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs until 2010. She was appointed to serve the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House from 2010 to 2013.
After her brief stints working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the State Department, she was appointed deputy director of the CIA by President Barack Obama in 2013, replacing Michael Morello. This bold move raised eyebrows among intelligence experts, as Haines had no experience working within the agency.
During her time in office, she would make several questionable decisions that left many wondering about her ethics and competence. Notably, she was criticized for her handling of the now infamous CIA torture Senate report, with accountability advocates arguing that she over-redacted it, leaving the public in the dark about the CIA's misdeeds.
Haines, as the deputy director of the CIA, overruled the CIA Inspector General and didn’t discipline CIA staff for hacking the computers of Senate staffers authoring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report. Ultimately, only a fraction of the 6,700-page CIA torture report, 525 pages, was released. Talk about a lack of accountability and transparency!
Ukraine, Biden, and Avril…
It’s no secret that Haines and the US government wanted Viktor Shokin, the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, out of a job.
According to former “acting” Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, “it was a whole-of-Government effort”, and he “had the opportunity and the privilege to work with President Obama; with the Vice President; with the National Security Adviser; with Avril Haines, the Deputy; with Tony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State; Victoria Nuland; with almost every Assistant Secretary of State who had any involvement with Ukraine.”
Would the current Russia-Ukraine situation even be happening right now, had the Obama administration not interfered in Ukrainian affairs? Probably not, but nobody truly knows.
The War on Terror during the Obama Years
Haines worked closely with then-CIA director John Brennan to flesh out U.S. drone policy. It was not unheard of for her to be called up in the middle of the night to decide if someone suspected of terrorism, including our own, should be “lawfully incinerated” in a U.S. drone strike in the Middle East. Numerous human rights organizations have reported innocent civilian deaths among drone casualties, but what’s a couple of broken eggs if it makes a delicious democracy omelet?
A couple of years later, Haines became the United States Deputy National Security Advisor until 2017. When the Trump administration took over, she ran for the hills. Like many others in the deep state, Haines put her public sector experience to good use.
After leaving the White House, Haines worked at a variety of organizations. She worked for Columbia University, consulted for data mining firm Palantir Technologies, and was an employee of West Exec Advisors, a consulting firm co-founded by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Unsurprisingly, their client list includes tech start-ups interested in working with the Pentagon.
Entering the Private Sector (Trump years)
Haines has worked on several boards and advisory groups like the Refugees International Advisory Council, the Board of Trustees for the Vodafone Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Bio Advisory Group. Haines even participated in Event 201, the infamous coronavirus simulation tabletop event hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, John Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the WEF in 2019. We all know what happened later that year, of course.
Thank you and a special shoutout to America Mission’s very own Dante for providing documents involving Avril Haines this week and last. In the previous Faces of Tyranny, America Mission dived into former Treasury bureaucrat Juan Zarate’s history, where readers first read about a special task force. In mid-2020, Haines co-chaired the pro-democracy globalist DC think tank Alliance for Securing Democracy’s “task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts” who aimed to devise a national strategy plan for the U.S. to “offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of competition”. It’s a noble goal, even if U.S. brand world policeman-style interventionist foreign policy hasn’t been all that great.
Their report, Linking Values and Strategy: How Democracies Can Offset Authoritarian Advances, made some noteworthy recommendations.
More state involvement in news and social media, via enacting “guardrails around online platforms”
More collaboration with corporate media to “reinvigorate the free press.”
Washington should “substantially increase” its investment in basic R&D and use “federal funding to incentivize private sector investment in critical technology areas, such as artificial intelligence, 5G, and quantum information science.”
“The Department of Homeland Security should identify and provide support to private entities that are responsible for ‘systemically important critical infrastructure’ as recommended by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.”
A triumphal return to the White House and the top Intelligence Role in the President’s Cabinet
Haines returned to the White House following the selection of Joe Biden in 2021. This time she had her sights set on becoming the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the U.S.’s chief spy. During Haine’s appointment process, her past came back to haunt her. Before her confirmation hearings, Daniel Jones, the chief investigator and author of the Senate’s CIA torture report, called out Haines for covering up the truth about CIA torture and gunned for her rejection.
Various Senators raised questions regarding her involvement in the CIA’s torture cover-up, though they skirted over her role in the matter. Politics as usual prevailed that day when the uniparty gave Haines her big promotion return gift in an 84-10 Senate vote. Haines was sworn in the next day by VP Kamala Harris.
Since then, the DHS under her watch has been disastrous. It’s resorted to targeting gamers and the Manosphere. The government grows concerned that gamers and others are being radicalized towards misogynistic extremism by them. The government also enjoys power and would like more, but can’t say that upfront, so they drag up some concocted security threat to scare people into compliance. It’s more woke activism infecting the IC.
Recently, President Biden authorized the creation of an AI advisory board headed by the DHS and chaired by DHS Secretary Mayorkas. It’s a who’s who of the Big Tech upper echelons like OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, and many others. Jackpot! Haines has been hellbent on implementing the various policy recommendations she made as the Alliance for Securing Democracy task force’s co-chair, so this AI board is certainly good news for her.
There is light at the end of the dark and dingy deep state tunnel because America First patriots recently scored a win against Haines and her IC ilk. America First Legal and Stephen Miller’s lawsuit against the DHS resulted in disbanding of their “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group”, a secret intelligence advisory panel.
Several group members signed the infamous phony-baloney Hunter Biden laptop letter, including John Brennan, Haines’s former deep state colleague and former CIA director direct report. According to a former CIA official’s congressional testimony, the laptop letter was orchestrated by Antony Blinken for Biden’s campaign team. All this shady stuff has flown below the ODNI’s radar, under Haines’s watch, probably because she’s known these people for years and would rather treat them with kid gloves.
Avril Haines's rise has been unbelievably unusual and head-scratching. Despite her lack of prior qualifications, questionable decision-making skills, and poor moral character, she has managed to fail up to the top of the IC’s food chain and stay there, for now. There will certainly be major shake-ups in the deep state’s top brass if Trump wins later this year. Haines better start dusting off her resume now, because she’s been a very unimpressive leader. One can only hope that her successor will bring more competence and integrity to the job.
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My name is Mike Melo and I have made America my mission this past year. I sincerely hope you choose to join me and so many others who have decided that the Mission is America.