
Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, speaks during the open portion of a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill, May 2, 2024, in Washington.
This week, Donald Trump’s nascent administration will face its greatest confirmation challenge yet: advancing the next director of national intelligence, the top spy role in government, overseeing more than a dozen member agencies of the intelligence community. Public battles have raged over allegations of sexual violence and public corruption leveled at cabinet nominees Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, but nobody has drawn as much widespread, unified condemnation as Tulsi Gabbard.
Since her nomination was made public, complaints leveled against Gabbard include accusations of loyalty to Russia, questions about an hours-long meeting with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, financial ties to the Indian Hindu nationalist party BJP, and her history with a religious “cult” in Hawaii. Her chances of confirmation have been souring in recent days.
But underneath these thinly veiled accusations of treason is a much more disturbing justification: Gabbard at one point represented the single biggest threat to the continuation of the awesome and dangerous surveillance powers wielded by the intelligence agencies, all of which are greenlit and monitored by a Senate Intelligence Committee that has long served as the IC’s able and willing lapdog.
In addition to her prior support for pardoning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Gabbard had, until the start of her confirmation process, supported the elimination of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which grants intelligence agencies sweeping powers to spy on U.S. citizens. This authority was reauthorized and even expanded in Congress last year by the barest of margins.
As she met with senators in advance of her confirmation hearing on Thursday, Gabbard then made a surprising flip, saying that she now supported 702 authority. But this has not moved the decision-makers. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), an Intelligence Committee member, said this week that she does not believe Gabbard is serious, and that she plans to challenge this assumption during her hearing.
Former intelligence officials have called for closed-door hearings on Gabbard, so that senators can interrogate the nominee with information obtained by the very same intelligence officials whose power she seeks to curb. Out of sight from the public, the intelligence community wants a decidedly undemocratic interrogation.
Former intelligence officials have called for closed-door hearings on Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination.
What’s important to know about the intelligence community is that it’s a community. Party labels matter less than supporting the maximalist desires of the nation’s spy agencies. Democrats, Republicans, and intelligence officials are united in wanting to block Gabbard’s confirmation, despite her scramble to get in line with them, because the slightest deviations are forbidden. You can view it as a secret society, one that CIA whistleblowers John D. Marks and Victor Marchetti described as “the cult of intelligence.”
The full-court press is even more striking given that a different member of that secret society, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, has a long track record of overseeing clear-cut constitutional violations by intelligence officials. Similarly troubling is Haines’s refusal to answer questions posed by the Prospect about when she first made contact with the CIA, and whether her husband worked as a pilot for the agency long before Haines ever held government office.
A darling of the intelligence community who managed to secure 84 Senate confirmation votes, it’s worth looking at how Haines was able to win the nearly unanimous support of not only Congress, but America’s most powerful spies as well.
AFTER STINTS AT THE HAGUE, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the State Department, and Joe Biden’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Haines joined Barack Obama’s team as a deputy counsel for national security. She developed a close relationship with CIA director John Brennan, whose legal justification for extrajudicial drone strikes against U.S. citizens Haines helped formulate.
According to a glowing profile of Haines in Newsweek, “Brennan, who has an affinity for lawyers and their logical way of thinking, turned to Haines for virtually every major decision when he was the counterterrorism chief in the White House. The two developed a strong professional chemistry, working endless hours together on the new targeted-killing policy.” Brennan has since had his security clearance stripped by Donald Trump, and has taken to the airwaves to raucously condemn the Gabbard appointment.
A master at planting humanizing details in the press, Haines has worked hard to paint herself as a liberal reformer fighting to make America a kinder, softer killing machine. In the same Newsweek article, Haines told Daniel Klaidman about staying up all night working on “knotty legal and policy problems,” while surviving on “Cheetos, Fig Newtons, and applesauce, and downing copious amounts of Coke or iced lattes.” Another part of the mythology involves Haines’s 1990s proprietorship of a left-wing bookstore, which included erotic reading nights, in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore.
But in the glimmering profiles Haines has racked up over the years, one character is conspicuously absent: her husband David Davighi. According to the official story, Davighi was Haines’s flight instructor, and the two fell in love during a transatlantic flight in a Cessna 310 (the same kind used for covert CIA flights), which was forced to make an emergency landing on the Newfoundland coast.
No reporter with access to Haines has ever noted the fact that Davighi is a former military pilot who attended flight school at Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker), where the CIA has long staged foreign paramilitary training and recruited pilots for its covert operations.
CIA documents obtained by the Prospect show that Fort Rucker was used by the CIA as a training facility for Latin American forces, CIA pilots who flew missions in Panama and El Salvador, and CIA analysts attempting to understand the mechanisms of field operations. The School of the Americas, a Department of Defense initiative for training Latin American soldiers (including dictators and death squad leaders), has also taught flight courses at the base.
Haines has refused to comment on this matter, and the Army continues to withhold Davighi’s service record after multiple requests. Haines also denied a request for comment seeking information about her many financial disclosures redacted during her confirmation hearing.
The mysteries continue around Haines’s hippie bookstore. At least two former employees of the bookstore list their current employer as the Department of Defense. The property was purchased from the federal government, which seized it after a drug raid.
While we may never know the truth about Haines’s husband and backstory, we certainly have a record of her actions as deputy CIA director under Obama. Perhaps the biggest blight on her legacy is her role in shielding the CIA torture program, and her efforts to meddle with the Senate investigation into it.
As deputy director, Haines was charged not only with redacting the Senate report on the CIA’s torture program (the final version is redacted beyond comprehension), but also choosing how to punish the CIA officers who spied on the Senate staff compiling the report. Ten CIA officers were found to have spied and meddled in an effort to restrict access to damning information describing the agency’s use of torture. Brennan denied the allegation unequivocally, before later acknowledging it and issuing an apology.
Haines was then deputized to determine reprisal for these unlawful acts, and ultimately chose to overrule the intelligence community’s own inspector general, giving this clear violation of the CIA’s mandate never to spy domestically a pass. Years later, Haines would support Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel—who personally oversaw CIA torture in a Thai black site—to run the agency.
And in addition to her full-throated support for the worst perpetrators of torture and domestic surveillance in the intelligence community, Haines took the same verve to the private sector, where she was involved with the lucrative consulting firm WestExec Advisors. As the Prospect’s Jonathan Guyer detailed, Haines “had her name scrubbed from WestExec’s website early on, but she worked with the firm from October 2017 to July 2020, when she joined Biden’s transition team as foreign policy lead.” In a questionnaire completed before her confirmation hearing, Haines acknowledged that she gave “strategic advice” on “cyber norms; national security threats; and testing, evaluation, validation and verification of machine learning systems by the Department of Defense” to her clients, which included Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Open Philanthropy, and Peter Thiel’s Palantir (though the last one was scrubbed from the record before her DNI confirmation hearing).
In the final paragraph of the final puff piece in her final act in government, Haines attempted to distance herself from the brutal carnage of the war in Gaza, which she helped oversee: “If I could contribute to a more ethical society, then I would be doing something to improve our discourse, decision-making and ultimately enhancing the quality of our lives,” Haines told Politico. “I very much hope I can make such a contribution in the next phase of my professional life.”
As Ken Klippenstein reported this week, in her last act as director of national intelligence, Haines signed Intelligence Community Directive 406, instructing the intelligence community to take more risks in its fusion with nonstate corporate intelligence contractors, a world of private surveillance companies Haines will likely soon join.
When Haines, who received an incredible 84 votes during her confirmation hearing, is held up next to Gabbard, some key lessons emerge. Haines made a career out of carrying water for the worst offenders in the intelligence community, while Gabbard has spent her career vocally opposing them, right up until the moment that she wanted to join their club. Kissing the ring may matter more than stated principle, at least when it comes to intelligence.
Frank Church, the Idaho senator who undertook sweeping investigations of illegal conduct by the FBI, CIA, and NSA during the 1970s, said on the Senate floor that “the United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.” His words still ring true today.
The director of national intelligence position was created after 9/11 to unify the disparate agencies full of squabbling and over-powerful spies under one roof. The office was ultimately defanged in the final hours before its formal sanctioning, and without budget authority, it has since become a battered shield for America’s vast and exponentially expanding surveillance bureaucracy. As the foot soldiers of the intelligence community cheerlead for a swift execution of Gabbard in the Senate this week, it’s worth remembering Church’s words, and understanding what kind of person would have handily won his vote.