Avril Haines

Avril Danica Haines (born August 27, 1969) is an American lawyer and senior government official who serves as the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration.

She is the first woman to serve in this role.

Haines previously served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Obama administration.

Prior to her appointment to the CIA, she served as Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs in the Office of White House Counsel.

Haines was born in New York City on August 27, 1969, to Adrian Rappin (née Adrienne Rappaport) and Thomas H. Haines.

She grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Haines' mother, a painter, was Jewish.

When Haines was 10, her mother developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and contracted avian tuberculosis; Haines and her father nursed Adrian in a home ICU until her death when Haines was 15 years old.

Her father, Thomas H. Haines, is a biochemist who graduated with a PhD from Rutgers University and helped in the formation of the CUNY School of Medicine, where he served as the chair of the biochemistry department.

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Haines moved to Japan for a year, where she enrolled at the Kodokan, an elite judo institute in Tokyo.

In 1988, she enrolled in the University of Chicago where she studied physics.

While attending the University of Chicago, she worked repairing car engines at a mechanic shop in Hyde Park.

In 1991 she took up flying lessons in New Jersey, where she met her future husband, David Davighi.

She graduated with a B.A. in physics in 1992.

In 1992, Haines moved to Baltimore, and enrolled as a doctoral student in physics at Johns Hopkins University.

However, later that year, she dropped out and with her future husband purchased a bar in Fell's Point, Baltimore, which had been seized in a drug raid; they turned the location into an independent bookstore and café.

She named the store Adrian's Book Cafe, after her late mother; Adrian's realistic oil paintings filled the store.

The bookstore won City Paper's "Best Independent Bookstore" in 1997 and was known for having an unusual collection of literary offerings, local writers, and small press publications.

Adrian's hosted a number of literary readings, including erotica readings, which became a media focus when she was appointed by President Barack Obama to be the deputy director of the CIA.

She served as the president of the Fell's Point Business Association until 1998.

In 1998, she enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center, receiving her J.D. in 2001.

In 2001, Haines became a legal officer at the Hague Conference on Private International Law.

In 2002, she became a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Judge Danny Julian Boggs.

From 2003 until 2006, she worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the Department of State, first in the Office of Treaty Affairs and then in the Office of Political Military Affairs.

From 2007 until 2008, she worked for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority Senate Democrats (under then chairman Joe Biden).

Haines worked for the State Department as the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs from 2008 to 2010, when she was appointed to serve in the office of the White House counsel as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House.

On April 18, 2013, Obama nominated Haines to serve as Legal Adviser of the Department of State, to fill the position vacated after Harold Hongju Koh resigned to return to teaching at Yale Law School.

However, on June 13, 2013, Obama withdrew Haines's nomination to be Legal Adviser of the Department of State, choosing instead to select her as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Haines was nominated to replace Michael Morell, the CIA's deputy and former acting director.

The office of the deputy director is not subject to Senate confirmation, with Haines subsequently taking office on August 9, 2013, the final day of Morrell's tenure.

Haines was the first woman ever to hold the office of the deputy director, while Gina Haspel was the first female career intelligence officer to be named director.

In 2015, Haines, then deputy director of the CIA, was tasked with determining whether CIA personnel should be disciplined for hacking computers of Senate staffers authoring the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.

Haines chose not to discipline them, overruling the CIA Inspector General.

During the Democratic National Committee email leak in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, Haines as DNSA convened a series of meetings to discuss ways to respond to the hacking and leaks.

Subsequently, she was involved in the CIA project of redacting the Senate report for release.

In the end, only 525 pages of the 6,700 page CIA torture report were released.

After serving as deputy director of the CIA, Haines was tapped as Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA), the first woman to hold that position.

During her years in the Obama administration, Haines worked closely with John Brennan in determining administration policy on extra-judicial "targeted killings" by drones.

Newsweek reported Haines was sometimes called in the middle of the night to evaluate whether a suspected terrorist could be "lawfully incinerated" by a drone strike.

The ACLU criticized the Obama policy on drone killings as failing to meet international human rights norms.