SPECIAL REPORT — It wasn’t quite an “exit interview,“ but with just over six weeks remaining for the Biden administration, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines spoke Thursday about the Intelligence Community (IC) and a range of threats that she and her colleagues will soon turn over to the Trump administration. At an event hosted by the Council On Foreign Relations in Washington, Haines spoke about the so-called “Axis of Authoritarians,” the heightened risks during a political transition in the U.S., and the increased push to declassify intelligence for strategic purposes — as the Biden Administration did prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Asked by Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski about an increasing number of threats posed by Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare, Haines said, “Russia has invested money, personnel, just an extraordinary amount of effort in this area, and I think will continue to do so…we judge that to be focused on trying to ultimately deter NATO and certain countries from providing assistance and getting more involved in the Ukraine conflict in support of Ukraine.”
Haines is the seventh Director of National Intelligence, a position created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as an attempt to integrate the work of more than a dozen agencies within the IC and better “connect the dots” of disparate streams of intelligence. As The Cipher Brief reported last week, the ODNI has come under scrutiny recently, given President-elect Trump’s stated wish to “overhaul” the IC, and his nomination of former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to succeed Haines as DNI.
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