Biden Offers a Trump Rebuke With His Choices for Spy Chief, DHS
President-elect Joe Biden is delivering a not-so-subtle rebuke to President Donald Trump with his choices of nominees to lead two key national-security agencies.
For his director of national intelligence, Biden has selected Avril Haines, a former top CIA official with years of experience in the espionage community who would fill a job that Trump had largely reserved for people better known for their loyalty to him. And as homeland security secretary, the president-elect has picked Alejandro Mayorkas, a former head of Citizenship and Immigration Services who would become the first Latino and immigrant to lead an agency that has played a central role in Trump’s widely criticized border crackdown. Mayorkas also served as deputy secretary of the department.
Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant picked to run DHS, also served as deputy DHS secretary in the Obama administration. A 60-year-old Jewish Cuban-American, Mayorkas came to the U.S. from Havana as an infant. He said in a tweet Monday that he fondly recalled the “refuge” the U.S. provided his family and said he’d look out for those who flee persecution in search of a better life.
Link to tweet
Haines will be the first woman selected to oversee the 17 agencies that make up America’s intelligence community after her previous posts at the CIA and time as a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration.
Haines’s experience will contrast sharply with Trump’s most recent picks to lead the intelligence community. Feeling like he was undermined by “deep state” operatives across his government, President Donald Trump increasingly turned to inexperienced political allies instead of intelligence veterans to serve as his DNI.
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