Biden offers Trump rebuke with his spy chief, DHS picks

Bloomberg

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 criticised border crackdown. Mayorkas also served as deputy secretary of the
department.
The selections were announced by Biden’s transition team as part of a broader slate of cabinet posts including the president-elect’s choices for secretary of State and national security adviser.
The moves marked Biden’s latest effort to begin forming his administration, even as Trump and his allies refuse to concede the election and continue to contest the result, stalling the formal handoff of power.
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. Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant picked to run DHS, also served as deputy DHS secretary in the Obama administration.
The 51-year-old Haines is “one the hardest working people I know and she’ll be fantastic at DNI,” former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said during an event Monday hosted by the Center for a New American Security.
Assuming she is confirmed by the Senate, 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 political allies instead of intelligence veterans to serve as his DNI.
While his first DNI chief, former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, was a respected former member of the Intelligence Committee, Coats’s willingness to publicly criticise the president for siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin put him in Trump’s crosshairs and left him sidelined by then-CIA chief Michael Pompeo. By the time the president tapped former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell to be acting DNI in early 2019, his strongest credential was his unwavering support of Trump.
Trump said he would “take care” of Dreamers and continue negotiating immigration laws when asked about his position on DACA at an October town hall, but he never offered clear proposals to do so. Biden, meanwhile, committed to reinstating DACA in the first 100 days of his presidency, according to his campaign website.