Why Congress Has To Investigate The Biden National Security Team

Starting with Avril Haines and Rob Malley

“Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is a retread Obama flunky who is dedicated to following the party line, not integrity or honesty,” Dr. John Schindler wrote at the beginning of December. This is a curt, but accurate summary of Haines’s career as a political appointee. Haines was an assistant legal advisor at the State Department when she was promoted to a White House intelligence job. Her relevant experience and education was limited to international law; Haines has never been a spook, a cop, or even a real diplomat, let alone a judge, even though she has adjudicated drone strikes.

She has instead been repeatedly put in charge of spies and clandestine information related to foreign adversaries, each time serving political agendas, because of who she knew. Her friendship with Joe Biden formed during her tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, leading to both White House appointments as well as an advisory role in the 2020 Biden campaign. In 2013, President Obama promoted her to a CIA leadership role, her very first intelligence job, raising eyebrows in Washington.

Between her two stints at the White House, where she was evidently a favorite, Haines taught at Columbia University, which this year became the epicenter of Ivy League protests against the war in Gaza. Although Haines had no direct role in the campus agitation, this link highlights the universe of ideas in which Haines has received her liberal education. Now that the Biden administration is weeks away from ending, Haines is preparing to return somewhere like Columbia so she can indoctrinate the next generation of Democratic Party policy wonks.

Biden has praised Haines as “brilliant, humble. Can talk literature and theoretical physics, fixing cars, flying planes, running a bookstore-cafe, all in a single conversation, because she's done all that.” Indeed, Haines seems to be an accomplished writer in various fiction formats, such as erotica. Both polymath and partisan, she has been the quintessential Obama-era policy wonk.

If 2025 brings justice, however, Haines will become an object lesson in political scandal. When he wrote his piece earlier this month, Schindler, a US intelligence veteran, called for a congressional investigation of the Biden administration intelligence community. His Substack post was published the day after after a House committee concluded that the COVID-19 virus was an experiment that leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

As DNI, Haines oversaw the intelligence reporting process on covid origins in 2021, concluding with “low confidence” that covid “was probably not genetically engineered.” Another report issued in June 2023 repeated this apparent consensus: “Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.” This was misleading.

According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, the FBI had a very different analysis, but never got to communicate their own finding of a likely lab leak to President Biden. Whereas “the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known,” Haines presented Biden with a briefing that “didn’t tell the whole story.” She cooked the intelligence, ignoring real scientists at the Department of Defense in favor of happy lies from the CIA.

Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.

The scientists shared their findings with FBI agents investigating the pandemic’s origins. “But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was ‘off the reservation.’” Some of the edits they proposed to the National Intelligence Council were not accepted. A paper they wrote in 2020 challenging the “proximal origin” hypothesis was restricted to to the building they worked in, even though it was unclassified. “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” FBI agent Jason Bannan tells the Wall Street Journal.

Since the National Intelligence Council was among proponents of the zoonotic theory, and the CIA, like two other agencies, had declined to take a stand either way, the makeup of the briefing meant that no proponents of the lab leak theory were present. A spokesman for Haines’s office said that the FBI assessment that pointed to a lab leak was accurately presented.

Of course, the words “accurately presented” do not tell us how much Haines made of the FBI “medium confidence” finding in relation to the CIA’s “low confidence” finding. One sentence can be accurate while infinite additional ‘information’ remains deceptive. Still, a lawyer of her caliber can always argue their way out of implications like this one.

But the deaths of more than one million Americans are not the only problematic legacy of Avril Haines. As DNI, Haines minimized substantial evidence that Russian military intelligence has targeted hundreds of American intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement personnel with microwave weapons, overseeing an intelligence community report which concluded the very existence of so-called ‘Havana Syndrome’ was “very unlikely.” Instead, the report ascribed Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) to environmental or psychological causes.

But in hearings held this year, witnesses told the Homeland Security subcommittee that “the executive branch, particularly at the behest of and manipulation by officials within CIA, is not truthfully reporting what it knows” about AHI injuries and deaths inflicted on Americans. The subcommittee released a preliminary report at the beginning of Demember saying the 2021 IC ‘consensus’ report “lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation.” Here again, Haines stands out among Biden’s appointees “stonewalling, slow-walking, and cherry-picking … information” to present the president and the public with a false consensus.

Describing “a rush to convey a consensus amongst elements of the IC in an effort to control the narrative with the American public, policymakers, foreign partners and adversaries, and IC employees,” the subcommittee recommended that further investigation must be “prioritized” under the new Trump administration. “The profound impact that this has had on the IC workforce” — the professional spies tasked with defending the United States against foreign adversaries — “demands such prioritization.”

Released on Friday, a new bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee further takes the CIA to task for failure to give victims of AHIs “timely and sufficient care.” The agency has not “established clear and documented policies, guidance, and criteria for how it refers AHI … reporters to facilitated treatment programs.” Patients “experienced delayed, denied, or pre-conditioned care.” Affected personnel have experienced “long wait times to access facilitated treatment options; were denied facilitated care by a CIA care adjudication board; perceived that their access to facilitated medical care was contingent on their willingness to participate in a NIH clinical research study,” undermining trust and confidence in the CIA by its own employees.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action: Haines has presided over two known cover-ups, apparently to soften American relations with hostile powers whose actions harmed Americans. Is there a third strike we don’t know about? Congress needs to find out, because these are already vastly bigger scandals than anything revealed in the Benghazi hearings — larger by many orders of magnitude.

Havana Syndrome “is the greatest scandal in the history of American intelligence,” Schindler wrote in September: “the leadership of the Intelligence Community has conspired with the White House and whoever is really running the Biden administration to deny and conceal that hostile intelligence services are attacking and crippling Americans, mostly IC personnel, all over the world, including at home.” In one case, a Russian attack on FBI personnel in Turkey was actually caught on video. In another, Biden’s CIA rejected a proposed operation to detain a GRU hit team and their high-tech weapon because “they don’t want to know,” Schindler said.

America needs another Church Committee, Schindler now argues. “Joe Biden’s IC is corrupted by politics and decided to lie rather than determine what caused the worst pandemic in modern times, which killed more than a million Americans,” he writes. “It then chose to cover up foreign attacks on hundreds of IC personnel, in many countries and several U.S. states, lying to everyone, including Congress, to prevent the truth from emerging.”

Republicans will control Congress next year and Biden-era politicized intelligence is a likely focus of investigations. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told the New York Post on Friday that the Biden administration has been “complicit every step of the way…in concealing the origins of COVID-19.” Whereas the Biden administration has quashed efforts to make Haines turn over further information, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) will likely have an easier time getting the Trump administraiton to cooperate. “Director Haines’ failure to fully respond to longstanding congressional oversight requests resulted in material information within the intelligence community from being shared with Congress, the American people, and even the President himself,” Grassley told the Post. “The individuals who politicized this administration’s COVID origins investigation performed a shameful disservice to the American people.”

Haines is not the only Biden appointee likely to become the focus of congressional interest next year. Rob Malley, the special envoy who negotiated Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and then came back to the Biden team in a failed attempt to rescucitate that project, lost his security clearance last April, but then somehow managed to dodge the normal consequences of that decision for ten weeks.

During that time, Malley “was periodically blind carbon-copied (bcc) on email communications that concealed his inclusion in ongoing email conversations from participants” because staff at all levels knew that he was still involved in policy discussions. Malley the very, very Special Envoy was not excluded until June 29, 2023, bringing his quantum state of suspension to an end at last. Although the Biden White House stonewalled congressional inquiries into what Malley had done to lose his security clearance, we now know that he “intentionally or unintentially … moved classified information onto his personal email” and then clicked on a phishing link, exposing it to hostile actors.

Fallout continues. One of Malley’s interfaces with the regime, Ariana Tabatabai, went on to work in a sensitive post at the Department of Defense. Suspicions swirled around Tabatabai after Tablet accused her of being part of a spy ring for Tehran. When a US intelligence estimate of Israeli plans to attack Iran leaked in October, a Middle East newspaper identified Tabatabai as the source of the leak. Since then, a CIA official named Asif Rahman has been arrested and charged with the leak. However, Tabatabai appears to have been “promoted” in order to transfer her out of the sensitive job she held at the Pentagon, anyway. We are left with a best-case scenario in which a government employee has been subject to unwarranted suspicion and career consequences due to the shambolic security practices of an Obama-Biden holdover, and a worst-case scenario in which the suspicion was warranted, but has now been undermined by false rumors.

Congress is capable of getting to the truth. In all likelihood, House and Senate committees will also determine that all of these national security failures derived from President Biden’s mental decline. Haines and Malley both had ‘face time’ with Biden while his condition deteriorated and access was being restricted to keep his condition secret.

Biden was not the only example of this behavior in his own administration. On 2 January 2024, when Lloyd Austin needed emergency hospitalization, a staffer requested “the ambulance not show up with lights and sirens” because “we’re trying to remain a little subtle.” It took two days for someone to tell President Biden what had happened — and three days for the National Command Center at the White House to get updated. Why? Because they did not want to know.

The bourgeoning national security scandals of the Biden administration are all about what the president did not want to know, or what people around him did not want him to know. As Joe Biden lost his capacity to learn and incorporate new information, the people who controlled the flow of information to the president reduced it, as well as the number of decisions for him to make. Joe Biden was less and less in charge, leaving more and more responsibility to trusted people like Avril Haines and Rob Malley. Investigation is overly warranted, and rightfully ought to be bipartisan. What are the chances, though?