This program is co-hosted by the Clements Center for National Security, LBJ Presidential Library, Public Interest Declassification Board, and the Strauss Center as part of a two-day conference “America’s Secrets: Classified Information and our Democracy” on January 26 and 27, 2023.

Director Haines’s keynote was held in-person in the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium located at the LBJ Presidential Library.

About the speaker:

Avril Haines was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence on January 21, 2021. She is the seventh Senate-confirmed DNI in our nation’s history and the first woman to lead the U.S. Intelligence Community.

DNI Haines has deep national security experience. During the Obama administration, she served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from 2015-2017, during which time she led the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee. From 2013-2015, Haines was the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first woman to hold both of these positions. She initially joined the federal government as a civil servant and over the last two decades has worked in all three branches of government, in and outside of the intelligence community, and in academia as a research scholar at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

DNI Haines most recently led the Transition’s National Security and Foreign Policy Team and served as a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

DNI Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.