Obama-Era ‘Sisters’ Circle Trump
Will the trio of Susan Rice, Avril Haines, and Lisa Monaco get their target or will their exaggerated sense of self
finally catch up with them?Susan Rice describes the trio as family.
In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”
Hard eye roll.
Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.
Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.