Austen Givens

Austen Givens
Temporary County Chair Oneida County Libertarian Party
February 11, 2018—March 4, 2018
Predecessor:	Charles Millar
Successor:	Craig Miles
Personal Details
Party:	Republican

Austen Givens, a Republican, is a national security policy analyst from Virginia.

Givens is a former undergraduate fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a foreign policy and national security research institution in Washington, DC. While a student at the University of Virginia, he published columns in student-run publications The Cavalier Daily and the now-defunct The Virginia Advocate pressing for hawkish U.S. foreign policy positions.

He was a public supporter of George W. Bush’s 2004 Presidential campaign and the U.S.-led war in Iraq. During the summer of 2003 and briefly during the summer of 2004, he was an intern in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. In August 2003 he traveled to Israel for a series of seminars on counterterrorism conducted at Tel Aviv University under the auspices of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

After graduating from UVA, Givens served as an intern in the Capitol Hill offices of then-Representative John Boozman (R-AR) and the late Jo Ann Davis (R-VA). In December 2004 he left Capitol Hill to take an entry-level job in the international trade division of Wiley, Rein & Fielding LP, a law firm co-founded by Reagan White House Counsel Fred Fielding.

He published a letter to the editor of National Review in 2006 calling for Saddam Hussein to be tried in Iraq, rather than in an international tribunal, for crimes against the Iraqi people. While a graduate student, he penned an April 2008 column in The Richmond Times-Dispatch in which he advocated for U.S. nuclear sanctions against Iran to be linked to Tehran’s international support of terrorist organizations.

A former Temporary County Chair for the Oneida County Libertarian Party from February 11—March 4, 2018, he disaffiliated from the Libertarian Party in 2018.