https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Jake-Sullivan-WH.png

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43387983)

TRANSITION

2021

The inexorable rise of Jake Sullivan

In his first interview as Joe Biden's national security adviser, Sullivan lays out his plans for a world transformed by the

coronavirus — and Donald Trump.

President-elect Joe Biden's national security adviser nominee Jake Sullivan speaks at The Queen theater in

Wilmington, Del. | AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

By

NATASHA

11/27/2020

BERTRAND

02:00

PM

EST“You have to be kidding me.”

Philippe Reines was sitting in a yurt in Mongolia during a trip with then-Secretary of

State Hillary Clinton, sure that he’d finally done it: traveled to more countries than

anyone else with Clinton as one of her top aides. And then Jake Sullivan strolled in.

Advertisement

“He’d literally just been in Oman for secret peace talks with the Iranians, and he

managed to make it to this remote part of Mongolia,” said Reines, still floored by the

feat seven years later. “So in the end he’s the only human being who went to 112

countries with Hillary. His capacity for work is just that annoying,” he joked in an

interview, one of a dozen for this story.

All that work has clearly paid off: Sullivan, now 43, will be the youngest national

security adviser in nearly 60 years when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in

January — in what those who know him described as an almost-inevitable next step for

a man who’s always seemed preternaturally older than his actual age.

After holding top positions at the State Department and in the Obama White House and

playing a key role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, it’s clear Sullivan is “on the

Benjamin Button track,” Reines said, referring to the F. Scott Fitzgerald character who

is born into an old man’s body and ages backward. “He is the equivalent of at least a

decade, if not two, beyond his biological years.”

Reached by phone on Tuesday, just hours after he was officially introduced by Biden

along with other incoming national security leaders, Sullivan spoke at length for the

first time about the unique circumstances that will face him and his team on Day Onefirst time about the unique circumstances that will face him and his team on Day One

— specifically, a raging pandemic and a changing climate that will spawn new

dangers.

It remains to be seen how much progress a Biden administration will be able to make

on issues like climate change and a return to the Iran deal with what is likely a GOP-

controlled Senate — Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has not allowed any

climate plans through the upper chamber and supported Trump’s withdrawal from the

Iran deal in 2018, calling it “a deeply flawed agreement.”

In an interview, though, Sullivan said he believes “the American people will

understand now, better than they have in a long time, that a threat that emanates from

elsewhere can cause massive disruption and catastrophic loss of life. And so being

engaged in the world — being out there with our diplomats and our public health

professionals and being part of institutions and systems that can help track and prevent

threats before they arrive at our shores — that matters profoundly to working families

across this country.”Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks with Jake Sullivan during a break in testimony on Capitol Hill in 2015. | AP

Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Sullivan grew up with four siblings in a middle-class home in Minneapolis. His father

worked on the business side of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and later at the University

of Minnesota’s journalism school, and his mother worked as a public school teacher.

They were strict and determined that their kids prioritize education, said Sarah Rathke,

who first met Sullivan at cross country practice at Southwest High School. All five

Sullivan kids attended either Yale, as Jake did for undergrad and law school, or

Cornell.

Our People

Advertisement

“Looking back at everything he did during those years, it’s clear he’s always had a

plan,” Rathke, now a lawyer in Cleveland who still counts Sullivan among her best

friends, said in an interview. She recalled Sullivan’s decision to learn two foreign

languages — French and Spanish — as a teen and his unusual fascination with Lyndon

Johnson’s Great Society, at the time the largest social reform plan in modern history.

A few years later, when Sullivan would visit Rathke at Georgetown, their idea of fun

was playing “the senator game” on the steps of the Supreme Court, she said.“One person would pretend to be the senator, and run up the steps and wave to the

people, while another person would play the reporter, and the third would be the

senator’s handler and just say, ‘the senator has no comment,’” Rathke said. “That was

it. That was the game. We played it late at night so no one would see us being so

goofy.”

Back during one of his first nights at Yale, a “spirited” evening debate about German

versus American nationalism — which lasted until 7 the next morning — gave

Sullivan’s roommates an early taste of what it would be like to live with him. “I

challenged Jake once to see who could finish ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ first,” recalled

his college roommate Sherlock Grigsby, referring to the book by Hannah Arendt that

introduced the phrase “banality of evil.”

“I thought I was pacing myself pretty well and figured Jake was so busy he wouldn’t

be able to keep up,” Grigsby said. “Turns out he beat me easily. I didn’t challenge him

after that.”

Global Insider | EP85

How can the US compete with China…

00:00

1X

35:35

SHARE

SUBSCRIBE

Sullivan graduated from Yale in 1998 with a degree in political science and was

awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, where he graduated in 2000 with a

master’s degree in international relations. That same year, he came in second place in

the 2000 world debating championship — a vindication of sorts after not making the

Yale debate team his freshman year, Rigsby said. He then enrolled at Yale for law

school and graduated with a JD in 2003.

Was there anything Jake was just plain bad at?

“He’s possibly the world’s worst driver,” Rathke mused. “He errs on the side of going

really slow and doesn't believe the lane lines are talking to him.”ea y s ow a d does t be eve t e a e

es a e ta

g to

.

Sullivan went back to Minnesota after law school to work at the law firm Faegre &

Benson and later as chief counsel for Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It was Klobuchar who

introduced him to Clinton, for whom he started working during her first run at the

presidency in 2008.

Clinton’s upset loss to Barack Obama could have been a rare career setback, but as

usual Sullivan landed on his feet: He went on to become the youngest director of

policy planning in State Department history after serving as Clinton’s deputy chief of

staff there and stayed on in government after Clinton stepped down as secretary,

serving as then-Vice President Biden’s national security adviser. And throughout it all,

he made sure to find time every year to attend the Final Four, his friends said.

Advertisement

Sullivan has managed to avoid much of the sharp criticism other top Obama-era

officials, such as Ben Rhodes, have faced from conservatives — perhaps because he

lacks his former colleagues’ appetite for partisan combat.

A former White House colleague noted Sullivan’s outreach to groups and think tanks

like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies that vehemently opposed the Irandeal. FDD’s chief executive Mark Dubowitz, a harsh critic of the deal, has described

Sullivan as the “sharpest guy on the [Iran] issue I know.”

In the White House, Sullivan was known for his insistence on questioning the

assumptions behind a given policy — “welcoming 'devil's advocate' discussions,

gaming out third- and fourth-order effects, and reframing issues to bring new questions

to light,” said Michael Carpenter, a former Biden foreign policy adviser who worked

with him.

In 2016, Sullivan left his relative comfort zone of national security and global affairs to

work for Clinton as a senior policy adviser to her campaign — an experience that

exposed him to the politics of everything from health care to gun control to

immigration. He has since homed in on a philosophy that happens to fit seamlessly

with Biden’s political message: that the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national

security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is

endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to

downplay or ignore.Jake Sullivan speaks during a hearing on Iran before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2017. | AP Photo/Jose

Luis Magana

Reflecting on his time in the Obama White House, Sullivan said he felt more could

have been done there, too, to put the average American on the agenda in the Situation

Room on a regular basis. And he paused for a long moment when asked how the rise of

Trump and Trumpism had affected his worldview, attuning him more, for example, to

the populist tide at home that he may have missed while focusing on international

nuclear negotiations, peace deals and trade treaties.

“When you spend years in government working on the Iran deal, or working on the

Asia-Pacific rebalance, or working on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian peace

process, it’s not that you completely lose sight of what’s happening on the home front

— but your focus is more on other things,” Sullivan said. “I do think that the 2016

campaign had an impact on my thinking, but it wasn’t all about Trump. It was about

the vigorous debate the Democrats had in the primary. It was about a recognition, as I

left national security and entered a domestic political conversation, about how

profoundly such a large segment of our country felt their government wasn’t working

for them.”

AdvertisementSullivan caveats that he doesn’t believe such economic anxiety was the sole driver of

Trump’s 2016 victory, which he says was also fueled by appeals to identity and

isolationism. But the campaign gave him a “crash course,” he said, in the importance

of bringing issues of inequality, dislocation and a disconnect between working people

and their government to “every table in the White House — including in the Situation

Room.”

So what will a Sullivan-led National Security Council look like? It won’t be too big or

micromanaging, Sullivan insists — criticisms that dogged the Obama NSC, which

stood accused of stepping on the prerogatives of Cabinet agencies, be it by setting

troop levels or insisting on signing off on individual drone strikes.

“I see my job as fundamentally about supporting and lifting up the work of the broader

national security team in service of the president-elect’s mission and strategy,” he said.

“My goal is to have a process that is able to give sufficient direction, but then empower

the departments and agencies to be the tip of the spear to carry that out.”

“He is unlikely to be confined to traditional structures,” said former Obama NSC

official Salman Ahmed. “He has long argued persuasively that these issues don't fit

neatly within the bureaucratic lens.”

The early years of Obama’s NSC were often tense, particularly under retired Gen. Jim

Jones, an outsider who often clashed with the coterie of political aides around the

president and resigned just before the 2010 midterms.

Among the many challenges Sullivan will confront immediately, knowing colleagues

like incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain won’t be one of them. “I’d argue

no two people know each other better, have worked more closely, overlapped more or

have a better working relationship on Day One than any chief of staff/national security

adviser pair before them,” said Reines.

“They all worked together at one level down in the Obama administration,” another

former Obama White House official said. “They are all friends — they’re not

strangers, not rivals, and at the very least are all known commodities to each other.”

One could argue that might make the team insular, prone to the kind of groupthink that

l d

k

d

d

k

h

fcan lead to mistakes and missed opportunities. Mike Pompeo, the outgoing secretary of

State, has already mocked his successors for allegedly living in “a bit of a fantasy

world” and for practicing “multilateralism for the sake of hanging out with your

buddies at a cool cocktail party.”

The former Obama White House official said the preexisting relationships among the

Biden crew will make them effective — unlike the early days of the Trump presidency,

which was plagued by rivalries, competing media leaks, backstabbing and constant

staff turnover.

For all Sullivan’s innate caution, he seems inclined to break sharply with his

predecessors’ emphasis on a traditional definition of U.S. national security: tanks and

missiles, grand summits and spy satellites.

The “major focus” of the Biden NSC’s work, at least initially, will be on beating the

coronavirus pandemic and restructuring the NSC to make public health a permanent

national security priority, Sullivan said. China will also be put on notice, he added.

“The way you actually make sure this doesn't happen again is by sending a very clear

message to China that the United States and the rest of the world will not accept a

circumstance in which we do not have an effective public health surveillance system,

with an international dimension, in China and across the world going forward,”

Sullivan said. A key theme Sullivan repeatedly returns to is the restoration of alliances

and partnerships that were neglected or spurned under Trump.

Advertisement“Unlike the policy of the last few years, we will be able to rally the rest of the world

behind us” on key foreign policy and national security issues, such as pressuring Iran

to come back into compliance with the nuclear deal so that the U.S. can reenter

negotiations, Sullivan said.

He is similarly optimistic about one of his loftiest goals: “to rally our allies to combat

corruption and kleptocracy, and to hold systems of authoritarian capitalism accountable

for greater transparency and participation in a rules-based system.”

That effort will need to begin at home — as has been well documented, the world’s

kleptocratic regimes depend heavily on money laundering networks that commonly

extend into Western centers of global finance like New York and London, aided by lax

incorporation rules in places like Delaware.

But as one former Obama administration official put it, the hardest task for Biden and

by extension Sullivan will be cleaning up the “shattered glass” left by the Trump

administration, along with an international community that has grown weary of the

whiplash induced by America’s political dramas.

“It’s a different world now,” said Ambassador Dennis Ross, a veteran diplomat who

worked with Sullivan in the Obama White House “But Jake brings experience andworked with Sullivan in the Obama White House. “But Jake brings experience and

personal relationships that are indispensable.”

The Biden Transition

Joe Biden may be the new president-elect — but with President Donald Trump continuing to challenge the

results and Senate control up still up for grabs, the story of the election is far from over.

BIDEN'S PLANS

Kathleen Hicks is Biden’s pick to be the first female deputy defense secretary.

Biden has tapped three senior officials onto his Covid-19 Response team.

Biden's transition chief blasts ‘obstruction’ by political appointees at OMB and the Pentagon.

Trump's unplanned gift to Biden is that clean energy is on the rise.

TRUMP AND THE GOP

Sen. Josh Hawley pledged to challenge Biden's victory in Pennsylvania on Jan. 6.

Nancy Pelosi will seat a Republican in a contested Iowa race.

Congress and the coronavirus could quash Trump's Electoral College gambit.

Sen. Ben Sasse delivered a critique of his Republican colleagues challenging 2020 results.

C O M I N G U P : G E O R G I A S E N AT E R U N O F F S

A judge is seeking a deal to limit voter challenges in the Georgia runoff.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going back to Georgia before the Senate runoffs.

Strong early voting turnout gives Democrats hope in Georgia runoffs.

Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue side with Trump on $2,000 stimulus payments.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43388183)

one can hope.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43440950)

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23225

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43441110)

All the pro-vax stuff is coming through non-CIA channels. That's what freaks me out right now. It looks like NIH has always had their own op going and never told the CIA. If you go back to January 2020 and look at the very first ever leaked intelligence report on the virus, it was put out by UK under the name @siradrianbond. It's clear they didn't know jack shit about any of the science. They didn't know about GOF or anything. CIA could have maintained a separate knowledge base, but as far as I can tell the CIA was divorced from this in the late 70s/early 80s. IIf you think about it, how could any of these agencies be expected to maintain a repository of knowledge that deep? What academics can they phone up and ask for help? They were in the dark.

https://www.scribd.com/document/445175966/siradrianbond-Coronavirus-Exposed-Part-1-Communist-Coverup-or-Pandemic-Bioweapon-of-Mass-De

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43523994)

https://imgur.com/a/m05u8AL

Looks to me like it was taken by a drone. I don't know how else you get a pic of a virus lab in China like that. Someone just had that lying around? The questions at the end tell you a lot too I think.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524042)

do we even have to look up his “early life” on wiki?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43522770)

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/nov/17/jake-sullivan-under-fire-amid-john-durham-indictme/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43522832)

Johm Bolton is the current reigning Damn Daddy of this btw.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43522864)

You've got this thing, let's call it the unitary executive/torture/iraq/afghanistan/blackwater agenda, call it the war on terror, whatever. You have to make the whole Federal government to bow to whatever that war on terror needs. If it needs black sites, people shot, cash, Federal fugitives getting security clearances and working as contractors, human slaves to trade to the Saudis (since that's what they really want, not more ferraris), you have to make the US government do that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43523974)

Whoever it is you put in charge of this - THE guy who is going to engineer the process by which you make this all pass legal sufficiency review at ever OGC - the guy who is going to run DoD and DOJ and enough judges to matter - is going to have to be sold to the public somehow. He has to have a name and a face and there has to be some explanation for why he's there. I think Bolton wears this "madman" personality and does and act or whatever because he's a slave to the job. People who do this stuff do it as a way of life.

Pompeo was the closest thing Trump had to that, but like anyone who ever did anything good for Trump he arrived WAY too late to do anything, and look at how Bolton even dadded his way into the Trump administration for a while to get that book deal. You know the only reason Trump hired Bolton in the first place was because someone convinced him he actually NEEDED John Bolton.

Trump never got the importance of certain positions. He needed to be able to put certain things on autopilot from day one, just have people in place who knew all the tricks, but instead he put a total stranger with no govt experience in charge of State Dept. Pompeo at State on day 1 would have prevented COVID.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524312)

OTOH you can't overlook the fact that Holly Petraeus looks like that. Shoulda kept the General taken care of. They should have vetted him and seen this coming. Maybe they did and he was just insatiable.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524375)

Do you think anything will come of his investigation?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43523971)

I'd like to see a full report on what the Brookings people and Benjamin Wittes crowd were up to.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524412)

After he did this the rest of the media followed suit, and all of a sudden you got all these hierarchies of anonymous-but-not leakers:

- a person familiar with this thinking (very very close - like family or long time confidant)

- a person with deep familiarity of the situation but not authorized to speak.... (NSC, chief of staff, cabinet level)

That's how they would do it. As a joke MI put out a statement in the August where they implied Biden was the leaker. It was something like "an anonymous source in control of everything whose decisions are not subject to higher review." Another time they said "someone with firsthand knowledge of his thinking." They were doing onion-esque plays on words to make fun of the Trump-era deep statespeak. Russians were doing it too. I have screenshots of all this shit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524437)

However, the articles that say "POTUS secretly thinking about nuking Israel" are trying to get information out to as many of the right people as possible, as quickly as possible. They have no reason to imply this is coming from chief of staff if it's actually coming from career bureaucrats. Furthermore, IF they did something like that they would get a call from the real chief of staff.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43526376)

Generic "familiar with his thinking" could refer to a low level dork who was in a meeting, but that assumes we're talking about an official action or something that would have been revealed at a meeting. If it's a person "familiar with his thinking" on Jews that's different I think.

I never paid much attention to sourcing on claims that could be easily rebutted if untrue. The idea with all of these was to lock Trump into a position where only he himself could deny the accusation. If the only people in the room were Trump and people selected by his chief of staff, CoS knows the others won't talk. People don't get how powerful chiefs of staff are.

https://imgur.com/a/WmVeKuA

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43526406)

I've never seen any evidence to corroborate anything he says about that. He gave outstanding lectures that were really enlightening that went for like 8 hours. Around hour six was when he would start talking about lizards and it was just downhill from there. So I've always had a poor impression of this theory. I just don't like it. People accused Icke of using reptiles as code for jews and I think that's probably right.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43524021)

any "good guys" on the inside are either long gone or have resigned themselves to sit quiet and do nothing ever

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4957292&forum_id=2#43525617)