Jake Sullivan

Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan (born November 28, 1976) is an American attorney who currently serves as the United States National Security Advisor, reporting directly to President Joe Biden.

He previously served as Director of Policy to President Barack Obama, National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary Hillary Clinton at the U.S. Department of State.

Sullivan attended Southwest High School in Minneapolis, where he graduated in 1994.

He was a Coca-Cola Scholar, debate champion, president of the student council, and voted "most likely to succeed" in his class.

Sullivan attended Yale University, where he majored in international studies and political science and was awarded the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize.

He was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa his senior year and graduated summa cum laude with distinction in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts.

Sullivan won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied international relations.

He was also awarded a Marshall Scholarship but he declined in favor of the Rhodes.

While at Oxford, Sullivan served as a managing editor of the Oxford International Review.

He graduated with a Master of Philosophy.

He graduated with a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2003.

He is a member, and former board member, of the Truman National Security Project.

At Yale, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Daily News.

He interned at the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Yale Debate Association and earned a Truman Scholarship in his junior year.

He also worked for Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

After graduating from law school, Sullivan clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court.

After his clerkships, Sullivan returned to his hometown of Minneapolis to practice law at Faegre & Benson and taught law as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

After Faegre & Benson, Sullivan worked as chief counsel to Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, who connected him to Hillary Clinton.

In 2008, Sullivan was an advisor to Hillary Clinton during the primary cycle and then to Barack Obama during the general election campaign.

He prepared Clinton and Obama for debates.

When Clinton became secretary of state, Sullivan joined as her deputy chief of staff and Director of Policy Planning, and travelled with her to 112 countries.

Sullivan worked in the Obama administration as deputy assistant to the president and National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden.

He became Biden's top security aide in February 2013 after Clinton stepped down as secretary of state.

In those posts, he played a role in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards Libya, Syria, and Myanmar.

In November 2013, the Associated Press reported that officials in the Obama administration had been in secret contact with Iranian officials throughout 2013 about the feasibility of an agreement over the Iranian nuclear program.

The report stated that American officials, including Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns, Senior White House Iran Advisor Puneet Talwar, and Sullivan, had secretly met with their Iranian counterparts at least five times face to face in Oman.

Those efforts paved the way for the Geneva interim agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, known officially as the Joint Plan of Action, signed by Iran and the P5+1 countries in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 24, 2013.

Since then, Sullivan has regularly attended bilateral consultations with Iran in Geneva as a member of the U.S. delegation on the Iran nuclear negotiations.

On June 20, 2014, The New York Times reported that Sullivan was leaving the administration in August 2014 to teach at Yale Law School.

, he was a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Sullivan also served as senior advisor to the U.S. federal government at the Iran nuclear negotiations and senior policy advisor to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, as well as visiting professor at Yale Law School.

Sullivan was Hillary Clinton's chief foreign policy adviser during her 2016 bid for the presidency.

He was reported to be the only senior staffer who repeatedly suggested that Clinton should spend more time in Midwestern swing states during the election campaign.

Clinton's failure to win those states was a key factor in her defeat.

Sullivan was prominent in many of the Podesta emails released during the 2016 US presidential election, including Sullivan questioning if Democratic primary candidate Martin O'Malley's 100% clean energy by 2050 plan was "realistic".

After the election, Sullivan confessed to feeling "a keen sense of responsibility" for Clinton's defeat.

On November 23, 2020, President-elect Biden announced that Sullivan would be appointed the United States National Security Advisor.

He took office on January 20, 2021.

Sullivan was born in Burlington, Vermont to a family of Irish descent and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His father worked for the Star Tribune and was a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and his mother was a high school guidance counselor.