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jake sullivan
What Next for Biden Officials Who Enabled War Crimes?
No matter how disastrously they perform in office—or what law-breaking they enable—departing White House officials from any administration can usually find cushy new jobs at lobbying outfits, hedge funds, media outlet, or major colleges and universities.
Mar 29, 2025
If a worker consistently and completely fails at a job, he or she should not receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a pat on the back. Sooner or later, that worker should receive a termination notice.
This is especially true of workers who engage in unethical behavior on the job. Almost any worker who violates office rules, defrauds their employer, or hurts their customers risks not only termination, but potential lawsuits and criminal charges.
Yet a small sector of workers in our nation do not face such consequences for such mistakes or misconduct on the job. Some people, no matter how badly they fail at their job or how many disasters they create on their job, can keep their positions or even move on to even better jobs.
Who are these special people who can “fail up” again and again?
Outgoing White House officials.
No matter how disastrously they perform in office, departing White House officials from any administration can usually find cushy new jobs at lobbying outfits, hedge funds, media outlets, or major colleges and universities.
To be very clear, McGurk and Sullivan were not civil servants carrying out orders. They were political appointees who developed, advocated, and executed disastrous, deadly and illegal decisions.
For the latest example of this pattern, look no further than where two of the most prominent and disastrous foreign policy officials from the Biden administration just landed.
President Biden's former National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, and his former National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East, Brett McGurk, left the White House when the Trump administration took over in January. Since then, both Sullivan and McGurk have obtained prestigious positions at some of America's most respected universities.
Without any hint of irony, the Harvard Kennedy School recently appointed Mr. Sullivan to serve as its first-ever "Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order." He has also just been appointed a Senior Fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
Meanwhile, Mr. McGurk joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the end of last month as a senior fellow (he also, predictably, joined a hedge fund).
In a moral and rational society, neither Mr. Sullivan or Mr. McGurk would be able to land such jobs after leaving behind a trail of death and destruction stretching halfway around the world.
Take Mr. Sullivan. He personally spent months presiding over planning for the U.S. military's phased troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Remember how well that ended? Vietnam-like images of U.S. diplomats scrambling to evacuate the Embassy. Panicking Afghans overwhelming U.S. military bases and falling off of airplanes. The killing of 13 American soldiers and hundreds of Afghans at Abbey Gate.
The Pentagon, which often reported to President Biden through Mr. Sullivan, capped the Afghan withdrawal disaster off by launching a drone strike on a supposed ISIS car bomber who turned out to be a well-known humanitarian aid worker returning home to his family. The attack killed 10 civilians, including children who were outside and visible to drone operators when they fired on them. Under Mr. Sullivan's leadership, no one faced any accountability for this war crime.
In a moral and rational society, neither Mr. Sullivan or Mr. McGurk would be able to land such jobs after leaving behind a trail of death and destruction stretching halfway around the world.
Both Mr. Sullivan and Mr. McGurk also played critical roles in ensuring U.S. financial, military and diplomatic support for the Israeli government's war crimes against the people of Gaza.
When asked in 2023 if Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure in Gaza constituted a war crime, Sullivan attributed such reports to the “fog of war.”
In November 2023, when the Israeli government was carrying out the defense minister’s pledge to block all food, fuel, water to everyone in Gaza because they were fighting “human animals,” Mr. McGurkendorsed the illegal collective punishment of an entire civilian population by saying that if all the hostages were released, humanitarian aid would be allowed in.
According to reporting byThe Atlantic, Mr. McGurk wouldpush back against colleagues concerned by civilian casualties in Gaza by “invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration,” an operation that cost the lives of 9,000 Iraqi civilians.
During a May 2024 press briefing, Mr. Sullivandenied that what was going on in Gaza was a genocide, and in 2025 he went on to preposterously say that President Biden’s policiessaved lives in Gaza.
In addition to their rhetorical support for war crimes in Gaza, Sullivan and McGurk helped develop and execute the policy that led to massive arms shipments to the Netanyahu government.
In April 2024, the Biden administration approved a shipment of $17 billion in unconditional military aid to the Israeli government. The administration also approveda shipment of over $20 million worth of fighter jets and other military equipment in August 2024. In one of their final acts, the administration approved an$8 billion dollar arms deal with Israel in January 2025.
By overseeing arms shipments to the Israeli government long after it waswell-established that American weapons had been used in the commission of war crimes by Israeli forces, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. McGurk brazenly violated federal laws, including the Leahy Law, Section 6201, and Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act.
To be very clear, McGurk and Sullivan were not civil servants carrying out orders. They were political appointees who developed, advocated, and executed disastrous, deadly and illegal decisions.
Harvard and the University of New Hampshire’s decisions to reward McGurk and Sullivan with prestigious appointments represent the worst example of failing up. The appointments also show a callous, arguably racist disregard for the countless Palestinian Americans whose family members were victims of the White House’s policies.
Everyone knows that if these two officials had enabled the slaughter of 40,000 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans instead of 40,000 mostly Muslim people of color, Harvard and UNH would never hire them.
Starting with Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, it's time for White House officials to face the same treatment that most other Americans would face for sparking disasters on the job.
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Biden Greenlights 'Racist' and 'Sociopathic' $8B Arms Sale to Israel
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
Jan 04, 2025
The administration of US President Joe Biden announced on Saturday an arms sale to Israel valued at $8 billion, just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Biden has repeatedly rejected calls to suspend military backing for Israel because of the number of civilians killed during the war in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza, primarily women and children.
The sale includes medium-range air-to-air missiles, 155mm projectile artillery shells for long-range targeting, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs, and more.
Human rights groups, former State Department officials, and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, citing violations of US laws, including the Leahy Law, as well as international laws and human rights.
The Leahy Law, named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the US to withhold military assistance from foreign military or law enforcement units if there is credible evidence of human rights violations.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s most significant Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called Biden’s new $8 billion arms deal “racist” and “sociopathic.”
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes.
The US is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said on Saturday:
“We strongly condemn the Biden administration for its unbelievable and criminal decision to send another $8 billion worth of American weapons to the government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu instead of using American leverage to force an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter, could send Netanyahu even more bombs while his government openly kidnaps doctors, destroys hospitals, and exterminates the last survivors in northern Gaza.
“If President Biden is actually the person who approved this new $8 billion arms sale, then he is a war criminal who belongs in a cell at The Hague alongside Netanyahu. But if Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, and other aides are making these unconscionable decisions as shadow presidents, then anyone with a conscience in the administration should speak up now about their abuses of power.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US accounted for 69% of Israel's imports of major conventional arms between 2019 and 2023.
On the other hand, incoming President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged unwavering support for Israel and has never committed to supporting an independent Palestinian state.
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Biden's New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia's Prince Bonesaw
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
Aug 16, 2024
Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.
In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.
What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.
Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.
Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.
Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.
The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.
Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.
While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.
Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.
Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.
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