Jake Sullivan

Sullivan was the chief foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton. He was reported to be the only senior staffer who kept on asking if it wasn’t a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states as the election approached. Sullivan was prominent in many of the Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks 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".

Sullivan married Maggie Goodlander, a former senior policy advisor to Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain and law clerk to Chief Judge Merrick Garland and Justice Stephen Breyer, in June 2015.

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 is currently a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He became Vice President Biden's top security aide in February 2013 after Clinton stepped down as U.S. 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 U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William 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.

Prior to teaching at Yale, Sullivan worked in the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. He also served as the Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, and as Deputy Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Prior to this, he was deputy policy director on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential primary campaign, and a member of the debate preparation team for Barack Obama's general election campaign.

In 2008, Sullivan was originally 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 U.S. Secretary of State, Sullivan joined as her deputy chief of staff and Director of Policy Planning, and he travelled with her to 112 countries.

Sullivan attended Yale University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1998. In 2000, he graduated with an MPhil having received a Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at the University of Oxford, and became a managing editor of the Oxford International Review. Afterwards, he returned to Yale Law School and graduated with a Juris Doctor degree in law in 2003.

Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan (born November 28, 1976) is an American policymaker and was a senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, with expertise in foreign policy. He was spoken of as a front-runner for the position of U.S. National Security Advisor under a potential Hillary Clinton administration, before she lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.