"I have great respect for Hersh and his reporting and believe that Sullivan could certainly have been instrumental in pushing for and carrying out this deceitful campaign that likely has inflicted monumental damage on citizens worldwide while also sapping America's remaining national prestige," Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
In December 2021, Jake Sullivan, acting with Joe Biden's blessing, convened men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments to come up with a plan on how to destruct Nord Stream 1 and 2 designed to pump Russian natural gas to Europe, according to Seymour Hersh's recent bombshell.
In early 2022, the CIA told Sullivan that they knew how to blow up the pipelines. The group decided to keep the risky plot on a hush. The US Congress wasn't informed. The US military and intelligence operatives did their best to conceal Washington's role in the sabotage. As per the investigative journalist, the team had concerns about the legality of the plot and was well aware that it could quickly morph into a foreign policy nightmare.
After the pipelines had been destroyed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, later, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland openly praised the development.
"When any crime is committed, the immediate question to ask when seeking suspects is 'to whose benefit?' Not only did it benefit the US, US officials made comments before and after the pipeline's destruction virtually confirming their role and the benefits derived," Brian Berletic, geopolitical analyst and former US marine, told Sputnik.
For his part, Jake Sullivan stated laconically on September 27, 2022, that the US was supporting efforts to investigate the "apparent sabotage" and "will continue [it's] work to safeguard Europe’s energy security."
"Hersh's reporting on the Nord Stream bombing is completely convincing and I know for a fact that he has reliable sources, mostly in the intelligence community, but I would rather regard Sullivan as the implementer of the attack on the pipeline by virtue of his position rather than the driving force behind it," Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. "To be sure, Joe Biden would have had to promote and endorse the project."
9 February 2023, 10:43 GMT
Clinton's Golden Boy
Jake Sullivan, 46, has long been praised as a "golden boy" by the US mainstream media. Having graduated from Yale in 1998 Sullivan became an advisor to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 and later, after Hillary dropped out from the race, he advised Barack Obama during his general election campaign.
Sullivan was just 32 when he was sworn in as Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff for policy at the US State Department. When Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, Obama promoted Sullivan to the position of national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In 2015, Sullivan married Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to well-known hawks Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who used to previously work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security. (Goodlander is currently Counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland).
Sullivan is known for being a quiet but prominent member of the Clinton-Obama team. According to the press, he was part of the "exclusive" team working on resuming relations with Cuba and striking the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. He is also said to be Hillary's close confidante in the Libya plan, which was developed months before the 2011 NATO invasion of the North African state and brutal killing of its leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Sullivan and his boss, Clinton, adhered to the concept of "smart power," which encompasses the use of military threat, force, and sanctions and the soft-power levers favored by foreign policy doves, which includes humanitarian aid and negotiations.
The aide was reportedly called "the cat's meow" and a "potential future president" by Hillary, while Biden lauded him as a "once-in-a-generation intellect."
In 2015, the sandy-haired Minnesotan joined Hillary on her 2015/2016 election cycle as a foreign policy adviser and eventually returned to the US administration as Joe Biden's national security adviser in 2021.
14 October 2021, 17:52 GMT
Sullivan Lacks True Sense of Right Versus Wrong
However, there's another side to Sullivan's stellar career. "Sullivan is clearly drunk on power and lacking a true sense of right versus wrong," according to Ortel.
"Sullivan is a fiercely partisan globalist who achieved numerous high honors in academic life so he is supremely self-confident and, sadly, often grievously wrong," Ortel told Sputnik. "One way to get a sense of the way he operates is to look through the State Department and Podesta WikiLeaks files and the FBI Vault files on Hillary Clinton where Sullivan is frequently involved. Like the Clintons, Sullivan thrust himself into contact with powerful Democrats and operated well above his experience level early on. But unlike the Clintons, Obama, and Biden, Sullivan has yet to hold elected office."
One might wonder why Sullivan rose to prominence so fast even though he had relatively little experience in government affairs. Hillary herself admitted that Jake wasn't the most experienced diplomat when it came to foreign policy.
"Jake was not the most experienced diplomat at the State Department I could have chosen, but he was discreet and had my absolute confidence," Clinton wrote in her memoir Hard Choices while describing her decision to tap Sullivan to kick off negotiations with Iran in 2012. "His presence would send a powerful message that I was personally invested in this process."
According to US media observers, Sullivan's primary secret is that he mastered himself in delivering on his boss’s wants and needs even when it went contrary to rules and ethics. The US press quoted a senior Obama aide as saying that Sullivan was ready to do "everything" for then-Secretary Clinton.
Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had no scruples about Hillary's unsecured email server use for classified and top secret government correspondence. He was bullish on Washington's Libyan and Syrian interventions which spiraled out of control, completely ruining the North Africa state and leaving the Syrian Arab Republic in tatters.
"Under Obama and Biden, Sullivan is connected to train wreck after train wreck, from the Arab "spring", to Benghazi, ISIS*, the Iran 'deal' and more. He seems to be a huge fan of secret negotiations that are never subject to oversight," Ortel noted.
Sullivan got mired in Hillary Clinton's Benghazi scandal revolving around the former secretary of state's failure to prevent a brutal slaughter of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US nationals in Libya on September 11, 2012. During the investigation into the matter, the House committee stumbled upon Sullivan's letter in which the official emphasized that "we need to live in a world of risks," while touting Washington's decision to oust Gaddafi which opened the door to chaos in Libya.
Trump-Russia "Collusion" Hoax
"In the 2016 campaign, he had every motive to hide the misdeeds of the Clintons, including corruption and tax fraud involving The Clinton Foundation and many other charities," said Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation's alleged fraud for several years. "Here it will prove interesting to see what [Special Councel] John Durham has to say about Sullivan, including his likely role pushing the Russian Hoax, for Trump's impeachment and for electing Joe Biden."
Sullivan appeared to have no scruples about actively spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and keeping the myth alive even after the allegations about Trump were proven null and void. Later, Durham's investigation shed light on Clinton campaign operatives' role in peddling a fake Trump-Alfa Bank story and uncorroborated "dirty dossier" by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
However, when testifying under oath before the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, the Clinton confidante denied any knowledge of the plot or people involved in it.
US investigative journalist Paul Sperry alleged that Sullivan was well-aware that the Trump-Alfa Bank story was "cooked-up" and personally spearheaded a "confidential project" to link Trump to the Kremlin.
Sullivan was also the one who personally promoted the Trump-Russia collusion story prior to the 2016 elections. Thus, during the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, Sullivan met with a number of mainstream media producers and anchors to tell a story "that Trump was conspiring with Putin to steal the election."
Around that time, the CIA intercepted Russian intelligence's "chatter" about a Clinton "foreign policy adviser" who allegedly proposed a plan to vilify Donald Trump by linking him to the Kremlin in order to distract public opinion from Hillary's emailgate scandal. Some US observers believe that the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.
According to Ortel, Sullivan could well be aware of many other "dirty" secrets of the US Democratic establishment, including the Clinton's alleged pay-to-play schemes, Joe and Hunter Biden influence peddling and Team Obama's efforts to undermine then-sitting President Donald Trump through a string of dodgy investigations and leaks.
"Simply put, Sullivan has no choice but to cover up the disasters connected to Biden, Obama and Clinton and likely cannot accept the grave errors (and high crimes) that seem to have been committed. In this effort, he will believe he is secure because his wife is a close advisor and friend of Attorney General Merrick Garland," the Wall Street analyst remarked.
Nord Stream Reporting Not Done
When it comes to the Nord Stream sabotage, "in a just process, Sullivan and his co-conspirators would swiftly be charged, convicted and incarcerated if it is proven that he orchestrated an undeclared war against Russia," argued Ortel.
According to Ortel, by fanning the flames of proxy war against Russia, Team Biden both pursues vested interests and seeks to cover up and obscure political misdeeds involving Biden, Clinton and Obama in Ukraine and other nations from 2009 to date.
Still, it appears that one could soon hear more about the Biden administration's secretive and risky plot. Hersh indicated to Sputnik that more investigative pieces about the Nord Stream explosion were forthcoming, but declined to provide further details.
* ISIS/Daesh/ISIL is a terrorist organization banned by Russia and many other states.