Joe Biden’s choice for national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, slammed President Donald Trump’s Middle East policies during an interview in late 2017 with China’s government-controlled CGTN network.
Sullivan appeared on the network to discuss Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital, the Daily Caller first pointed out.
“This was a political decision, not a foreign policy decision. This was about Trump and his supporters. It was not about moving the peace process forward,” Sullivan said in the interview, which aired Dec. 9, 2017.
He went onto say the move “created turbulence and turmoil” in the region.
“It’s hard to find a good argument for this decision with respect to advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East,” Sullivan went on.
Trump went on to secure three normalization deals in six weeks between Israel and Arab nations.
Sullivan continued by saying the Trump’s Jerusalem decision wouldn’t do much to impact negotiations.
“I don’t believe that we were near a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan was a top adviser to Hillary Clinton at the State Department as well as national security adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice president.
He was credited for initiating the secret talks with Iranian officials in 2012 that laid the groundwork for the nuclear deal.
The Justice Department requires CGTN, formerly known as CCTV, to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) because it is controlled by the Chinese government, the Daily Caller noted.
Sullivan’s appearance on CGTN was in his capacity as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank that has received between $500,000 and $1 million in funding from Zhang Yichen, the CEO of CITIC Group, one of China’s largest state-owned investment companies.
Zhang, a trustee at the think tank, is also a member of the Eleventh and Twelfth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory group to the Chinese communist party.
During Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, Sullivan sent and received hundreds of classified emails that were stored on the private email server.
A dump of Clinton’s email correspondences by Wikileaks showed Sullivan making sarcastic comments about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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