Jake Sullivan, who served as former President Biden’s national security adviser, said Thursday he does “not recall” the former president ever forgetting his name, as described in a forthcoming book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson.
In an interview at Politico’s Security Summit, Politico Playbook’s managing editor and author Jack Blanchard asked the former White House official about reporting in the book that claims Biden forgot Sullivan’s name in December 2022, calling him “Steve” a couple of times.
“I do not recall that ever happening,” Sullivan said when asked about the veracity of the account. “And I will tell you, Joe Biden knows my name. He knows my name — like, I talk to him, even now — so I was surprised to read that in the book.”
Sullivan defended the job Biden did in office and what he saw from his interactions with the former president during his term.
“What I will, more generally, say is I had to wake the president up in the middle of the night when there were crises. I had to go into him at various points when unexpected things happened — and surely plenty of unexpected things happened during the time that he was in office and that I was in the seat,” Sullivan said.
“I did that over the course of the four years. And I saw him operating, decision-making, executing as commander-in-chief throughout that time,” he continued.
The remarks come amid new reporting from excerpts of Tapper and Thompson’s forthcoming book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The reporting suggests members of the former president’s Cabinet were iced out toward the end of his term and that only a handful of long-time close advisers and members of his family would interact frequently with the president. The book also cites aides who said Biden would sometimes “mumble incoherently.”
Blanchard, in the interview with Sullivan, pressed the former Biden aide on whether he ever witnessed moments where Biden would “fade away,” as described in the book.
“I could just tell you my own personal experience,” Sullivan responded. “I cannot speak on behalf of aides, unnamed people, and I can’t speak on behalf of what folks, you know, reacted to when they saw him operating in public. All I can do is tell you my experience with him, and that’s what I’ve done.”
A spokesperson for Biden told the New York Times that the president’s team had not seen a copy of the book nor been consulted about fact-checking.
“We are not going to respond to every bit of this book,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”
