Grenell: ‘Very Concerned’ With Biden and His NSA Pick Over China

Richard Grenell at the Federal Defense Ministry in Berlin, Germany, on Nov. 8, 2019. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, said on Sunday that he was very concerned with Joe Biden and his national security advisor pick with respect to U.S.-China policy.

Mark Levin, the host of the Fox News’ “Life Liberty & Levin” show, suggested that Biden is “exactly the wrong man, at the wrong time, to be anywhere near creating and leading American foreign policy” because his family is “so bought off in so many ways by the Communist Chinese government.”

“I’m very concerned about what not only Joe Biden and his family, how they’ve responded to China in the past,” Grenell told Levin on Sunday evening, “ but also those around him.”

“I mean, look at Jake Sullivan, who has really tried to compliment Beijing and to really surrender to the fact that China is going to be a superpower and that we should just deal with it. I don’t think that that’s true.”

Jake Sullivan, currently a senior policy advisor to Biden, was declared on Nov. 23 to be Biden’s pick for future national security advisor. He was national security advisor to then-Vice President Biden during the Obama administration from 2013 to 2014. He was also a lead negotiator in the initial talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal.

“Despite the many divides between the two countries, each will need to be prepared to live with the other as a major power,” Sullivan pointed out in a co-authored article published in the September/October 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs.

The article was titled “Competition Without Catastrophe,” and it expressed concern that Trump Administration’s “competition” might evolve into a confrontation.

This year in August, Sullivan also talked about what the foreign policy could be like if Biden is elected.

“[Biden] will seek to compete from a position of strength, but he will also seek to work with China and any other country on those issues where it can advance the basic purposes of American foreign policy,” Sullivan said in an interview.

Grenell, on the other hand, stressed that the United States should recognize China as a crisis and a real danger.

“We have to get much more aggressive about recognizing that China is a crisis, and too many Democrats are trying to tell us that Russia is the crisis,” Grenell said in the interview.

“We have to make sure that we understand that China has been playing us and it’s time to call out the fact that the international community has failed and the United States has failed to recognize them as a clear and present danger.”

Grenell was the acting director of national intelligence early this year from February to May. He was the ambassador to Germany from May 2018 to June 2020.