As a leading candidate in the race to represent New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, Democrat Maura Sullivan is running on her resume. By any conventional standard, it’s a strong one: wartime service as a U.S. Marine captain, graduate degrees from Harvard, stints in the corporate world, and jobs in the Obama administration.
In the primary’s final weeks, Sullivan is making the case to voters that her experience — including her work in key federal posts — distinguishes her from her rivals in a competitive race. But Sullivan and her campaign have also characterized her background in ways that appear to stretch or embellish the record, suggesting she had greater responsibility and influence than the facts bear out.
‘Six years’ in the administration
Sullivan’s connection to President Barack Obama is something she emphasizes as she courts Democratic voters. She says her first visit to New Hampshire came when she volunteered for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign while a graduate student at Harvard.
Sullivan has told voters she spent six years working for the Obama administration. It’s true that Sullivan worked for the Obama-era Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs in public affairs positions. But those jobs spanned just two years, 2014 to 2016. To get Sullivan’s math to add up to six years, you have to include the four years she spent as an unpaid board member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees U.S. military cemeteries and monuments. Sullivan held the post from June of 2010 until October 2014, while she worked full-time at PepsiCo as a senior franchise manager and zone director, according to her resume.
Sullivan’s campaign uses this claimed six-year tenure to connect her to what many Democrats see as the signal policy accomplishment of the Obama presidency.
“Maura was proud to be part of the Obama administration when they passed the Affordable Care Act,” her campaign website states.
In fact, Sullivan was working at PepsiCo when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March of 2010, not in the Obama administration.
Asked about Sullivan’s lack of connection to government work when the ACA was signed, the campaign responded with an amended claim: “Maura was proud to be part of the administration when they implemented the Affordable Care Act in 2010.”
Sullivan’s sole government post at that time, however, was as a board member on the Battle Monuments Commission — which played no role in implementing the ACA — and not as an Obama administration employee.
'Across the table with Netanyahu'
While Sullivan talks often on the campaign trail about her time as a federal employee, it represents a relatively short period in her resume.
After graduating from Northwestern University in 2001, she joined the Marines, where she rose to the rank of captain and served in the Iraq War, including a deployment to Fallujah. She went on earn degrees in business and public administration from Harvard in 2009, and was hired by PepsiCo into its leadership development program, where she spent five years. Her two years working for the Obama administration followed. She then ran for Congress in 2018, finishing second in the Democratic primary to Chris Pappas. She returned to the private sector after that loss, spending just over four years working in the health tech sector, before launching her second run for Congress last year.
In this campaign, Sullivan regularly refers to her time at the Pentagon. Sullivan spent less than a year as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and then a year as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. She's said such jobs had her criss-crossing the globe and in regular direct contact with global leaders and prepared her for the work she would pursue in Congress. During an April candidate forum in Barrington, Sullivan said she spent “days, if not weeks, meeting with world leaders and military leaders throughout the Middle East.”
And during a candidate forum on Manchester Public TV in May, Sullivan was more specific: “I sat across the table with Netanyahu," she said. “I sat across the table with world leaders.”
When asked for details of these experiences in a brief interview this week, Sullivan said, ”I traveled with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, all round the world.” Pressed for more detail about her time sitting “across the table” from the prime minister of Israel, Sullivan referred to a trip by then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to the Middle East to reassure allies after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That trip came just two weeks after Sullivan started working at the Pentagon.
“I had the chance to participate in high-level bilateral negotiations,” Sullivan told NHPR. She also offered to follow up with more information “offline.”
Her campaign later stipulated that Sullivan was “one of eight Americans in the room for that meeting,” which took place in Tel Aviv. It also reiterated that Sullivan had spent time in several countries in the Middle East, but did not provide details about the specific “world leaders” she says she “sat across the table” from while working for the Defense Department.
Sullivan told NHPR that she’s highlighting her international experience because “these are serious times. We have a reckless, unhinged president in the White House, and we need leaders who are grounded in service, but also grounded in experience — for whom this isn’t their first rodeo.”
