A cohort of 12 officials who voluntarily departed their posts during Joe Biden’s presidential administration has released an open letter targeting all prospective 2028 U.S. presidential hopefuls, demanding they explicitly pledge not to hire any former government staff who actively facilitated the actions in Gaza that the United Nations and leading Holocaust scholars have formally classified as genocide. The signatories, drawn primarily from the U.S. State Department, intelligence agencies, and military ranks, include both Arab American and Jewish American representatives spanning multiple federal government sectors.
The letter frames the demand as a baseline standard of accountability, noting that the bare minimum of consequence for the widespread harm enabled by senior U.S. officials is to block those individuals from re-entering positions of public power. It explicitly states that senior officials who ignored verified facts, misled the American public, suppressed internal government dissent, and enabled U.S. material support for Israel’s actions in Gaza have no right to occupy influential roles in any future presidential administration, nor should they be granted access to any institution that allows them to shape U.S. foreign policy or train the next generation of American policy leaders.
This public call comes amid a growing wave of public remorse from high-profile former Biden administration figures who previously served as vocal defenders of Israeli operations in Gaza, many now acknowledging the Biden White House failed to take timely action to halt unfettered civilian casualties. In June 2024, former State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller drew widespread public outrage when he stated on a Sky News podcast that he believed “without a doubt” Israel had committed war crimes, even as he stopped short of labeling the campaign a genocide, adding that Israel was failing as a democracy by refusing to hold its soldiers accountable for conduct in Gaza. Miller also confirmed that deep internal disagreements persisted across the administration for the full duration of Israel’s Gaza assault, which at its peak claimed up to 300 Palestinian lives per day in the besieged enclave.
Two months after Miller’s remarks, former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan faced widespread online backlash for hypocrisy, after he stated in an interview with The Bulwark that he would support congressional efforts to withhold military aid from Israel over its decision to abandon a March 2025 ceasefire agreement. This public stance stood in stark contrast to his actions while serving in the Biden White House, where he personally lobbied Democratic members of Congress to reject legislative proposals that would block arms transfers to Israel, even as pressure from U.S. allies mounted to restrict such shipments.
Earlier in 2025, then-Vice President and subsequent 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris acknowledged “horrific conduct” by Israeli forces that left the Biden administration “fallen short of its moral obligation to human rights and international law,” admitting “We should have acted sooner and more forcefully.”
The open letter from the former administration resignees does not target only Democratic candidates, noting that sustained criticism of the longstanding U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship has gained significant traction in conservative U.S. political circles over the past 18 months, while public opinion polling confirms that U.S. public favorability toward Israel has fallen to its lowest recorded level in history. The letter calls on all 2028 presidential contenders to formally acknowledge that the U.S. government bears complicity in what it describes as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and broader human rights abuses against Palestinian people, facilitated through billions in arms transfers, unwavering diplomatic cover, and active suppression of critical debate on the issue both domestically and internationally.
Context for the letter’s demands stretches back to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel that triggered the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Over the course of the conflict, more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded, and the Gaza Strip has been reduced to widespread structural ruin. Despite Biden’s public comments to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just 10 days after the October 7 attacks warning against indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas, in which Netanyahu reportedly pushed back by citing U.S. wartime bombing of Berlin and the 1945 nuclear strikes on Japan to justify his campaign, the Biden administration authorized nearly $30 billion in new military aid to Israel across separate congressional bills, a level of financial and military support unmatched by any other global ally of Israel.
Critics have repeatedly noted that the Biden administration deliberately refused to leverage this unprecedented financial and military leverage to force a ceasefire as early as May 2024. Multiple former senior administration officials have since confirmed that it was not the Biden White House, but rather the Donald Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, who pressured Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal that Qatari mediators had spent more than a year negotiating. That initial ceasefire was broken by Israeli forces less than two months after it took effect, and it was only in October 2025 that the Trump administration secured a formal, long-term ceasefire through backchannel diplomatic talks with Hamas. Even after that agreement was signed, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, including 19 children in the most recent 30-day reporting period alone.
Bishara Bahbah, a former Democratic voter who shifted his support to Donald Trump during the Biden administration and later served as a key intermediary relaying messages between Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Hamas officials in Doha, told Middle East Eye this week that his recent efforts to push the White House to prioritize enforcing the Gaza ceasefire have been consistently rebuffed, describing his reaction to the snub in unvarnished, blunt terms.