Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max Ask most reporters who cover the Biden White House what the most penetrating piece of journalism has been about the first year-and-a-half in office and you’re likely to get blank stares. That soon may change. Longtime New York Times reporter DAVID SANGER is producing what promises to be a probing documentary about the early Biden years, he confirmed to West Wing Playbook. Titled “Year One: A Political Odyssey,” it will be released on HBO and HBO Max on Oct. 19 and focus largely on the major national security issues that confounded the administration. More enticingly, Sanger’s team scored interviews with some of the top administration officials (though not President JOE BIDEN himself) for it. Sanger said he and the documentary team spoke with Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN, a college friend of his who let the film crew tag along on international travel. They also interviewed National Security Adviser JAKE SULLIVAN, who, according to Sanger, was in the Situation Room during Biden’s inauguration to monitor for potential political violence, and Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN. The team also met with CIA director BILL BURNS , who in the film described his first secret meeting with Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN. “The whole film plays through the interplay of these three things: Covid, post-Jan. 6, and the international challenges,” the longtime New York Times reporter said in a phone call. He said the film ends with Biden’s first State of the Union address, delivered this past March. “The common theme — I’d say there are two: The country was in a deep hole because there wasn’t a Covid vaccination rollout plan, they had to kind of make one on the fly,” Sanger said. “The second was the country was deeply divided and our adversaries saw an opportunity in that because they knew we were so distracted. I think you’ve seen that with the resumption of superpower conflict.” Sanger is collaborating once more with director JOHN MAGGIO and much of the same crew that made the 2020 HBO documentary on cyber warfare, “The Perfect Weapon,” based on his 2018 book of the same name. Sanger told West Wing Playbook it was initially difficult to secure access for the documentary due to White House’s skittishness around in-person meetings as Covid-19 cases raged during the early days of Biden’s term (he recalled a “15 minute rule” for some meetings that the White House implemented in order to limit the potential for Covid breakouts). But the administration began to open up over summer 2021 as fears about the virus eased — and top administration figures were eager to explain their thinking around thorny dilemmas, including the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The documentary begins with the Covid crisis and some of the fallout from the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Sanger recalled a story former press secretary JEN PSAKI relayed about how senior members of the Biden team would be bused to the White House from the Smithsonian zoo in the early days of the administration to avoid additional security around the complex. The documentary will focus at length on the U.S. relationship with China, and especially the hasty American withdrawal from Afghanistan (Sanger says that he and his crew were “pretty critical” of the administration on the pullout). The film offers a number of revealing moments from the hectic weeks in August 2021, including an instance where Biden put his head down on the Situation Room desk upon learning that 13 service members were killed. Sanger also argued that the Afghanistan failure gave the administration a chance to “fix themselves” a bit, allowing the White House to recalibrate its foreign policy strategies and, ultimately, engineer a savvy campaign to needle the Russians as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine in early 2022. The documentary is independent of the New York Times, where Sanger has covered foreign policy for decades. He told West Wing Playbook that he instead drew much of the material from an untitled book he’s working on about rising superpower conflicts, though that project will go beyond Biden’s first year. MESSAGE US — Are you TODD ZUBATKIN, the White House deputy director of research? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com and we may publish your comments.
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