Susan E. Rice and tie to the Brookings Institution

Susan Rice was a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings from 2002 to 2009. At Brookings, she focused on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security. 

In January 2009, the U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination by U.S. President Barack Obama as permanent representative to the United Nations. Before her time at Brookings, Rice served on the staff of the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during President Bill Clinton's second term.
http://www.brookings.edu/experts/rices

The Brookings Institution is an American liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C.,^[2] in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and global economy and development.^[3][4]

Its stated mission is to "provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals: strengthen American democracy; foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans; and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system".^[2]

Brookings states that its scholars "represent diverse points of view" and describes itself as non-partisan.^[2][5] Its liberal reputation derived from "being closely identified with the technocratic liberal style of the 1960s

Brookings was founded in 1916 as the Institute for Government Research (IGR), with the mission of becoming "the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level".^[7]

The Institution's founder, philanthropist Robert S. Brookings (1850–1932), originally financed the formation of three organizations: the Institute for Government Research, the Institute of Economics, and the Robert Brookings Graduate School affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis.^[4] The three were merged into the Brookings Institution on December 8, 1927.^[4][8]

During the Great Depression economists at Brookings embarked on a large scale study commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to understand the underlying causes of the depression. Brookings's first president Harold Moulton and other Brookings scholars later led an effort to oppose President Roosevelt's New Deal policies because they thought such measures were impeding economic recovery.^[9] With the entry into World War II in 1941, Brookings researchers turned their attention to aiding the administration with a series of studies on mobilization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution