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Since October 2005, John P. Hannah has held the position of assistant for national security affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney. Prior to this appointment, Hannah was part of the vice president's national security staff for more than four years and played a major role in corralling intelligence that the Bush administration used to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq. He previously served in the State Department's Office of Arms Control and International Security, alongside Undersecretary John Bolton, and in the State Department during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Cheney promoted Hannah to his current role following the indictment and resignation of I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, with whom Hannah worked closely. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed Hannah as part of the investigation that led to Libby's resignation, but despite speculation that he was involved in the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, Hannah was not charged with any crime. Hannah's promotion in the aftermath of the Plame scandal disappointed reform-minded Democrats who complained that Hannah was too closely linked to Libby. "Instead of cleaning house, you simply rearranged some of the furniture," Senate Democrats wrote Cheney, regarding Hannah's appointment (New York Times, November 4, 2005).

Soon after his promotion, Hannah, along with Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, and National Security Council Deputy Adviser Elliott Abrams, conducted high-level, strategic meetings with Israeli officials regarding "the Iranian government's growing radicalization and its irresponsible policy on nuclear issues" (State Department, November 29, 2005). Hannah is among the hardliners on Iran within the vice president's office. When Tehran refused to suspend its uranium enrichment operations in August 2006, Hannah insisted on a firm U.S. response, arguing that anything less risked "allowing Iran's response to appear reasonable" (New York Times, August 25, 2006).

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Hannah worked closely with Libby, who was part of an informal White House team called the "White House Iraq Group," which was tasked with culling information about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (Washington Post, October 20, 2005). The Libby-Hannah team produced a 48-page draft for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-infamous 2003 speech at the United Nations in which he used erroneous evidence to justify invading Iraq. According to commentator Robert Dreyfuss, Powell regarded the draft to be "so extreme" that he "trashed the entire document."

Hannah was also a main liaison between the vice president's office and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a leading Iraqi exile. Chalabi was a close confidant of many neoconservative figures in and out of government prior to the 2003 Iraq War and was accused of feeding false information to the Bush administration regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons programs (New York Times, October 30, 2005). The INC's other main contact was Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, who headed the Defense Department's much-maligned Office of Special Plans (OSP). Under the direction of senior Defense Department staff, including Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith, OSP provided much of the since-discredited evidence that supposedly linked Iraq to al-Qaida and detailed Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (New Yorker, May 12, 2003).

Prior to his work in government, Hannah worked as a lawyer in Washington, DC and as a research fellow and deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank established by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the 1980s. A graduate of Duke University and Yale University Law School, Hannah's initial expertise was the Soviet Union, but his interests broadened. Hannah served on the 2000 Presidential Study Group that examined U.S. policy in the Middle East, along with a number of prominent thinkers and government officials. The group's report, "Navigating Through Turbulence: America and the Middle East in a New Century," was criticized by some as "pro-Israeli" and has been widely cited as the basis for some Bush administration Mideast policies.