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ALEXANDER VINDMAN SPEAKS. Last fall, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a member of the National Security Council staff, was a star witness against President Trump at House impeachment hearings. Since then, he has left public view, left the White House, and left the Army. Now, with an election approaching, he is launching what appears to be a media campaign to take shots at the president.
Shots like this: “President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin.” Vindman told The Atlantic. “We cannot have four more years of this president and the kind of damage that he’s done to American institutions,” he told NBC News.
But neither The Atlantic nor NBC devoted much time to what Vindman did to start the impeachment process. In my new book Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump, I report that House Republicans came to believe that Vindman was the initial force behind impeachment. Remember that in the Ukraine affair, the whistleblower — never publicly identified — filed a complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that eventually resulted in impeachment. But who told the whistleblower about the call? That person got the action started. House Republicans came to believe it was Vindman.
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On July 25, 2019, Vindman was one of several people who listened to the call as it happened. Of those people, Vindman was the only one who thought there was something wrong with the call. The next day, July 26, a CIA official — the person who became the whistleblower — wrote a memo describing a “conversation I had this afternoon with a White House official about the telephone call yesterday morning.” The soon-to-be whistleblower wrote that, “The official who listened to the entirety of the phone call was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S. national security apparatus about the call.”
So who was that person who told the whistleblower about the call in the first place? Republican House investigators asked Vindman who he talked to about his concerns over the call. In both secret and public testimony, Vindman named the people he talked to inside the National Security Council. Then he was asked who he told about the call outside the NSC. He said there were just two people. One was George Kent, a State Department official who dealt with Ukraine.
And the other was…at that point, Vindman, with the full support of Democrats, would not say. Republicans asked who that final person Vindman talked to was, but House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff forbade Vindman from answering. Why? Because, Schiff said, identifying the person Vindman told about the call would identify the whistleblower himself.
Republicans asked over and over. Each time, Democrats refused to allow Vindman to answer. That person must never, ever be named, they said. And why? Because it would identify the whistleblower.
Republicans then reached the obvious conclusion: That last person Vindman told about the call was the person who became the whistleblower. It was Vindman who effectively got the whistleblower affair, and thus impeachment, rolling. “Vindman was the person on the call who went to the whistleblower after the call, to give the whistleblower the information he needed to file his complaint,” Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin told me. From Obsession:
On NBC, Vindman again did not name that person. “I know who I spoke to,” he said, “but do I know that that was the person that then made the complaint? I do not.”
One of the many noteworthy aspects of the Trump impeachment was that, even though it was a matter of the most serious public concern, it began with an anonymous complaint that remained anonymous through secret hearings and through public hearings, through committee investigations, through a House impeachment vote, and, finally, through a Senate impeachment trial. The identity of the whistleblower remained a secret. And related to that, the identity of the final person with whom Vindman discussed the Trump-Zelensky call remained a secret, too — one he appears ready to keep for a long, long time.
