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LT. COL. VINDMAN RETURNS. It seems like eons, but just two years ago at this time, House Democrats were buzzing about a whistleblower complaint about a phone call between President Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Republicans knew nothing about it; they would learn a month or so later, in September 2019.
At the center of it all was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a previously unknown aide in charge of Ukraine affairs on the National Security Council. Vindman, who listened to the call as it happened and believed Trump behaved improperly, became the star witness at House Democrats’ impeachment proceedings. He maintained that he was, at all times, acting as an “apolitical” civil servant.
Now, Vindman has written a book, Here, Right Matters, about his experience. And in one recent publicity interview, with the Lawfare podcast, he said that if there had been no whistleblower complaint against Trump, Vindman would not have “let things stand.” Instead, Vindman said, he would have devised some other tactic to protect Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, from harm by Trump’s actions.
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The whistleblower’s still-anonymous complaint launched congressional impeachment hearings at which Vindman testified. But if there had been no hearings, Vindman said, “I would have had to either stomp my feet up and down or figure out another way to really address an attack on our democratic system.”
Vindman said he is not sure what he would have done. But he felt he had to act, because “the current president, President Biden, would absolutely have been harmed, and who knows if he would have ended up as the Democratic nominee, because President Trump had realized his corrupt enterprise.”
As it happened, Vindman did testify, and today the “apolitical” public servant is proud of his efforts to help Biden win. His work, Vindman said, combined with the strain of the Covid pandemic and last year’s racial unrest, “came together to allow President Biden to defeat President Trump.”
“We contributed to that,” Vindman said, with a touch of pride. “We public servants, the antibodies against corruption, contributed to that. And then the public, the United States citizenry, held the president accountable ultimately where the Senate failed. And that, I think, is a success.”
Vindman was asked whether that attitude confirms what Trump and his supporters have long said about the “deep state” — that there were nameless, faceless functionaries, deep inside the bureaucracy, trying to influence the political process to defeat a president who had been elected by tens of millions American voters.
Not true, Vindman insisted. “The judgments that come in and would label me as a deep stater are partisan, political judgments,” Vindman explained, “when an impartial, fair assessment would suggest that all I did was do my duty.” In short: My critics are partisan, but I am not.
There is much more to the story. You can read about it in my new article here and in my book, Obsession. Republican lawmakers came to believe that Vindman had a conversation with the person who became the whistleblower and essentially set the whistleblower process in motion. To this day, Vindman, who says he discussed the Trump-Zelensky call with six people, will identify five of them but has steadfastly refused to reveal the sixth. That person, Republicans believe, became the whistleblower.
It sure doesn’t sound apolitical. Yet Vindman told the Lawfare podcast, “I still consider myself apolitical.” In fact, he took part in one of the most political exercises one could imagine — and still won’t reveal his entire role in it.
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