It shouldn’t have to be said, but Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council officer testifying in the House impeachment proceeding, is a great American patriot. He is not a Ukrainian agent.
The line of attack against Vindman goes as follows: Somehow a Purple Heart recipient who spent two decades serving the United States in the military and then another as an Army foreign area officer secretly still holds primary allegiance to Ukraine, a nation he fled from as a Jewish refugee when he was 3 years old.
And this isn’t a theory that’s being touted on QAnon message boards. President Trump’s surrogates are spewing it on national television.
Sean Duffy on CNN on Army Lt. Col. Vindman: “It seems very clear that he is incredibly concerned about Ukrainian defense. I don’t know that he’s concerned about American policy … we all have an affinity to our homeland where we came from … he has an affinity for the Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/dlsYlTnCwR
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 29, 2019
Oh my God, look at the spin they are using right now, actually saying that Vindman is a Ukrainian double agent….this is so freaking bananas pic.twitter.com/Oxpju5W23N
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 29, 2019
No, you didn’t just huff glue. That’s John Yoo, the Korean-born author of the torture memos allowing the Bush administration to use “enhanced interrogation,” implying that an Iraq War veteran is committing espionage on behalf of Ukraine.
It’s one thing to argue that Vindman’s prepared remarks indicate he won’t bring new or impeachable information to Congress. It’s another entirely to impugn the integrity of a war hero without a modicum of evidence. This isn’t a case of career bureaucrats such as Peter Strzok and Lisa Page clandestinely plotting to take down the president. This is a lifelong patriot, who joined the National Security Council during the Trump administration, going through the proper channels, publicly, claiming he twice voiced concern about Trump’s conduct to the National Security Council, corroborating the testimony of other credible witnesses.
Furthermore, this scurrilous attack on Vindman’s patriotism is rendered all the more laughable by the fact that Trump let Rudy Giuliani outsource American outreach to Ukraine to two actual foreigners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both of whom still have Ukrainian business interests.
At the very least, there is more evidence for the theory that Trump attempted to initiate a possibly impeachable quid pro quo with Ukraine than there is for the idiotic conspiracy theory that Vindman is secretly working on the behalf of Ukraine.
