Last fall, Lt. Col. 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.
Vindman is making news by saying things 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 said that in an interview with the Atlantic, which has become a much-read resistance clearinghouse.
On Monday night, Vindman spoke to NBC News. “We cannot have four more years of this president and the kind of damage that he’s done to American institutions,” Vindman said, adding that he is now “absolutely a NeverTrumper.” Vindman said he wants to inform voters about Trump and “persuade them to choose an alternative.”
Neither the Atlantic nor NBC devoted much attention to the details of Vindman’s role in the impeachment. And neither clarified what, specifically, 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 against the president that eventually resulted in impeachment. But who told the whistleblower? That person got the action started. House Republicans came to believe it was Vindman.
On July 25, 2019, Vindman was one of several people in the national security and foreign policy bureaucracy who listened to the president’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky live, as it happened. And of those several people, Vindman was the only one who thought there was something wrong with the call. He did not know if it was a crime, he later testified, but he believed it was definitely wrong.
On July 26, 2019, the day after the Trump-Zelensky call, 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 whom 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, outside the NSC, outside the White House, he told about the call. He said there were 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 who the last person Vindman told about the call was. 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. Vindman 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.
“Ultimately, we know Vindman is the person talking to the whistleblower,” said a senior Republican aide. “All the facts point that Vindman here is the coefficient, that he sparked this whole thing. For all intents and purposes, Vindman is the whistleblower here, but he was able to get somebody else to do his dirty work for him.”
On NBC, Vindman again did not name that person. From his conversation with NBC’s Lester Holt:
HOLT: “Vindman says he told the NSC’s legal counsel and others but says he does not know for sure who filed the whistleblower complaint.”
VINDMAN: “I know who I spoke to, but do I know that that was the person that then made the complaint? I do not.”
So Vindman does not know “for sure” who the whistleblower is. And who was that person Vindman spoke to? Vindman obviously knows that. It is not clear whether NBC asked. But it is clear that during the impeachment, Republicans asked and asked and asked, and Vindman never answered.
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 and 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 remains a secret, too — one he appears ready to keep for a long, long time.
