Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is many things, including a Purple Heart recipient who took a bomb for our freedoms in Iraq, a career foreign service officer, and, we’re told, a great American patriot.
What Vindman is not, however, is an important witness to the impeachment investigation against President Trump.
Unlike other witnesses who have testified publicly, Vindman had extensive direct contact with Trump throughout the spring and summer. But Vindman only witnessed two disturbing events.
The first was the July 10 exchange when he alleges that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland emphasized the importance of Ukraine investigating the Bidens and Burisma Holdings. The second was the July 25 phone call that instigated the original whistleblower report. Nearly everything else that Vindman has claimed is mere context.
Thus far, Vindman’s account of these two events has seemed credible and, indeed, worrying. If Sondland did hinge the congressionally approved aid to Ukraine on the announcement of, but not necessarily the actual investigation of, the Bidens, that would prove impeachable if Trump approved the scheme. But Sondland is testifying tomorrow, and the transcript of the July 25 call was released months ago.
Given Sondland’s deteriorating credibility, having secondhand witnesses such as Vindman use the truth to compel Sondland to clarify his answers is obviously beneficial. But Vindman is by no means a star witness, and his counsel treating him as such is only ripening him for Republican attacks.
In Tuesday’s public testimony, as he did with his closed-door testimony, Vindman defied precedent in wearing his Army uniform to testify in his capacity as a member of the National Security Council. The intentionally performative move has once again opened him to attacks on his motives. Although his counsel surely knows that he’s not a star witness, they let him conclude his opening statement, not by making some greater point about our Ukrainian relationship, as William Taylor did, or American diplomacy, as Marie Yovanovitch did.
Instead, Vindman’s lawyers let him wax poetic about his dad. The GOP attack ads write themselves.
Vindman is no pawn, and it’s possible that he overrode the advice of his counsel. But the closed-door transcript indicates that his counsel just isn’t very good at this.
During the closed-door testimony, Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik began to question Vindman, only to be interrupted by his attorney Michael Volkov.
“First off, I don’t know who you are, if you could identify yourself for the record,” he said, a claim that was almost surely a lie. Witnesses don’t have to ingratiate themselves to either side, but outright hostility and, frankly, sexism, are uncalled for.
Unlike the respectable objectivity of Taylor and Yovanovitch’s performances, it seems obvious that Vindman’s attorney is happy to prop him up as a #Resistance hero. That’s a disservice to his client, the impeachment investigation, and the country.
