Alexander Vindman is a lieutenant colonel who currently serves in the White House as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. He was an eyewitness to President Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and on Tuesday he is going to testify before Congress. The New York Times has the story:
“I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Colonel Vindman said in his statement….“This would all undermine U.S. national security,” Colonel Vindman added, referring to Mr. Trump’s comments in the call.
Vindman was also present during a White House meeting between American and Ukrainian officials:
[It was] a stormy meeting in which Mr. Bolton is said to have had a tense exchange with Mr. Sondland after the ambassador raised the matter of investigations he wanted Ukraine to undertake. That meeting has been described in previous testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
At a debriefing later that day attended by the colonel, Mr. Sondland again urged Ukrainian officials to help with investigations into Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
“Ambassador Sondland emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens and Burisma,” Colonel Vindman said in his draft statement.
“I stated to Ambassador Sondland that his statements were inappropriate” and that the “request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the N.S.C. was going to get involved in or push,” he added.
Most of this has been reported before, but Vindman is an eyewitness, and an unusually credible one. He’s an active duty officer who’s an Iraq war veteran; he immigrated from Russia to the US at age three; he speaks Ukrainian; and he’s widely regarded as a diligent and earnest civil servant. So how do you deal with someone like that? If you’re Fox News, you do it like this:
That was quick: Laura Ingraham goes right at LTC Vindman being a Soviet refugee of Ukrainian origin; John Yoo then says LTC Vindman may be guilty of espionage https://t.co/bht402n9QP
— David Burbach (@dburbach) October 29, 2019
Is there truly nothing these people won’t do or say? This is just so despicable.
