Army Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman is the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council in the White House. As such, he was listening in on Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and he was deeply concerned by what he heard. That’s what he plans to tell House impeachment investigators on Tuesday, in what promises to be very, very difficult testimony for Republicans to hand-wave away. In the statement, Vindman emphasizes that he is not the whistleblower who originally raised the issue of the Ukraine call, and “I do not know who the whistleblower is.” But he shared many of the same concerns, and “I did convey certain concerns internally to national security officials in accordance with my decades of experience and training, sense of duty, and obligation to operate within the chain of command.”
On one occasion, Vindman says, he confronted Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland directly. After hearing Sondland pressure Ukrainian officials to “deliver specific investigations in order to secure the meeting with the President,” Vindman writes, “I stated to Amb. Sondland that his statements were inappropriate, that the request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security, and that such investigations were not something the NSC was going to get involved in or push.”
But that was before the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. About that, Vindman says in his statement, ”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.” Indeed, “This would all undermine U.S. national security.” That’s why he registered his concerns internally not once but twice. In every line of his statement, Vindman, who received a Purple Heart in Iraq, works to convey that he is a by-the-book, non-partisan, patriotic guy. “As an active duty military officer, the command structure is extremely important to me. On many occasions I have been told I should express my views and share my concerns with my chain of command and proper authorities.” That’s what he did, but clearly the top of the chain of command in the White House was not interested in hearing him.
House Republicans are presumably hard at work figuring out what stunt they can pull to top last week’s storming of the SCIF to delay and distract from this testimony.