'Apolitical' Alexander Vindman is happy he helped Biden win, coy about whistleblower

Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the White House national security aide who set off the chain of events that led to the investigation and first impeachment of President Donald Trump, recently told an interviewer that if there had been no whistleblower complaint against Trump in the Ukraine affair, Vindman would not have "let things stand." Instead, Vindman said, he would have devised some other tactic to protect Joe Biden, Trump's Democratic rival for the presidency, from harm by Trump's actions.

"What would have happened if there was no whistleblower? What would I have done?" Vindman asked himself during an interview with Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution's Lawfare podcast. Vindman said wanted to testify against the president. But if there had been no congressional inquiry to testify in, Vindman said, "I would have had to either stomp my feet up and down or figure out another way to really address an attack on our democratic system."

Vindman, on a publicity tour for his new book Here, Right Matters, explained that in the late summer of 2019 he believed Trump was "on the brink" of succeeding in pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into corruption in Ukraine that would include the questionable business dealings of Hunter Biden, candidate Biden's drug-addicted son. It was a vulnerable moment for the Democratic contender. "I don't know what I would have done in that case," Vindman said. "But the current president, President Biden, would absolutely have been harmed, and who knows if he would have ended up as the Democratic nominee, because President Trump had realized his corrupt enterprise."

So Vindman was determined to act. As it turned out, House Democrats gave Vindman the opportunity he wanted. Even though they knew they could never win Trump's conviction in the Senate, their hasty impeachment inquiry — at least it was hasty until compared to their second impeachment of Trump in 2021 — was intended to weaken the president heading into his 2020 re-election effort. Vindman emerged as the star witness in that inquiry, and when it was over, even though he was angry at the Senate for not finding Trump guilty, he was happy that he played a role in keeping Biden's campaign viable and, ultimately, bringing about Trump's defeat.

His testimony, along with some others, Vindman said, was "the first crack, the first chip away at the president's claims of good governance...It was brought to light for large swaths of this country that the president is actually in fact a corrupt actor." His testimony, Vindman said, along with the strain of the Covid pandemic and also racial unrest, "came together to allow President Biden to defeat President Trump."

"We contributed to that," Vindman told Lawfare, with a touch of pride. "We public servants, the antibodies against corruption, contributed to that. And then the public, the United States citizenry, held the president accountable ultimately where the Senate failed. And that, I think, is a success."

At that point in the conversation, Wittes raised a question. Trump supporters would say that what Vindman had just described was precisely what they feared about the deep state: a faceless, unelected functionary, deep inside the bureaucracy, trying to influence the political process to defeat a president who had been elected by tens of millions American voters. Trump might say, 'Listen to this guy Vindman,'" Wittes suggested. "'He just described as a success that he and other people in the deep state helped the public decide to vote against me. That's actually what I've been saying about the deep state from the beginning. It's the Alex Vindmans and the Pete Strzoks and the Andy McCabes, and they all want the Democrats to win.' What's your response to that? On the one hand, you talk about apolitical service, and you clearly mean it, but on the other hand, part of your definition of success was that you guys helped Joe Biden unseat Donald Trump. Reconcile that for me."

Vindman responded with a defiant, self-serving answer. My adversaries are partisan and political, he argued, while I am not. "The judgments that come in and would label me as a deep stater are partisan, political judgments," Vindman explained, "when an impartial, fair assessment would suggest that all I did was do my duty. We reported what we saw, we gave factual testimony, and left it to the political actors to either move forward through impeachment or basically embolden the president by not holding him accountable." Never mind that Vindman had earlier said that if the political actors had not taken action against Trump, Vindman would have had to find another way to do it himself.

When he discussed the impeachment, Vindman presented his testimony as his main contribution to events. But at least as important was his role in the whistleblower complaint that started the Trump-Ukraine investigation. During the course of the impeachment, Republicans came to believe that Vindman was the one who set the whistleblower train in motion — and then denied that he knew how it happened.

Impeachment testimony revealed that Vindman, who in his role as a National Security aide had listened to the Trump-Zelensky call, told six people about the president's conversation. He told his brother, who was a lawyer at the NSC. He told three other NSC officials, John Eisenberg, Michael Ellis, and Tim Morrison. Then he told two people outside the NSC, both of whom, he said, had full security clearances and a "need to know." One of them was George Kent, an official at the State Department who dealt with Ukraine. And the other was -- Vindman would not say.

When, in his deposition before the impeachment committee, Republicans asked who the final person Vindman told about call was, Vindman's lawyer forbade him to discuss it, telling GOP lawmakers, "You have to protect the identity of the whistleblower." The lawyer was allowed to stonewall the lawmakers because Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the committee, encouraged Vindman to keep the identity of that final person secret.

At Vindman's public testimony, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes questioned Vindman about the people with whom Vindman discussed the Trump-Zelensky call. Nunes went through all of them before coming to the unnamed, final person. At that point, Schiff intervened. Nunes must quit discussing the subject, Schiff said. "We need to protect the whistleblower," Schiff warned. "Please stop. I want to make sure there's no effort to out the whistleblower through these proceedings."

The situation could hardly have been clearer. "Ultimately, we know Vindman is the person talking to the whistleblower," said a senior Republican aide who discussed the matter for my book Obsession. "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."

By the way, Republicans learned during the investigation that the whistleblower, whose name has never been publicly revealed, had a prior working relationship with one of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates -- later reported to be Joe Biden.

In the Lawfare podcast, Wittes walked Vindman through the basics of the whistleblower matter. "In the book, you say that you don't know who the whistleblower is," Wittes said. "But you also describe circumstances that suggests you have a pretty good idea who it must be. Is that fair?"

"That is fair," Vindman said. He went on to say that there was some "doubt" about the person's identity, and that doubt "warrants extreme caution."

But Wittes went further. "You have every reason, based on circumstances, to presume that it is a person whom you describe in the book," he said to Vindman. "But you have never asked that person, you wouldn't ask that person, and you have no other authoritative means of knowing. Is that fair?

"That is exactly right," Vindman said. "I don't in fact know with certainty who the person is."

It is safe to say that no Republican investigator during the impeachment would believe Vindman. And Vindman's next statement would do nothing to change their minds. "I think the whistleblower is a sophisticated actor in their own right," Vindman said, with some admiration. "When they wrote their whistleblower complaint, they attributed it to multiple sources. So that again adds to this quite reasonable doubt as to who is the original source, who was involved in the initial complaint."

The idea, then, was to conceal the origins of the whistleblower complaint, even though it would be used for the most public reason imaginable. Wittes never asked about the final, unnamed person to whom Vindman spoke -- the one whose name Adam Schiff ruled must remain secret.

On August 3, the New York Times book section tweeted, "Alexander Vindman, the whistle-blower in the first Trump impeachment, never expected to become a key figure in history's spotlight." The tweet was probably written by a staffer who did not know much about the impeachment story. After all, Vindman has repeatedly denied being the whistleblower. But Vindman not correct the Times. Instead, he retweeted the tweet.

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It should be noted, just for the record, that federal whistleblower law does not apply to the President of the United States. There is no inspector general at the White House. The idea of applying whistleblower law to the president was ridiculous from the get-go. But Congress could do what it wanted, and Schiff and Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved ahead, because they hoped to cripple Trump going into 2020.

Now, looking back, Vindman is proud of his role trying to bring down the president and protect the president's main rival. Which is why some listeners to the Lawfare podcast might be surprised to hear Vindman say, near the end, that "I still consider myself apolitical." In fact, he took part in one of the most political exercises one could imagine — and still won't describe his entire role in it.

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Tags: Alexander Vindman, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Impeachment, Joe Biden, Whistleblowers

Original Author: Byron York

Original Location: 'Apolitical' Alexander Vindman is happy he helped Biden win, coy about whistleblower