Alexander Vindman Goes After GOP Traitors For Enabling Insurrection

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This week, ret. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman spoke out in support of Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and the other law enforcement personnel who recently spoke at a public hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. All of the officers who were present participated in the defense of the Capitol against rioting Trump supporters, and all of them faced serious, dangerous threats while there that day. Denying the truth of what happened, as certain Republicans have done, helps enable it to happen again.

Now, certain interests on the far-right — even including Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham — have opted to publicly go after the officers from that hearing, impugning their credibility. At one point soon before the hearing unfolded, Carlson — ridiculously — described Dunn as an “angry left-wing political activist.”

Evidently, the conservative obsession with backing “the blue” only functions as long as doing so serves right-wing political purposes. Once immovably supporting law enforcement became even slightly inconvenient for certain Republicans in the aftermath of January 6, that unshakable support vanished. Vindman referred to the Capitol and D.C. officers who testified as “in the crosshairs of radical, vindictive fanatics because they gave a truthful account [of] their experiences on Jan. 6.”

Vindman added as follows:

‘The safe option isn’t always the right one. Capitol Police Officers such as Harry Dunn have found themselves in the crosshairs of radical, vindictive fanatics because they gave a truthful account [of] their experiences on Jan. 6. I know a bit about this experience. By once more proving that Here, Right Matters, Officer Dunn has been subjected to an all too familiar smear campaign that privileges personal aggrandizement and gross negligence above the need for justice and accountability in our democracy… We can neither blatantly disregard his words, nor the words of his fellow officers. They have given their all and then some in upholding their oaths and fulfilling their duties, both on Jan. 6 and during their testimony.’

Vindman added that the “least the US can do to honor” these officers — and the late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who participated in the defense of the Capitol and then died of what the D.C. medical examiner ruled were natural causes very soon thereafter — “is pursue this investigation and hold the insurrectionists, collaborators, and provocateurs to account.” Read Vindman’s remarks below: