During an appearance on MSNBC this week, ret. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman publicly shamed former President Trump for his disgraceful betrayal of the country. Vindman, who served as part of the National Security Council at the time, listened to a 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as it unfolded, hearing how Trump was seeking to pressure the Ukrainian leader into doing his bidding. That included an effort by Trump to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens in hopes of turning up damaging information. Vindman said on MSNBC that, ahead of the Trump-Zelensky call, part of him “refused to believe that the president was going to be complicit in this corrupt enterprise, undermining the very foundation of our election, which is a free and fair election.”
Vindman commented as follows:
‘Even going into the call, I was apprehensive. I shouldn’t have been — I put together all the talking points. I knew exactly how it should have gone. And under almost any other circumstances — except for that president, because he never really followed anything scripted or policy-oriented; it was almost always self-serving — but I knew that there was a risk that it would go the way we had seen it going with the Giuliani narrative creeping in, with this demand for an investigation… But on the other side, there was a professional military officer that refused to believe that the president was going to be complicit in this corrupt enterprise, undermining the very foundation of our election, which is a free and fair election.’
Vindman subsequently explained some of the contents of the Trump-Zelensky conversation, sharing how then-President Trump laid out what the United States had done for Ukraine before mentioning a “favor” that he wanted from Ukrainian authorities. In particular, that “favor” involved an examination by Ukrainian officials of a cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike, which was brought in by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the infamous hack into its system that corresponded with the 2016 election cycle. As Forbes explained it, the theory was that — under the cover of that inquiry — “Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.” There is no legitimate evidence supporting this idea.
Vindman also indicated that he stands by his decision to come forward. As he put it:
‘There was no hesitation on the fact that I needed to report this. It was my duty. I had sworn an oath on multiple occasions to support and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic… I recognized I’d almost certainly be out of the White House.’
Vindman was eventually removed from the National Security Council. Watch his comments below:
