NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

His posting to Moscow was a sign of both trustworthiness and accomplishment. "For a Foreign Area Officer to get assigned to Moscow, that's a big deal," explains McFaul. "And then to be seconded to the National Security Council as he was, that is a minority group. They're the crème de la crème. You have to be super smart to get that job." The Atlantic Council's Daniel Fried, who designed the Obama administration's Russia sanctions when he was at the State Department, met Vindman several times when he came in to talk to Vindman's boss, the NSC's Russia director (and witness in the impeachment probe) Fiona Hill. "He was always there, he was very sensible, completely non-partisan," Fried recaled. "When I read his testimony [about President Trump's July 25 call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky], I thought, right. He didn't speculate, he only commented on what he knew about, he was thorough and methodical." Vindman, Fried says, struck him as "a Boy Scout."

In 2015, two years after hosting that dinner at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Flynn, now retired from the Army and heading up his own consulting, would attend another dinner in Moscow. Unlike the GRU dinner, which had been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the 2015 event was the 10th anniversary dinner of RT, the Kremlin's foreign propaganda channel. This time, he wasn't sitting with American diplomats but next to Putin. And two years later, Flynn would be fired from his position as President Donald Trump's national security advisor for lying about a secret back channel from the White House to the Russian ambassador to Washington. He eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Vindman also saw a secret back channel from the White House to the former Soviet Union. The president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Gordon Sondland, his ambassador to the E.U., were trying to extort the Ukrainian government outside typical diplomatic communications: give us dirt on the Bidens, and we'll free up the Congressionally allocated military aid.

On July 10, 2019, Vindman, who had been born in Kiev, sat in on a meeting between the Ukrainian national security advisor and American officials, including Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and U.S. special envoy Kurt Volker. The Ukrainians were pushing for a White House meeting with President Trump, which would be an important signal of American support in the face of the five-year war Russia has waged on Ukraine. But to Vindman's surprise, administration officials took the conversation elsewhere. "Amb. Sondland started to speak about delivering the specific investigations in order to secure the meeting with the President, at which time Ambassador Bolton cut the meeting short," Vindman wrote in his planned remarks to the House intelligence committee.

"Following this meeting, there was a scheduled debriefing during which Amb. Sondland emphasized the importance that Ukraine deliver the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma. 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. Dr. Hill then entered the room and asserted to Amb. Sondland that his statements were inappropriate."

"Think about if a young officer who is trying to do the right thing is confronted with what he was confronted with in the NSC," says Zwack. "When this young officer is put in a really tough position, this is what you do. This is what you're taught to do."

And so Alexander Vindman, known to his colleagues as highly disciplined, especially about the strength of his convictions, marched over to the NSC's legal office and reported what he had just witnessed: the President of the United States using the power of American military and diplomacy for his personal political gain.

One of the NSC lawyers to whom Vindman took his complaint was his identical twin brother and fellow ROTC alum, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman.

Almost as soon as news of Vindman's planned testimony broke on Monday night, Trump's allies seized on Vindman's birthplace and language abilities as proof of his disloyalty to the United States. John Yoo, architect of the post-9/11 torture program, even went so far as to accuse Vindman of "espionage" on behalf of the Ukrainians. It was an assertion repeated by a former Republican congressman who is now a CNN commentator.

Of course, what they meant was that Vindman was not loyal to Trump, something the President himself confirmed this morning on Twitter when, without any evidence, he dismissed Vindman as a "Never Trumper." According to public records, both Vindman and his identical twin brother Yevgeny, a lawyer for the NSC, were once registered Democrats, but Zwack says he never knew of Vindman's personal political leanings in the two years he served with him. Of course, the President's defenders had no issue with Soviet-born Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two men arrested earlier this month for allegedly funneling Russian money to Republican candidates. Nor did they criticize Flynn, who regularly worked for foreign governments and pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington.

While Trump has a history of attacking anyone who questions his power, there is a particularly insidious history to questioning the loyalty of Jewish émigrés.

Tweet   @brothersjudd