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Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman isn’t the only holdover from the Obama administration on the National Security Council to get the pink slip recently.
President Trump has fired another 70 potential problems as well.
Question is, what damage will they do — what distorted secrets will they leak to make the president look bad — when they return to the federal bureaucracies whence they came?
But beyond that, an even more pressing matter is unresolved: the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme. Trump’s effort to expose it led to his impeachment and Vindman’s testimony.
70 Gone
In some sense, as Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner reported, Trump “is making good on his promises to ‘drain the swamp.’”
In this case, he’s targeting leftist appointees to the NSC hired by his predecessor, Barack Hussein Obama.
“Officials confirmed that Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien have cut 70 positions inherited from former President Barack Obama, who had fattened the staff to 200,” Bedard reported. “Many were loaners from other agencies and have been sent back. Others left government work.”
The mass firing is no surprise, and Trump should have moved long ago against what could have been a nest of anti-MAGA vipers just waiting to do what Vindman did: sabotage the president’s policies.
Vindman Gone
Vindman, of course, is the immigrant army officer who with his twin brother, Yevgeny, somehow wrangled his way into a top position in the U.S. Army and then the White House.
Vindman leaked the content of Trump’s phone call of July of 25 with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to ballyhooed CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella, the holdover Obama subversive who in turn filed a report with House Intelligence Committee chieftain Adam Schiff.
During that phone call, Trump asked his counterpart to help expose the still-unresolved Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme that has ensnared Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Schiff used his committee to open the impeachment case against Trump that included Vindman’s suspect testimony.
But like Ciaramella, Vindman didn’t much care for Trump’s America First foreign policy and worked to undermine it, as The New American reported weeks ago, citing Paul Sperry of Real Clear Politics.
The native Ukrainian “openly expressed his disdain for Trump,” NSC sources told Sperry:
Before he was detailed to the White House, Vindman served in the U.S. Army, where he once received a reprimand from a superior officer for badmouthing and ridiculing America in front of Russian soldiers his unit was training with during a joint 2012 exercise in Germany.
His commanding officer, Army Lt. Col. Jim Hickman, complained that Vindman, then a major, “was apologetic of American culture, laughed about Americans not being educated or worldly and really talked up Obama and globalism to the point of [it being] uncomfortable.”
“Vindman was a partisan Democrat at least as far back as 2012,” Hickman, now retired, asserted. “Do not let the uniform fool you. He is a political activist in uniform.”
That’s why Vindman and his 70 Obama-era colleagues had to go. Trump also pink-slipped Yevgeny Vindman, also a lieutenant colonel.
Another top official to lose his job was Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the failing European Union. He too testified during the impeachment hearings.
Smaller NSC Staff
Trump “has noted how prior presidents had a much smaller NSC team,” Bedard reported for the Examiner, and ordered his National Security Advisor George O’Brien to lower the boom:
O’Brien recently said that former President George W. Bush handled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with 100 NSC aides, a model he is instituting.
“This month, we will complete the right-sizing goal Ambassador O’Brien outlined in October, and in fact, may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions,” John Ullyot, the NSC’s senior director for strategic communications.
A key question left unanswered by the impeachment is what can be done about the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme that Trump hoped Zelensky would help him expose.
Despite former Vice President Joe Biden’s denial of wrongdoing, and the mainstream media’s oft-repeated narrative that Biden-Burisma is a “debunked conspiracy theory,” one fact is incontrovertible:
Biden threatened to withhold financial aid from Ukraine if it didn’t fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma holdings, the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden a fortune despite his lack of experience in the energy field and record as a drug addict.
In other words, the arrangement was a quid pro quo: Fire the prosecutor; you’ll get the money.
That stopped the prosecutor from asking questions about Hunter Biden.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
