Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman lived the American dream: he came to the U.S. as a toddler fleeing oppression in the Soviet Union and found not only a better life but a chance to serve his country, including in combat. But on Tuesday, Republicans used one of the oldest and ugliest smears about Vindman and cast the Army officer, who was wounded in combat in Iraq, as conflicted between his loyalties to the country he serves and the one he fled.
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During Tuesday’s impeachment, Republican counsel Steve Castor repeatedly brought up the offer by Oleksandr Danyluk, Ukraine’s former national security adviser, to make Vindman Ukraine’s defense minister. Vindman said “Every single time I dismissed” the offer for a job in Ukraine’s cabinet and “upon returning, I notified my chain of command and the appropriate counterintelligence folks about this.” Danyluk has since said he was only joking about the offer.
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Despite Vindman’s reiteration that he’d quickly shut down the approach, Castor kept raising the issue and asked whether he’d “[left] the door open” and whether Danyluk had made the offer in Ukrainian rather than English, which Vindman’s American counterparts couldn’t speak.
The effort, as Connecticut Democrat Jim Himes noted, “was designed exclusively to give the right-wing media an opening to question your loyalties. And question they did.”
On his talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh outright accused Vindman of being disloyal. “He does not work for the president of Ukraine. He does not represent Ukraine interests,” Limbaugh said. “But if you listen to his testimony, that's what he's all about. He is representing the interests of Ukraine against Donald Trump.”
Not just the right-wing media: Trump administration officials and senior Republicans were only too happy to take that opening too. Dan Scavino, president Trump’s top social media adviser, tweeted out footage of the exchange with Castor. Scavino didn’t mention that Vindman had turned down the job and reported it to authorities back in the US but emphasized that it had been offered “THREE times!”
Steve Guest, the RNC’s rapid response director, wondered aloud “How often do American military officers get offered Defense Minister positions in foreign countries like Vindman says he was offered three times by Ukraine?”—as though the offer itself made Vindman suspicious, regardless of his rebuttals.
The GOP flows downstream from Fox: Rep. Himes’ statement that the questioning of Vindman’s loyalty on Tuesday may have been aimed at giving grist to right-wing media may not be entirely true. In fact, it looks as though House Republicans largely took their lead from Fox News before Vindman ever appeared before Congress.
Like all the House impeachment inquiry witnesses, the Army lieutenant colonel first appeared before lawmakers during a closed-door session in October. When his opening statement was released ahead of his testimony, Laura Ingraham responded to a New York Times story about Vindman’s interactions with Ukrainian officials in English and Ukrainian with incredulity. “Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside the White House apparently against the president's interest and usually they spoke in English,” she said.
John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who authorized the CIA’s torture of al Qaeda detainees, responded by saying, “Some people might call that espionage.”
Those comments set the tone for how Republicans approached Vindman.
Rudy takes the baton: In October, Vindman testified that Ukrainian officials had asked him “for advice on how to respond to Mr. Giuliani' s advances, meaning his call to undertake these—what would come across as partisan investigations.” In response, Vindman says he told them on multiple occasions to “stay out” of U.S. domestic politics because it could harm bipartisan support for the country, as Russia’s interference in the 2016 election had embittered Democrats towards Moscow.
His advice wasn’t much different from the advice that Kurt Volker, the Trump administration’s then-Ukraine envoy, had given to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a meeting between the two in Toronto over the summer. “I decided to tell President Zelenskyy that we had a problem with the information reaching President Trump from Mayor Giuliani” because the former New York mayor was poisoning Trump’s opinion about Ukraine, Volker testified.
“I made clear to the Ukrainians that Mayor Giuliani was a private citizen, the President’s personal lawyer, and not representing the U.S. government. Likewise, in my conversations with Mayor Giuliani, I never considered him to be speaking on the President’s behalf, or giving ‘instructions,’” he said.
Both Vindman and Volker warned Ukrainian officials about Giuliani and advised them to manage, rather than oblige, the president’s attorney. But Republicans only pounced on Vindman for his counsel.
Texas Republican John Ratcliffe tried to suggest that Vindman’s advice was an implicit instruction to the Ukrainians to ignore the president’s requests during his July 25 phone call asking for an investigation of the Bidens. The accusation was insubordination to the president, rather than loyalty to Ukraine.
After the hearing, Giuliani built on the exchanges to blast Vindman for “giving advice to two countries” and tweeted that “I thought he worked for US.”
An ugly history: The allegation that Americans with immigrant backgrounds are somehow conflicted in their allegiance to the U.S. has a long and ugly history in American politics and foreign policy.
It’s been used most extensively as an anti-Semitic smear against Americans of Jewish heritage to accuse them of loyalty to Israel at the expense of the U.S. The smear has its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews are all-powerful and seek to subvert national agendas for their own interests. They’ve surfaced throughout American history, including in the Civil War, when Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled Jews from his military district on the unfounded idea that they were helping the Confederacy by trading banned southern cotton. During World War II, anti-Semites like Charles Lindbergh accused American Jews of pushing the U.S. to war with Nazi Germany based on Jewish interests rather than American national security.
While anti-Semitic smears have been among the most common in the dual loyalty genre, they’re not the only ones. In the 1960s, John F Kennedy had to give a speech in Houston, Texas, rebutting the idea that his Catholic faith would make him a pawn of the Vatican in Rome. During the McCarthy era, many officials fell under unwarranted suspicion of being communist sympathizers or Soviet agents. One of them, Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, was stripped of his commission by the Air Force reserve based on his father’s Serbian immigrant background and suspicions of his family’s ideological allegiances. The Air Force only reversed course and reinstated him after Edward R. Murrow featured Radulovich’s case on TV.
