On July 25, 2019, Donald Trump had a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine. Trump asked Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 American election by investigating the actions of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Trump also abused his power by bribing the Ukrainian president by withholding millions of dollars in military aid if he didn’t probe the Bidens.
The phone call, like all the President’s calls are monitored normally by at least two members of the National Security Council (NSC). Typically, prior to the call, NSC members discuss the upcoming call with the President. NSC members also stay with the President during the call. The record of the call is also stored on government computers. Those who listened to the call will use their notes, and the computer record to draft a single report of the call. According to various sources, more than ten people listened to the Trump-Zelensky call, many of them sitting around a table in one of the White House situation rooms.
Trump was accused of an abuse of presidential power by blackmailing a foreign president with withholding $400 million in military aid unless his government investigated (dig up dirt) Joe Biden,and his son Hunter Biden. The allegations that Trump and others made about the Bidens were already discredited. This debunking didn’t stop Trump from dispatching his personal attorney Rudi Giuliani, and Attorney General William Barr to Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
After the impeachment hearings Trump took his revenge on anyone who testified against him. People were fired and some forced to retire. It was typical Trump vengeance, which he has used throughout his life.
The Vindman Brothers
A day after the phone call, two Army lieutenant colonels on the National Security Council (NSC), twins Alexander[1] and Yevgeny Vindman went to the top lawyer at the NSC, John A. Eisenberg, concerned about the phone call. Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman was the top Ukraine expert on the council. Eisenberg and one of his aides, Michael Ellis decided to put Vindman’s information into the White House’s most secret server to keep it safe or to keep it away from prying eyes. A few days later, Eisenberg told Vindman not to talk about the call to anyone. The White House blocked Eisenberg from testifying at the House impeachment hearings in December 2019. Courageously, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman[2] did testify and was later fired by the vindictive Trump from his position in the White House.
The Vindman brothers spoke to a young CIA analyst who was already on alert about Trump’s intertwining of foreign policy with personal political desires. The analyst was an expert on Ukraine , and his job was to track the effects of any action between the United States and Ukraine. The analyst also had an eye on Rudi Giuliani who was carrying out a stealth political operation to stir up potential investigations into the Bidens. When the analyst learned about the Trump-Zelensky phone call, he was on high alert.
Vindman said that he only talked to two people, both with full clearance and both apparently included in the need-to-know group. He, still to this day, does not know if one of the two he spoke to about the call is the whistleblower.[3] The whistleblower, on the other hand, heard about Trump’s phone call from other members of the White House Intelligence group. One of those could have been Vindman. Vindman said he does not know if he was the source. Vindman would soon learn that a silent campaign to undermine his credibility was underway because he had spoken out about Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s president.
Michael Schmidt wrote about this analyst’s duty to report and do something about what he believed occurred during the phone call. The following discussion[4] is based on his research. I believe this story is important to reveal the depths that this person had to go to expose wrongdoing by Donald Trump.
Passing on what was found would not be a simple matter of calling the boss and filing a report. It didn’t work that way at all. The analyst first met with a CIA lawyer who agreed that something needed to be done. The analyst met with the CIA’s general council. The general council communicated the information to the White House, which indicated that it would not be taking this complaint seriously.
This impasse presented a serious dilemma for the analyst. Only a few people knew about the nature of the phone call, and the analyst knew about Giuliani’s campaign to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens. The analyst was also concerned that Ukraine needed the financial aid in its fight with Russian-backed separatists. The analyst then contacted a friend who now worked as a staff member of the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA). The analyst was told that for anything to happen, the analyst would have to file a whistleblower complaint. This would mean finding a lawyer to guide him through the process. A lawyer was needed that understood whistleblower complaints.
The Whistleblower
He found one and they met at a coffee shop near the Capitol. The lawyer made sure that the analyst didn’t tell him anything classified or privileged. At this time, the analyst only revealed that he had not witnessed the incident, but several people told him about it. The lawyer told him that he would refer him to Andrew Bakaj, a lawyer who had worked at the CIA early in his career. He reported wrongdoing in his office as a whistleblower but was forced out of his job and left government. Now, his work specializes in helping whistleblowers and others needing similar help.
He believed that the analyst stumbled across wrongdoing and now wanted to do the right thing. Bakaj advised him to write a whistleblower complaint without any advice or help from anyone else. He wrote the complaint, and after discussing it with Bakaj, he sent it on a secure government computer to Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community on August 3, 2019. A few days later, he found out that the director of National Intelligence, a Trump appointee, was not going to forward the complaint to the Congress. Atkinson was not happy.
At this point Andrew Bakaj decided to hand deliver a letter to the office of Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), chairperson of the Senate Intelligent committee and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairperson of the House permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Burr’s office staff didn’t seem interested in talking with him, but when he went to Schiff’s office, he was invited in and sat with three of the committee’s lawyers. While the lawyers were talking about the whistleblower’s complaint, they learned that a letter was just received from Inspector General Atkinson claiming he was being prevented from passing on a “credible” and “urgent” complaint.
The analyst filed the complaint on Aug. 12, but it was not released until September 26. The whistleblower’s letter begins by identifying what the President did and who was involved with him. He wrote in his complaint:
I am reporting an “urgent concern” in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U.S.C. §3033(k)(5)(A). This letter is UNCLASSIFIED when separated from the attachment. In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.[5]
The letter, (cited below) written by the whistleblower is an important document that eventually led the House of Representatives to file impeachment charges against Donald Trump, and then deliver them to the Senate for a trial.
Trump claimed that he made a perfect call to the president of Ukraine. There was nothing done improperly or wrong in the phone call, according to Trump. The whistleblower claimed that Trump wanted the Ukranian President to:
Initiate an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden; assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm CrowdStrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016; and meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.[6]
For the next few months, and during the Impeachment hearings in the House, the White House refused to cooperate with the Congress, and instead went out its way to threaten and conceal documents related to the phone call. The impeachment process continued in the U.S. Senate with members of the House prosecuting the case against Donald Trump. During and after the impeachment hearing Trump took his revenge on anyone who testified against him. People were fired, including the Vindman brothers and some others were forced to retire. It was typical Trump vengeance which he has used throughout his life.
[1] Vindman, A. (2021). Here, Right Matters: An American Story. HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York.
[2] The Pritzker Military Foundations appointed Alexander Vindman as its first Pritzker Military Fellow, based at Lawfare (lawfare.com). Vindman will join the staff at Lawfare for a two-year fellowship allowing him to write a book and complete a dissertation for a Ph.D.
[3] Ibid. 161.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Whistleblower. (2019, August 12). Whistleblower complaint (unclassified). Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://www.usatoday.com/documents/6430388-20190812-Whistleblower-Complaint-Unclass/
[6] Ibid.
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