About The Vindmans--And Bolton
I didn't know this, and maybe some regular readers weren't aware of this either. According to an article at American Greatness,
The American people have the former national security advisor to blame for the presence of the self-serving brothers on the National Security Council staff.
Bolton is behind Impeachment Theater in more ways than one. The article states that Bolton in fact hired both of the Vindman twins. It also goes on to make some interesting observations about Bolton's MO which--from everything I've read--sounds in character and the author seems to have the background to know whereof he speaks:
Joseph Duggan is ...is a former White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush.
Excerpts:
During his four decades as an accumulator of power in the nation’s capital, a holder of high offices in the State Department, and finally a stint as President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton has been well known for his scrupulous attention to the hiring and firing of his staff.
He always has demanded unwavering personal loyalty as well as fealty to his own—not his president’s—policy agenda. He has performed the most rigorous vetting on all who have been selected to serve on his various staffs, both the small number of political appointees a political appointee such as himself is allowed to have as well as the more numerous personnel selected from the foreign service, civil service, military services, and intelligence agencies.
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... Bolton’s loyalties are never to his superiors but always to himself and to others only so long as they remain his sycophants.
The strange case of the Vindman twins (Alexander and Yevgeny) should be examined in the light of Bolton’s Roi du Soleil [Sun King, i.e., Louis XIV, absolute monarch of France] management style.
In July 2018, three months or so after becoming President Trump’s national security adviser, Bolton hired both Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a Ukraine policy specialist for the National Security Council and his identical twin brother, Army Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, as deputy legal counsel in the NSC’s “ethics” office.
Bolton is totally responsible for this pair of unusual hires. There is no explaining this strange duo of appointments as something that the bureaucracy simply slipped over on Bolton. That is not Bolton’s way.
Anyone who has been involved in national security affairs in Republican administrations since 1981 knows that it is impossible that the Vindman brothers were given sensitive jobs in Bolton’s NSC without Bolton having become assured of their usefulness and loyalty to Bolton and his agenda. Both the Ukraine policy and the “ethics attorney” slots are of vast personal priority to Bolton.
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So here we are. Acting on his own, without authorization, Alexander Vindman reported his jaundiced view of President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to friends in the State Department and intelligence agencies whom Vindman—unilaterally and going over the head of his superiors—asserted had a “need to know.” This led directly to the “whistleblower” complaint that ignited the impeachment conflagration.
Alexander Vindman also conflated his policy disagreement with President Trump into an ersatz “ethical” concern, and he shared his version of the phone call with his preferred in-house ethics lawyer, his own twin brother. Yevgeny Vindman is not the only ethics lawyer on the NSC staff. Alexander could have exercised a prudent compartmentalization of the information he considered so sensitive as to require the impeachment of his commander-in-chief. But instead of avoiding involvement of his brother in this matter, reportedly his first recourse was to decide that Yevgeny had a “need to know.”
All of this happened under the all-seeing eye of John Bolton.
The Justice Department’s legal counsel issued an authoritative statement that the highly classified information Alexander, with his own spin and Yevgeny’s blessing, fed to his friend in the intelligence community, was in no way a matter for the jurisdiction of the intelligence community inspector general.
Nevertheless, the IC’s inspector general took his own invalid action to cloak the Vindmans’ friend with “whistleblower” protection while the leaks to the mainstream media, the disingenuous interactions with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and his staff, and the histrionic impeachment farce ensued.
President Trump fired the insubordinate Bolton on September 10. During the week that followed, the “whistleblower” complaint emerged in the news, at first connected to a communication between President Trump and an unidentified foreign leader. On September 18, the Washington Post reported that Trump had made some kind of “promise” to the foreign leader. On September 19, the IC inspector general gave a secret briefing to Schiff and other congressional leaders. The same day, the Washington Post reported that the whistleblower complaint involved Ukraine.
The sanctimonious Alexander Vindman is suspected of perjury in his October performance in front of the House Intelligence Committee. Vindman had sworn in a deposition that he did not know the whistleblower. When, in an open hearing, committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) asked Vindman to identify the specific agency within the intelligence community employing the person with whom he had shared his version of the Trump-Zelensky call, Schiff interrupted the proceedings to say that Vindman was not allowed to answer the question because it would “out” the whistleblower. Schiff also is widely suspected of having lied when saying he does not know and has not had contact with the whistleblower.
Yevgeny Vindman reportedly is the NSC staffer given charge of reviewing John Bolton’s self-sanctifying memoir manuscript, which somehow leaked to the New York Times last week.
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There's a lot more than even this extensive excerpt offers. I urge you to follow the link.
But it remains disturbing to me that Trump failed to follow the advice of well wishers re hiring John Bolton: Don't do it!