Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump in his impeachment trial and was subsequently fired by the president and escorted out of the White House, is speaking out about Trump’s status as “an unwitting agent of Putin.”
Said Vindman in an interview with The Atlantic: “President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin. … They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it. They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin. … In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”
Vindman told NBC News anchor Lester Holt on Monday night that he’s a “Never Trumper” and offered a reason for why he’s speaking out: “I have assumed a — what I analyze to be a significant amount of personal risk, reputational risk to come out here and to talk to you with one hope in mind. And that hope is to share a perspective that could somehow inform an electorate going to the most important election of our lifetime and maybe persuade them to choose an alternative to what we have, an alternative to four more years of disaster.”
