Digging Into the Corpulent Alexander Vindman

posted by Stu Cvrk at RedState

LTC Alexander Vindman, USA, now retired, burst onto the national scene in October of 2019 when he testified before Congress as part of the Democrats’ orchestrated effort to impeach President Trump on abuse of power charges. A window into his ego and narcissism was evinced when he admitted during that testimony that he was offered the position of defense minister of Ukraine three times, as reported here. He was being played and corrupted by the Ukrainians in order to influence US policy toward Ukraine. This “flattery” amounted to bribery that should have gotten him court-martialed for corruption and doing favors for a foreign government – as well as not officially reporting the attempted bribery to his superiors, particularly in view of his extremely sensitive position on the NSC staff.

His credibility was subsequently shredded during public testimony in November 2019 by congressional Republicans, and after President Trump was acquitted by the Senate, Vindman was eventually fired from his position at the National Security Council and escorted out of the White House with his twin brother in February 2020, as reported here.

Vindman’s conduct and testimony through the impeachment process have been widely reported by many former military personnel (myself included) as having been reprehensible and probably seditious. He is a typical overweight, rear-echelon staff puke who picked up a Purple Heart from a roadside IED that hit his vehicle. A loathsome creature. The Army should recall him to active duty, convene an Article 32 investigation, and select members to conduct his general court-martial.

But is that all there is to him? Maybe he is a window into something of far greater significance as relates to the Democrats’ continuing efforts to “get Trump.” Let us examine excerpts from a fascinating Mollie Hemingway article:

It turns out that the heated discussion over the whistleblower, who was previously identified by Real Clear Investigations as the CIA’s Eric Ciaramella, was a diversion from allowing the American people to understand who was the actual instigator of the failed effort to oust President Donald Trump from office.

Rather than being a witness who independently supported the claims of the whistleblower, the National Security Council’s Lt. Col Alex Vindman was the driving force behind the entire operation, according to the book’s interviews with key figures in the impeachment probe and other evidence. The whistleblower’s information came directly from Vindman, investigators determined.

“Vindman was the person on the call who went to the whistleblower after the call, to give the whistleblower the information he needed to file his complaint,” said Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y.

“For all intents and purposes, Vindman is the whistleblower here, but he was able to get somebody else to do his dirty work for him,” explained one senior congressional aide.

[It should be noted that] Vindman received no punishment for his insubordination and disobeying of a direct order to not work with Congress on impeachment.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence testimony transcripts indicate that Vindman was a main driver behind the impeachment farce, not just a bumbling bit player who gave conflicting public testimony. The whistleblower was likely just an administrative tool to get Vindman’s accusations to Chairman Adam Schiff at the HPSCI.

Recall that the Ukraine hoax first broke in August 2019 in news reports of a whistleblower complaint raised against the President after his 25 July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Media reports exploded in a pattern that matched what happened throughout the two years of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax: media reports using leaked classified information, quotes from various unnamed sources, confirmation of reports by other unnamed sources, and circular and repetitive reporting among anti-Trump legacy media figures at the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. A veritable media feeding frenzy that ended only after the US Senate acquitted the President in February 2020.

The media’s continued use of “unnamed sources” for their sensational anti-Trump articles may actually mask something far more sinister. It is presumed that actual anti-Trump personnel in the White House, National Security Council, CIA, and State Dept are the sources of the classified leaks that served as the basis for many legacy media claims over the past four years. It is entirely possible that the real sources of the classified information leaks were through electronic eavesdropping of White House communications with other federal agencies and foreign governments. Thus, “unnamed sources” are misdirection to hide the real sources of the leaks – unauthorized illegal electronic surveillance. The media stories could have been written and slanted as cover stories to protect the non-human technical surveillance wiretaps. Let me explain further.

Some former and still-serving members of the US Intelligence Community speculate that the Obama administration compromised communications security in the White House and National Security Council prior to Inauguration Day 2017. Their goal was setting traps for privileged classified communications that could be collected and spun by trusted agents in the media to undermine Trump policies, and to sow suspicion and discord among Trump White House/NSC personnel. This would involve setting up long-dwell passive collect-and-store sensors that would gather information for later downloading by Obama embeds loyal to former CIA Director John Brennan or former FBI Director James Comey who remained in the White House and on the NSC staff with access. Another possibility is that the previously existing White House fiber optic networks might have been spliced or tapped by induction at some point outside the walls of the facility/building, at which point the data could be routed clandestinely to an external collection source, and perhaps decrypted using codes provided by those same Obama embeds. Either way, these measures might have been implemented by the Obama embeds to ensure that the passive sensors were protected from detection by periodic communications security sweeps aimed at detecting communications compromises, bugs, and unauthorized taps.

It is quite possible that the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) would agree with this assertion based on past disclosures from the organization. Note that a key member of VIPS is William Binney, a former senior technical officer at the National Security Agency and whistleblower who argued convincingly on technical grounds that the DNC server was not hacked by Russia, but rather that information was downloaded internally and leaked by an insider, as reported here. Binney retired from the NSA and disclosed that the agency used technology he had created to spy on US citizens. Furthermore, according to leaker/whistleblower Edward Snowden:

[S]py software and hardware has been implanted onto over 50,000 servers, networks and computers worldwide. And according to Binney, Congress doesn’t know what intelligence agencies are doing in the US.

Binney and others at VIPS would be quite knowledgeable about electronic communications transfers, downloads, and passive taps. Could the technology and capabilities reported by Binney and Snowden have been used to spy on the Trump administration? Note that Investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported on Sunday that John Brennan “ran a secret task force out of Langley with its own separate budget to investigate the Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia.”

It would be an easy segue to detail members from that task force and others loyal to Brennan or Comey to the NSC before President Trump was inaugurated. In short, Brennan’s secret task force very likely continued to operate from within the Trump NSC using operatives like the Vindman twins, Eric Ciaramella, and other yet-to-be-named operatives to do the dirty work. They kept the information/disinformation flowing to Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others for use by the legacy media in smearing the Trump administration over the past three-plus years, with a major assist from clandestine electronic surveillance methods.

Interestingly, the Obama administration has never released or provided access to the entire White House communications archive from that era. And the only public information available about facility and network upgrades pertains to a complete remodeling of the Green Room and other office spaces in the West Wing in 2017. The renovations even included replacing the HVAC system, which makes one wonder what they may have discovered in completing the work.

There is precedent for Brennan setting up unauthorized electronic surveillance of the White House. Recall that in 2014, Brennan publicly apologized to the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (SPSCI) for the CIA’s spying on SPSCI staff, as reported here:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials.

Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while they used the network.

Given Brennan’s crackpot public accusations that “President Trump is a Putin stooge and a traitor,” do you think that this ACTUAL traitor would hesitate for even a nanosecond before directing the implementation of electronic eavesdropping taps on White House/NSC networks and a continuation of his secret “get Trump task force” in 2017? Precedent, motive, and the subsequent massive number of classified information leaks strongly suggest that that is exactly what happened. And Alexander Vindman was an integral member of Brennan’s team!