Aides: Trump call ‘improper,’ ‘unusual,’
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — One top national security aide who listened to President Donald Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s president called it “improper.” Another said it was “unusual.” The two testified Tuesday at House impeachment hearings as the inquiry reached deeper into the White House.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an Army officer at the National Security Council, and Jennifer Williams, his counterpart at Vice President Mike Pence’s office, said they both had concerns as Trump spoke with the newly elected Ukrainian president about political investigations into Democrat Joe Biden.
“What I heard was inappropriate,” Vindman told lawmakers. He said it would be seen as a “partisan play.”
The two led off a pivotal week featuring testimony from nine witnesses as the House’s impeachment inquiry accelerates. Democrats say Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden while withholding U.S. military aid that Ukraine needed to resist Russian aggression may be grounds for removing the 45th president.
Trump says he did no such thing in his call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Democrats just want him gone.
Vindman, a 20-year military officer arrived at Capitol Hill in military blue with a chest full of service medals, and said he reported his concerns “out of a sense of duty.”
He did so, he said, “because they had significant national security implications for our country.”
Williams, a career State Department official who has worked for three presidential administrations and counts former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a “personal hero,” said the Trump phone call was the first time she had heard anyone specifically seeking investigations from Ukraine.
The reference to Biden and his son Hunter “struck me as political in nature.”
Vindman, an immigrant who arrived in the U.S. as a toddler from Ukraine, told the panel he was grateful for “the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant, where I can live free of fear for mine and my family’s safety.”
In the audience was his twin brother, also an official at the National Security
Council and among those he told about his concerns over Trump’s phone call.
Addressing his father, Vindman said, “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”
Gaveling open the second week of live televised hearings, the Democratic Intelligence Committee chairman leading the probe, Rep. Adam Schiff, noted that Trump tweeted against Williams over the weekend and Vindman has seen “far more scurrilous attacks” on his character by the president’s allies.
Schiff, who has warned that the president’s attacks on others in the impeachment inquiry could be seen as intimidation, said the witnesses “are here because they were subpoenaed to appear, not because they are for or against impeachment. That question is for Congress.”