Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, arrives at the Capitol to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
During his testimony Tuesday, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a top National Security Council official who listened in from the Situation Room on the July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the so-called transcript of the conversation released by the White House was incomplete and misleading. The summary of the call omitted key words and phrases, including an explicit mention by the Ukrainian president of Burisma, the energy company being used as a proxy to blunt Joe Biden’s presidential aspirations. Vindman also testified that Trump claimed on the call that there were recordings of Biden, as vice president, discussing U.S. government attempts to get Ukraine to replace former prosecutor Victor Shokin, who was widely criticized by the U.S. and its allies for his permissiveness on corruption.
Vindman told House impeachment investigators that he made edits to the transcript as part of the official archiving of the conversation, some of which were included in the final draft. Two of Vindman’s corrections to the transcript created by voice recognition software and professional notetakers were omitted, though he did not testify to the motive behind their omission. When the White House released the summary of the call last month, there were a handful of conspicuous ellipses in the text, suggesting that portions of the call had been excluded. The obvious working assumption was, the Trump administration being the Trump administration, they had simply dropped unflattering or potentially incriminating portions of the call.
Vindman said he registered internal objections on two occasions to the Trump team’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating a political rival citing national security concerns. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Vindman said in his opening remarks. “This would all undermine U.S. national security.”
“It is not clear why some of Colonel Vindman’s changes were not made, but the decision by a White House lawyer to quickly lock down the reconstructed transcript subverted the normal process of handling such documents, according to people familiar with the matter,” according to the New York Times. “But after the call, Colonel Vindman went with his brother, a lawyer on the National Security Council staff, to see John A. Eisenberg, the council’s legal adviser, to raise his concerns about the conversation.”
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