If there is one person besides Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy whose career and public profile has seen the biggest upgrade over changes in U.S.-Ukraine policy since 2019, it would be Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. A U.S. Army officer and National Security Council official assigned to Europe under President Donald Trump, Vindman became one of the principal witnesses in the impeachment inquiry that led to the first impeachment of Trump for allegations of conditioning U.S. aid on assistance from Zelenskyy in investigating the activities of then former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter to Ukraine. Now that he is out of uniform and not needed at committee hearings, Vindman is no longer content with defending the “interagency consensus” of aiding Ukraine but according to Human Events is attempting to benefit from military contracts with the Ukrainian government. The low-key effort by the former Army officer, who has written numerous op-eds urging the United States to invest more in the defense and rebuilding of Ukraine, shows how steep the ramp has become from being a figure ennobled by the media for safeguarding national security to using one’s connections to benefit financially from that experience.
Recently Vindman has made headlines both in right-leaning and mainstream publications like Politico for proposing new maintenance facilities staffed by U.S. military veteran personnel embedded near the front lines in Ukraine in order to cut down on the down time for military equipment. The three principal officers appearing on their literature are Vindman, his twin brother and U.S. Army Col. Yevgeny Vindman (ret.), and former Brig. Gen. Steven M. Anderson (ret.). However the journey from the Capitol to a capital venture wasn’t made in one leap.When the impeachment effort did not yield a conviction Vindman was transferred out of the NSC and the White House in February 2020. After briefly threatening to sue the White House and Defense Department for retaliation he retired in July of that year, and would later file a different lawsuit against various Trump-aligned figures such as Donald Trump, Jr. and Rudy Giuliani for violating witness protection laws when they criticized him during the impeachment. The suit was tossed by a federal judge in 2022.
But thanks to his notoriety and military background, Vindman had already landed on his feet by then. In November 2020, scarcely a year after his name had appeared as an impeachment witness, he was named the first fellow of the Pritzker Military Foundation, a non-profit owned by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s cousin and fellow billionaire Jennifer Pritzker (born James), a retired Illinois National Guard colonel. The fellowship paid for Vindman to be a writer for the Lawfare Blog, a publication of the Lawfare Institute that the Pritzker Foundation contributed $400,000 to in 2020 according to year-end tax disclosures. His first entry in February 2021 was about how the military under Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Defense Sec. Mark Esper had delayed promotion of female officers out of a supposed fear that they would have been criticized by President Trump, throwing in his own complaint that he had been passed over for promotion to full colonel before deciding to retire. In the next month’s entry Vindman lamented not having sued Fox News for defamation while lauding Twitter and other social media companies for banning Donald Trump. All told Vindman only contributed to six articles, most of them sharing a byline with other writers.
amgreatness.com/2023/03/12/from-prime-time-witness-to-war-profiteer/