A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by star impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.) against Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and two Trump White House staffers for supposed “witness intimidation” during Trump’s impeachment hearings.
Vindman filed his suit in February, just over a year after he had enjoyed fifteen minutes of infamy before Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the House Intelligence Committee, as Democrats sought to impeach and remove Trump for allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate allegations of corruption against Joe Biden, his leading rival in the 2020 election.
Biden’s son, Hunter, was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that was under investigation at a time when Biden insisted Ukraine fire the head prosecutor.
Vindman alerted a contact in the intelligence committee — whom he refused to name under oath — about a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelensky, triggering the investigation into Trump. Schiff would not allow Vindman to be questioned about the so-called “whistleblower” who first approached the House Intelligence Committee with his second-hand concerns about the call. Vindman did admit, however, that the Ukrainians felt no “pressure” to investigate Biden.
The Ukrainian-born Vindman, who won the Purple Heart with the U.S. Army in Iraq, admitted that Ukraine approached him three times to offer him the post of defense minister. On social media, he often cheers Ukraine’s war effort against Russian invasion.
Following the Senate’s acquittal of the president, Vindman was fired from his post at the White House National Security Council, and he retired from the military soon thereafter. He alleged he was a victim of “bullying” and “retaliation” by the Trump White House, which he blamed for ending his military career.
That reflected a narrative that Democrats and the media attempted to hype during the impeachment trial, when they portrayed any criticism of the witnesses by the White House as an attempt to intimidate them. But a federal judge disagreed with Vindman on Tuesday.
U.S. District Court James Boasberg of the District of Columbia, a Barack Obama appointee, issued a 29-page ruling, The Hill reported, concluding that even if “Defendants leveled harsh, meanspirited, and at times misleading attacks” against Vindman, “political hackery alone does not violate [the law at issue].” White House staffers Dan Scavino and Julia Hahn, a former reporter for Breitbart News, were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.