Trump supporters vent fury at decorated war veteran Alexander Vindman amid impeachment battle

Days after a decorated Army lieutenant colonel offered damaging testimony about president Donald Trump’s conduct on a July phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Trump stood on the South Lawn and issued a vague but ominous warning.

“You’ll be seeing very soon what comes out,” Trump said, referring to the officer, lieutenant colonel Alexander Vindman.

The US president was not more specific. But an attack on Mr Vindman’s character and motives was already making its way from the dark corners of Mr Trump’s social media following to the front lines of the impeachment battle.

One day earlier, right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec had retweeted a lengthy thread by a Florida man — a fan of QAnon, a fringe conspiracy about the “deep state” — claiming to have witnessed Mr Vindman “bash America” in a conversation with Russian officers during a joint military exercise in Germany in 2013.

That accusation was unsubstantiated and has been rejected by some of the colonel’s colleagues. Even so, Mr Posobiec’s post was retweeted by Trump’s son and chief defender, Donald Trump Jr, driving it through conservative social media circles and onto pro-Trump websites, whose stories the younger Mr Trump promoted to his 4 million followers.

“Anyone who’s been watching for the past three years is not at all surprised that this would be their ‘star witness,’” the president's son posted about Mr Vindman, who had testified that he was concerned about the linking of US military aid to Ukraine with an investigation of Trump’s political rival.

While the White House has scrambled to mount an organised response to the House impeachment inquiry — there is no consistent message from Mr Trump’s team and little formal guidance to surrogates — Twitter has become the president’s war room. The president and his supporters, including his family, have used Twitter to frame his defence, torch his Democratic inquisitors and try to undermine public officials, like Mr Vindman, who have testified against him.

It is hard to discern how the 6-year-old comments attributed to the officer affect the veracity of his testimony on Capitol Hill, which aligns with that of numerous other witnesses.

But by questioning the colonel’s loyalties, partisans who are spreading the story uncritically to millions of Americans leave the impression he is somehow not to be believed.

The attack emerged late on Halloween night, when a retired Army officer, Jim Hickman, claimed he had overheard Vindman — a major at the time who was chatting with Russian soldiers during a military exercise — laugh “about Americans not being educated or worldly” and talking up “Obama and globalism to the point of uncomfortable”.

Mr Hickman said he took the major aside and reprimanded him.

Through his lawyer, Michael Volkov, Mr Vindman declined to comment.

Mr Hickman, a former lieutenant colonel whose service record indicates he served in Afghanistan and earned a Purple Heart, at some point took an interest in QAnon.

A review of his past tweets found more than 100 in which he recirculated or commented on QAnon-related theories, including hoaxes about Satanism and paedophilia, and until recently he had the hashtag #Q in his profile.

Reached for comment, Mr Hickman said he did not believe in QAnon but found it “interesting.”

“I do think it’s actually been pretty accurate on predicting a lot of things,” he said.

He has also tweeted strident pro-Trump, anti-Democratic themes, writing, “It’s incredible how evil the Democrat party is”.

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A week before going public with his story about Vindman, he retweeted a Trump supporter urging “STOP IMPEACHMENT! STOP THIS COUP!”

In a Twitter thread, Mr Hickman, who said he was disabled from combat injuries and living in Florida, said he had helped manage joint exercises in Germany involving US and Russian soldiers.

He met Mr Vindman there in 2013, he said.

Mr Vindman referred to himself as a patriot during closed-door testimony in the house last month and said he had reported concerns about the president and his inner circle’s conduct out of a “sense of duty”.

The colonel received a Purple Heart after being injured by an improvised explosive device in Iraq.

Several officials have publicly defended Mr Vindman since his testimony emerged. General Joseph Dunford, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the colonel “a professional, competent, patriotic and loyal officer”.

Michael McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia, has said he had worked with the colonel “and interacted with him in front of Russian officers. He never once said anything near what this ‘retired Army officer’ claims”.

As the tale gained attention on Twitter and received pushback from some users who questioned it, a new Twitter account popped up with the name Thomas Lasch, tweeting that he had worked with Mr Hickman and remembered the 2013 episode.

Mark Hertling, a retired general who was suspicious of the pair and contacted them through direct messaging, later tweeted: “They are who they say they are.” But he added that “LTC Hickman and I agreed to disagree on LTC Vindman and many other things.”

In an interview, Mr Hertling, who commanded the US Army in Europe, said that a number of things about Mr Hickman’s recollections did not add up, including his claim of hearing what Mr Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, said to Russian soldiers.

“Vindman would’ve been speaking to Russian soldiers in Russian, not English,” he said. “Russians, when they come to these exercises, they don’t speak English — they take pride in it.”

Mr Hertling added: “I asked Hickman about that, and he said, ‘Well, they were going back and forth between Russian and English.’”

An effort to reach Mr Lasch was unsuccessful. At his home in Homosassa, Florida, Hickman said, “All I want is the truth to get out”.

Within a day of Mr Vindman’s testimony, conservative media figures on Fox News and elsewhere, as well as Republican surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, raised questions about whether the Ukrainian-born colonel had “dual loyalties”. Some even pushed innuendo that he could be some sort of spy for Ukraine.

But those who know and have worked with Mr Vindman have provided a different account.

They said that Mr Vindman, then a military attache, was assigned to meet with Russians and gather whatever intelligence he could. He spoke to the Russians in Russian, did not denigrate the US and reported back everything he heard, according to a person briefed on the episode, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the colonel had not publicly testified.

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Mr Vindman did not have dealings with Hickman in relation to his work during the exercise, the person said, and was not reprimanded for it.

Peter Zwack, a retired brigadier general who was Mr Vindman’s commanding officer during the joint exercise, said he was sceptical of Mr Hickman’s account.

“If there was something egregious that occurred, believe me, we would have had our ears rapped in Moscow,” said Mr Zwack, who served as the United States’ senior defence official and attache to Russia.

“The bottom line is, where there are Russians in an exercise in and among our units and people, we have an attache that coordinates with them,” the general said. “It’s all just a part of an attaches' job.”

Attaches are expected to overtly collect information on what is happening in the country in which they are posted, as well as collect information from unsuspecting foreign officials through casual conversation. The allegations made by Hickman may simply describe Vindman playing his assigned role.

The New York Times