Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman on Why He’s Speaking Out: To Convince Voters to Defeat Trump and Avoid ‘Four More Years of Disaster’

The former national security official who testified against President Donald Trump in last fall’s impeachment hearings told NBC Nighty News host Lester Holt that he was speaking out now to urge voters to defeat the president in November.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who recently retired from the U.S. Army, had served as the Director of European Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council up until earlier this year. In a striking moment last November, he testified before the House Intelligence Committee and publicly debunked a conspiracy theory that Trump had been pushing about Ukraine and the 2016 election.

In the same interview on Monday, Vindman had acknowledged that he is now a “Never Trumper” after the White House attacked him on Twitter, Trump supporters called for his court martial for testifying about Trump, and he was humiliatingly escorted from the White House grounds when he was reassigned off of the NSC.

“This interview will elicit strong reaction. some will call you bitter. Are you bitter?” Holt asked.

“I don’t think so,” Vindman replied.

“Are you angry?”

“I don’t think so. I hope I don’t come across the that way,” Vindman said. “I have assumed a — what I analyze to be a significant amount of personal risk, reputational risk to come out here and to talk to you with one hope in mind. And that hope is to share a perspective that could somehow inform an electorate going to the most important election of our lifetime and maybe persuade them to choose an alternative to what we have, an alternative to four more years of disaster.”

Watch the video above, via NBC Nightly News.