Lt. Col. Vindman Says Trump is Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot’ in First Interview With The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg

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In his first major interview since leaving civil service, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman shared a less than a charitable description of President Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, calling him a “useful idiot” to the Russian president.

Lt. Col. Vindman played a central role in the Trump administration’s controversial relationship with Ukraine that ultimately led to the impeachment of the president, a process in which Vindman served as a trial witness. The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg met with and interviewed Vindman in a wide-ranging look back at Vindman’s role in the center of that massive political controversy unfolded, impossibly it seems, less than a year ago.

After an appropriate amount of context and set-up, Goldberg asked Vindmand the “key question: Does he believe that Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence?” Vindman’s reply:

“President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,” he says. Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms.

But do you think Russia is blackmailing Trump? “They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it,” he says. “They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.”

Vindman continues, “In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”

President Trump has long dismissed any alleged collusion with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 general election as a “hoax.” However, there is ample evidence that his campaign coordinated some information with Russian intel officers, according to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that was published in August of this year.