Elected Democrats immediately denounced these “reprisals” on the part of the American president.
“You’re fired! “ Two days after being acquitted by the Senate of the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of the congress which weighed against him in the Ukrainian affair, the American president, Donald Trump, dismissed Friday February 7, two officials from his administration who had testified against him.
The first, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was asked to quit his job at the White House. A few hours later, it was the turn of Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, a wealthy businessman and republican donor, to announce in a press release that he was thanked with “immediate effect”.
Born in Ukraine and arrived in the United States at the age of 3, Alexander Vindman had worked since 2018 as a consultant for European affairs in the National Security Council at the White House. In July, he listened to the phone call in which Donald Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden. Judging the motion “Inappropriate”, he then decided to alert the lawyers of the presidency.
Gordon Sondland, for his part, stated bluntly at a public hearing in November before Congress that an agreement “give and take” had been proposed to the Ukrainians: if their president wanted to be invited to the White House, he had to publicly announce investigations into Burisma, the gas group that has long employed Hunter Biden, the son of the former vice-president of Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s potential rival in the November presidential election.
Elected Democrats immediately denounced these “reprisals” from the President. “Ambassador Sondland and Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Vindman are courageous public servants, heroes and patriots”, wrote the elected Mark DeSaulnier on Twitter. “Trump’s revenge against them for telling the truth is an action worthy of dictators and criminals, not the president of the world’s largest democracy”.
During a debate between contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden called the public to a standing ovation in honor of the military. “We are not like Trump”, he said.
Biden asks the audience to give Alexander Vindman, who was escorted out of the White House today, a standing ovation: “[Trump] should be pinning a medal on Vindman and not on Rush Limbaugh. ” pic.twitter.com/lMsHyaT8IQ
– Axios (@axios) February 8, 2020
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