[csa]

Vindman is a perfect recent example of how easily this protections are skirted. He was a “key witness” in Trump’s first impeachment.

His career was largely derailed, and his post-retirement second career options are most likely severely limited.

To be specific (and iirc):

- He was not kicked out of the military. He retired due to “bullying” and a big congressional kerfuffle that was about to happen because of his delayed promotion to full bird.

- Iirc, he was told that he could remain in his career, but he would have to move from a hot shot track he was in to something like being commandant of a nowhere base in Alaska so he could lay low. Note that moves like this happen when being promoted to full bird, but I got the sense that this was not his trajectory pre-testimony.

- His post-retirement options probably exclude working at any organization that is pro-Trump and most that are pro-Republican, which is a not small number of DoD contractors (common landing spot for retired military).

- Note that his lawsuits were dismissed. This type of discrimination is fairly easy to do in such a way that makes it difficult to sue successfully, usually due to something like “documented personal opinion or discretion” that the discriminator had. Note that I have personally seen this knowingly done several times —- it was super creepy to see in action.

Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vindman

Some of his interviews were enlightening if you search for the links.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

How would you protect someone like Vindman from that kind of retaliation? Would you force the MAGA crowd to wash his feet? He's also benefited- I was surprised and delighted to see him on an episode of Curb your Enthusiasm

We were talking about protections from prosecution which Snowden absolutely had.

[csa]

> How would you protect someone like Vindman from that kind of retaliation?

Realistically, there is nothing rule-based that I can think of in the US that would protect someone like Vindman. He probably knew that.

The protection has to be from a system of shared beliefs about what is ethical and appropriate.

Trump’s whole campaign and strategy (love it or hate it) was to completely dumpster that idea.

There could be an interesting discussion about the merits and demerits of disrupting the existing system of shared beliefs that was in place when Trump was elected (I would actually welcome that), but Trump mostly (if not entirely) just used the opportunity to feed his narcissism.

> Would you force the MAGA crowd to wash his feet?

Totally uncalled for.

A simple solution would be things like:

- Don’t block his career for petty politics. The problem is that Trump specifically was all about retaliation and petty politics. I think most of the folks around him gave guidance not to do these sorts of petty things, but that was his style.

- Own your mistakes. Again, I don’t think this was Trump’s strong suit.

- Factor in the bigger picture when making decisions. Vindman, if my read on his career is correct, is precisely the type of person we need more of in the upper officer ranks. Tanking his career was bad for Vindman, but worse for the country, imho. That’s just short-sightedness.