Trump Accuser Vindman Suggests That Musk Provided State Secrets to Putin
“Elon Musk has access to state secrets. … And he [Putin] has been using the richest man in the world to do his bidding.”
You may recall “Ukraine expert” Alexander Vindman, Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) star witness during President-elect Donald Trump’s first House Impeachment Inquiry. That’s Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman to you. In his capacity at the time as the Director of National Security Affairs at the National Security Council, Vindman was a direct witness to the now-infamous July 25, 2019, phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was so “troubled” by the call that he reported his concerns to the NSC’s lead counsel. And we all remember what came next.
Following the Senate’s acquittal of Trump in February 2020, Vindman was fired from the NSC and escorted out of the White House.
On Oct. 25, the Wall Street Journal reported:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.
The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.
At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.
Musk has emerged this year as a crucial supporter of Donald Trump’s election campaign, and could find a role in a Trump administration should he win. While the U.S. and its allies have isolated Putin in recent years, Musk’s dialogue could signal re-engagement with the Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, the contacts also raise potential national-security concerns among some in the current administration, given Putin’s role as one of America’s chief adversaries.
Vindman appeared on MSNBC to discuss the Journal’s report with MSNBC’s highly partisan host Nicole Wallace, during which he suggested Musk may be handing “state secrets” to Putin. Vindman’s defamatory remarks went largely unreported at the time but resurfaced on X on Wednesday.
Vindman told Wallace, “Clearly, Putin has a type. He likes narcissists and egomaniacs that he knows as a case officer can easily pander to manipulate, to do his dirty work. We are under attack. Russia has been using different levers — whether that’s corruption networks, in this case, it’s influencers like Donald Trump, like Elon Musk, to really kind of sow discord.” [Putin began his KGB career as a case agent.]
Vindman finds this very disturbing because “Elon Musk has access to state secrets. He has top-secret security clearance.”
He continued:
It’s possible that some of that is seeping through. Putin has been very effective in playing both Trump and Elon. And he’s been using the richest man in the world to do his bidding. In some cases, that’s encouraging him probably to support Donald Trump.
That’s not speculation. We see how far in Elon has gone. And then using Twitter as a disinformation platform.
Vindman added that he sees this as a national security threat and that Putin is using both Trump and Musk as useful idiots.
Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2024
Alexander Vindman tells MSNBC that Elon Musk might be giving “state secrets” to Vladimir Putin, and that his support for Trump comes at Putin’s behest.
Please sue this scumbag @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/2AEboXyVJd
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) November 27, 2024
First, it should be noted that Musk did not endorse Trump until July 13, 2024, the date of the first assassination attempt, long after he began “regular contact” with Putin.
Second, in his capacity as one of the world’s most influential businessmen, Musk has likely been in regular contact with many world leaders since 2022.
But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that, similar to his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee five years ago, Vindman’s remarks amount to pure speculation. He provides no evidence for his bombshell statements. His analytical mind thinks in terms of possibilities rather than proven facts.
The retired lieutenant colonel gave himself away by telling Wallace that Musk is using Twitter as a “disinformation platform.” Although this remark was music to Wallace’s ears, it is simply not true. Democrats label anything they disagree with as “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
Vindman is trying to resurrect the Trump/Russia collusion scandal which was fully debunked five years ago following a lengthy special counsel investigation and now he’s adding Elon Musk to the storyline. He is playing with fire.
Upon hearing about Vindman’s remarks on Wednesday, Elon Musk fired back on X: “Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.”
I have no earthly idea if Musk’s claims are true or not. But his response shows that he will not tolerate baseless accusations. Nor will he hesitate to fight back.
Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2024
Vindman responded: “Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics. That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason? … ” Um, didn’t Vindman just make false and completely unfounded accusations about Musk on national television without providing any specifics or am I thinking of something else?
Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics. That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?
Let me help you out with the facts: I don’t take/have never taken… https://t.co/E2ieupoiRf
— Alexander S. Vindman 🇺🇸 (@AVindman) November 27, 2024
At any rate, this story was widely reported on Wednesday night. But oddly, most of the legacy media reports begin with Musk accusing Vindman of being on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and committing treason against the U.S. Strange, huh?
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
This would be the same Elon Musk who provided free Starlink terminals and service to the Ukraine? The same one who destroyed Russia’s business of satellite launches?
Vindman should realize Musk’s clearance is primarily because he builds ICBMs.
Vindman is a worm. And his brother, too.
Please, do not disparage the worms.
One of the brothers was just elected to Congress.
I’m still amazed he was not Courts Martialed, reduced in rank and given a general discharge. Trump could still recall him to active duty and get that done. He should, too.
Yeah, yeah… but what if Musk secretly targets America with those ICBMs? Did anybody think about that?
I detect a new “voice of insanity” for the House now that Schiff has moved on to the Senate.
Oh, look who just opened himself up to a libel claim! Because he can prove these charges, right? Oh sure!
Perfect case to revisit NY Times vs. Sullivan.
And Vindman did brag that the Ukranians wanted him to be their Minister of Defense.
No libel case here, even without Sullivan. Even if Musk were a private person, what Vindman said about him was a conclusion based on given facts, and therefore an opinion rather than a factual statement.
Normally if you give an extreme conclusion about someone, a reasonable person will conclude that you must surely be in possession of facts that support such a conclusion. Therefore, although your target can’t sue you for the conclusion itself, he can sue you for those implied facts.
But if you explicitly lays out the facts on which your conclusion is based, and they are plainly insufficient to support your conclusion, a reasonable person will not assume that you disclosed only the inconsequential evidence and forgot to mention the solid evidence. He will instead assume that this is essentially all you have, and on that basis he will either accept your conclusion or reject it. So your target can’t sue you.
E.g. suppose I were to claim that my neighbor John Smith is secretly a serial killer, people would assume I must have some evidence for this. I must know facts that show this to be true. So he could sue me, not for what I said but for what I implied. But if I were to say John Smith is a serial killer and I know this to be true because I saw it in the Tarot cards, then he can’t sue me any more. By disclosing my “evidence” I am no longer implying that I have real evidence. People will correctly conclude, not that I have factual evidence that he’s a killer, but that I’m a kook. So all that’s left to sue me for is my statement itself, and that’s an opinion, not a factual allegation.
Justice Millhouse has spoken 😂😂
Lucky you ain’t a boar with all those holes in your argument 😂
Pretzels for the twisting and swiss cheese for the holes.
Mailman, what I wrote is the undisputed black-letter law. Nobody who knows anything about defamation law will tell you any different. You cannot sue for an opinion, including a conclusion. You can only sue for factual statements, including implied ones.
That is NOT an opinion, that is an *accusation*. Adding a presumed alleged “May” does not absolve him of that accusation.
It is absolutely a target for libel laws.
Defamation laws do not cover “accusations”. They only cover false statements of fact. When someone lays out certain alleged facts and then draws a conclusion from them, the conclusion is an opinion and is absolutely not actionable. This is settled law. You can ask anyone who knows defamation law.
Except the controlling case says if you say something like ‘this just my opinion, but…’ and call someone a serial killer, it’s not an opion. Perry Mason you are not.
Oh give it up. While opinions are generally protected by the First Amendment and not considered defamatory, an opinion can become defamatory if it implies the existence of undisclosed defamatory facts.
For example, if the defendant says, “I saw John the other night, and I think John is a thief,” this could be considered defamatory if the recipient can reasonably infer that the opinion is based on undisclosed facts. This is, essentially, Vindman’s game.
However, despite your BLACK LETTER LAW CRAP, it is also important to note that merely framing a statement as an opinion, e.g., “It’s my opinion that John is a thief,” does not automatically make it an opinion. The court will examine the statement as a whole, including the context in which it was made, to determine whether it is a statement of fact or an opinion.
Vindman made a statement of fact that Musk supported Trump at the behest of Putin. That Putin is playing Musk for a fool. And he goes on. He’s the Alex Jones of the left.
MosesZD, what is wrong with you? You quoted the correct law which is exactly what I wrote, but you seem not to understand what you yourself wrote!
As you yourself wrote, opinions are never defamatory. What can be defamatory is the implication of undisclosed facts.
You can, in fact, say “this just my opinion, based entirely on my gut feelings and not on any facts, but I think MosesZD is a serial killer”. You’ve made it clear that it’s just an opinion, and that gets you completely off the hook.
What you can’t say is just “I think MosesZD is a serial killer”, not because the opinion itself is defamatory, but because you are implying that you know facts to back it up. The moment you make it clear that your opinion is not based on facts, or you lay out the “facts” on which it is based and make it clear that that’s your entire case, you’re off the hook.
“I think MosesZD is a serial killer because since he moved to this neighborhood the number of prostitutes seems to have declined. You can never find a hooker when you need one. He must be killing them all.” That is not defamation, because there are no implied undisclosed facts. I’ve laid out my entire case, and it’s obviously defective, so I’m off the hook.
And that’s exactly what Vindman did. He didn’t just say Musk was working for Putin, he explained exactly why he thinks so. Everyone can consider that “evidence” and decide for himself whether it makes any sense. Thus there is no defamation (Unless any of his alleged facts aren’t actually true, but as far as I can tell they all are. They just don’t justify his conclusion.)
“ He’s the Alex Jones of the left.” So, ‘It ain’t Defamation Milhouse’, tell us again what happened to Alex Jones in the Sandy Hook defamation case?
“He’s a crook!”, “He’s the Alex Jones of the left!”, “He’s a traitor”.
That’s hyperbole, and reasonably not a target for Libel.
“He sold state secrets to Russia”, on the other hand, is a specific accusation. Newspapers can get away with adding that necessary weasel “Allegedly” because someone *else* has done the accusing, and they are reporting a truthful statement.
“May have”, on the other hand, is NOT a necessary weasel, it is not even a gratuitous ferret.
It remains a direct accusation, and you better be able to have reasonable evidence to that accusation, or it signs you up for a libel case.
It’s one of the few places you don’t even have to prove the counter is true, as you have the right to protect your good name.
Jones made the same mistake as Raimondo of Oberlin. He made objective factual statements that weren’t true.
Had Raimondo stuck to saying that the Gibsons were racists she and Oberlin would have been fine. “Racist” is an opinion, not a factual statement. The entire case against Oberlin was because she went beyond that and made specific factual statements, which she probably assumed were true because “they’re racists and that’s what racists do”, but they weren’t.
Likewise Jones made specific factual statements, which he didn’t even think were true. He also messed up in a big way by cheating on discovery.
The saddest thing is that you spent that long trying to prove your point to a stranger on the internet.
Look at you replying to a stranger on the intraweb 😂😂😂
Vindman is a liar. What he said then and now is not based on “facts.”
Factual statements do not need to be true. Indeed the definition of defamation is false factual statements.
Name-calling is a fine old American tradition, and Milhouse is right:
Ain’t nuthin’ gonna happen.
Musk trolling Vindman by tarring him with his own diry brush is fun though.
Anyhow, the best part of the article was this bit:
Vindman appeared on MSNBC to discuss the Journal’s report with MSNBC’s highly partisan host Nicole Wallace, during which he suggested Musk may be handing “state secrets” to Putin.
Vindman’s defamatory remarks went largely unreported at the time but resurfaced on X on Wednesday.
So, NOBODY but NOBODY is watching MSNBC… this story was invisible until it appeared on X, cause EVERYBODY is on X.
Hillarious
Tarot cards? Seriously?
Yes. There exist people who believe in them, and when someone says that that is how he knows something then everyone understands that he is such a person. And they therefore know how little value they should place in what he says — unless they too believe in the power of the Tarot. Or the tea leaves, the ouija board, or whatever.
Hardly analogous to Vindman’s actions.
It’s exactly analogous. He’s laid out the exact reasons why he thinks Musk is Putin’s spy. He’s explained his chain of reasoning, if you can call it that. He’s not lying about any of it. He’s just drawn a conclusion that no reasonable person would draw from those facts. So it’s exactly like the guy who makes an accusation based on a Tarot reading.
In fact there was a case exactly like that in South Dakota last year. When there were those students murdered, some utter lunatic accused someone else of being the murderer, because she’d seen it in a dream or some such nonsense. Since she made it clear how she “knew” this, it was not actionable.
Milhouse, the TikTok psychic LOST that case. It was not only actionable, she was ordered to pay.
Pulling crap out of your ass isn’t ‘facts’ there Sonny Jim.
A factual statement is anything a person asserts to be objectively true. Defamation by definition is a false factual statement.
“A factual statement is anything a person asserts to be objectively true.
Uhm no. Asserting something does not make it a factual statement.
I can assert that the Rabbit in the moon likes cream cheese.
1. The Japanese have asserted that there is a rabbit on the moon, for more than a thousand years.
https://www.bokksu.com/blogs/news/the-moon-rabbit-legend-exploring-japans-enchanting-lunar-story?srsltid=AfmBOooSOfyqKcDoxPt4ydqpCjCObROtxLb6dNluyLbWxh3rc8wdHis6
2. Many Europeans have asserted that the moon is made of cheese for equally as long.
https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/evidence-indicates-the-moon-is-made-of-cheese
So, I objectively have evidence from which to draw my conclusion.
However, I have not made a factual statement.
Yes, it is a factual statement. One that can easily be proven false. Or it would be except that you laid out your “evidence” for it, which shows that you weren’t actually asserting it as a fact, but as a conclusion you drew from that “evidence”. And conclusions are inherently opinions.
You got a little Vindman on your chin.
😂😂
The problem with your response is there are few to no “reasonable”
people left in the US, or even the world. 🙂
If only Vindman had not shown where he is coming from. A pompous pretend savior, a hater tearing down democracy to save it. He should be in jail for sedition and put on a diet.
He would probably gain weight in prison.
Not if they feed him what he deserves, bread & water.
Is this the Vindman that gave Ukraine Starlink access for free?
Oh, wait, that was Elon Musk.
Well done. It’s clear that Musk is working for Putin. I’m glad you figured that out.
Vindman hasn’t gotten the memo yet that this country is in a different place than it was when he first tried to bring down a sitting President.
Project 2025 will require Vindman and Schiff be deported to Ukraine.
Or Pluto.
And Ray Epps.
That is Shiffless.
Now that Schiff-for-brains is in the Senate, Vindman is vying to be the replacement Schiff-for-brains in the House. In that manner he has rgb gesurrected the Russian hoax, so hè can beat a dead horse..
Of course Vindman hasn’t committed treason. Musk knows that, and knows that any reasonable person will understand that he’s not seriously accusing him of it, he’s just throwing the same kind of garbage that Vindman threw at him. And he knows that Vindman can’t sue him, just as he can’t sue Vindman.
It’s like when people accuse Ted Cruz of being the Zodiac killer. It’s completely obvious that he’s not, so it’s just a joke. Which Cruz has embraced and made his own. There’s no fun in accusing him of it when he openly “acknowledges” it.
Vindman is grifting neocon acolyte of globalism. These are the sorts of people who keep using the people of Ukraine as a cats paw. Europe has a series of self inflicted catastrophes coming to a head and their leadership class is desperate to find a boogeyman other to blame or at least shift attention away from foolish immigration policies, disastrous energy policy, stupid agriculture policies and chronic under investment in national defense to name just a.few issues coming to a head.
EU should follow in the footsteps of others who are now expelling losers, especially those from the Middle East.
That is not treason.
No shit, which is why I didn’t make any argument that he committed treason but nice try to reframe my post into something totally different than I wrote.
Interesting that you reflexively argue about treason when I made no such claim…paging Dr Freud….we have slip injury in exam 1.
It’s an artifact of how comments are indented here, and the fact that I use an avatar and you don’t.
The original post we are discussing quotes Musk accusing Vindman of treason. I commented that Musk clearly didn’t mean this literally. Of course Vindman hasn’t committed treason, and Musk knows that, and isn’t really accusing him of it, he’s just exaggerating for effect. The context makes that clear (and that is why Vindman would not be able to sue Musk for making the accusation).
Your comment followed mine immediately, and because you don’t use an avatar it looks like it’s indented one level from my comment, which would make it a response to my comment. That is why I misread it as a response, and replied that the valid points you made did not make it treason.
Read as an independent comment to the original post, which it is, you are of course 100% correct I am sorry for the misunderstanding.
The whole rotted Vindman family needs to be either held liable for their treason or stripped of their citizenships and sent straight to the front lines in Ukraine.
Neither of those things is possible.
Tell the truth now — the Democrats have a book of Mad Libs for any occasion, for morons like Vindman to use, by plugging in whatever people’s names they want to defame at the moment.
I can’t trust anyone with Vindeman’s history of self-aggrandizement and dishonorable conduct.
Both of these Vindman pukes should have their heads on a pike.
Someone is more than happy to lie for the Democrats, again. That guy is a complete joke.
The vile Vindman’s opining about “narcissists and egomaniacs” is truly the pot calling the kettle black.
His obnoxious and narcissistic “Call me Lieutenant-Colonel Vindman” admonition during House or Senate hearings, combined with his constant, self-promoting grandstanding, say it all.
I , against my better judgment, did go check out the comments sections on several different places around the internet. In doing so the thing that stood out most to me was how unaware supporters of Vidman appear. I would say somewhere between 40% and 50% of the posts supporting Vidman referred to Alexander Vidman as “Congressman” and/or congratulated Vidman on his winning. They have no clue that the Vidmin being talked about isn’t the one who won a seat in Congress, just amazing.
I realize he and his brother are twins, but they don’t look enough alike to make mistake about which is which.
I think they may be confusing this fat boy for his brother who won in Virginia?? 🤔
Vindimin is and always will be a snake in the grass. He and his brother. He is a troll. Nothing more, nothing less. Just ignore him. He is saying things like this to gain acceptance at a network that is failing. Think about that. Lots of keystrokes back and forth responding to a troll.
For those who still think Musk would have a case against Vindman (or would if not for Sullivan), see Hill v DePaul Univ.
Here’s the key quote:
Exactly so, Vindman’s statement about Musk “stated the factual basis for the opinions it expressed”, and “evaluative opinions are not actionable since, by definition, such statements are based on disclosed facts”.
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