The Pentagon is urging the House to investigate whether Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Virginia) improperly consulted on behalf of the Ukrainian government before being elected to Congress — a claim the congressman denies and argues is an attempt by the Trump administration to “intimidate” him.
In a letter dated Nov. 19, and reviewed by The Washington Post, Pentagon General Counsel Earl Matthews alleges that Vindman and his twin brother Alex did not have approval from the U.S. government before seeking to act as “paid brokers” for American defense firms pursuing contracts with Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
The letter does not explicitly allege the Vindmans received money from the Ukrainian government, arguing only that they “did not insulate themselves from the requirements of federal law.”
Eugene Vindman told The Post that their revenue came only from American firms and that they obeyed necessary regulations.
The Vindman brothers — who received national attention while serving on the National Security Council during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 — are both retired Army officers, and needed the consent of the U.S. secretary of state and Army secretary before working on behalf of a foreign government, the letter argues.
“If any U.S. military retiree could simply form a ‘consulting firm’ and immediately start providing services to a foreign government without the required secretarial approvals, it would make a mockery of the law,” Matthews writes in a letter addressed to the House committees on ethics, oversight and armed services.
But in an interview, Eugene Vindman denied the allegations and called them a politically motivated attack.
“This is an attempt to intimidate and silence me, and it ain’t going to work,” he said.
Spokespeople for the House committees that received the letter did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said the department was “aware of a potential violation of the Emoluments Clause and applicable federal regulations by Rep. Vindman before he entered Congress and has referred the matter to the House Committee on Ethics.” The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause limits how U.S. officials can accept payment or gifs from foreign governments.
Eugene Vindman said he didn’t know whether the committees were proceeding with an investigation and that he wasn’t concerned by the possibility.
“We understood, my brother and I, that we would be under a microscope,” he said. “Everything we did, we did [with] an eye towards strict compliance with law and regulation.”
The letter adds to the Trump administration’s standoff in recent weeks with some of its frequent critics in Congress. This week, the president posted online that a group of Democratic lawmakers who had called on U.S. service members to disobey unlawful orders had committed “sedition,” actions he later said were “punishable by DEATH!”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump was not calling for violence against the lawmakers.
Since returning to office, Trump has urged the federal government to investigate his political foes, from former FBI Director James Comey to sitting members of Congress, such as Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California). Democrats have framed these inquiries as a weaponization of government agencies with the potential to erode longstanding norms that seek to ensure the fairness of government institutions.
Vindman this week led dozens of Democratic lawmakers seeking to pressure the White House into releasing a transcript of a call between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2019, which the congressman argued would be “shocking.”
While hosting Mohammed on a visit to Washington, Trump claimed the de facto Saudi ruler “knew nothing about” the 2018 killing of Washington Post opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi— contradicting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the crown prince approved the assassination.
In a Friday press conference with Vindman, the journalist’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, described the president’s comments as “disturbing” and also called on the White House to publish the transcript of the call.
Vindman, who has called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign, sits on the House Armed Services Committee, tasked with overseeing America’s vast military. To prevent the “appearance of a conflict of interest” by opening an inquiry, Matthews, the Pentagon general counsel, wrote that he was deferring to the House committees on whether to open an investigation.
Still, if the Republican-controlled panels decided that further inquiry was “appropriate,” the Pentagon could begin one of its own, Matthews wrote in his letter.
“I don’t know whether there’s going to be an investigation or not, but again, I’m in a position where I have nothing to hide,” Vindman said
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