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Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman, a retired Army colonel who along with his twin brother raised alarms about President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, plans to announce that he will run for Congress in Virginia’s 7th District, where Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) has declined to seek another term to run for governor instead.
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Vindman, 48, is the first Democrat to announce a campaign to succeed Spanberger, whose decision to seek statewide office opens up a competitive seat in the Washington exurbs that is likely to be eyed by Republicans as a pickup opportunity — and by some state and local Democrats as a chance to move to Congress. The news of his announcement was first reported by Semafor.
A career military officer who went from fighting in Iraq to serving in the White House as a national security adviser, Vindman acknowledged that he is a newcomer to Virginia politics who is better known for his time in Washington.
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But his experiences immigrating to the United States from Soviet Ukraine as a child and later prosecuting cases as a judge advocate general at Fort Hood in Texas (now Fort Cavazos), he said, illustrates the kind of rule-of-law approach that he wants to bring to representing the district on the Hill.
“I’m not your typical candidate,” he said in an interview ahead of the announcement. “The bottom line is that I want to serve my community. I’ve retired from the Army, but now I have a change of mission — and that’s to serve the community I decided to live in and raise my kids in.”
Vindman emerged into the national spotlight when he reported a claim from his colleague and twin brother, Alexander, about a call in which Trump implored Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a corruption investigation of Joe Biden.
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As a senior ethics official at the National Security Council, Yevgeny Vindman brought the report to his superiors. When Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was later subpoenaed and then testified before a House panel during the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, he was never far off. The identical twins were later dismissed together from their jobs at the National Security Council following the inquiry.
All the while, he notes, they were commuting together to Washington from their homes in Dale City — just four doors down from each other — up Interstate 95, facing the brutal gridlock familiar to so many residents of Prince William and Stafford counties.
The 7th District stretches from eastern Prince William County through the Fredericksburg area into redder, rural territory closer to Charlottesville, and Republicans have already set a target on the purple but blue-trending seat as a potential pickup in their effort to defend a majority in the House of Representatives next fall.
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After Spanberger officially bowed out of running for another term in Congress on Monday to focus on her gubernatorial campaign, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report reclassified the district in its ratings as more competitive, shifting it from a “likely” Democrat hold to one that “leans” blue.
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In a statement this week, a spokeswoman for the Republicans’ campaign arm for the House of Representatives said that the group is “all hands on deck to flip this now-open seat and grow the House Republican majority.”
“Spanberger joining the other swing-district Democrats racing for the exits makes House Democrats’ climb out of the minority that much steeper,” said the spokeswoman, Delanie Bomar.
Speculation has also grown since then over local and state figures who might also seek the Democratic nomination. Del. Elizabeth R. Guzman (D-Prince William), who was doubled up with another lawmaker in redistricting and then narrowly lost a state Senate primary in June, said she was exploring a run.
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In a district heavy with military officials and veterans and government contractors, Vindman presented himself a potent example of how Democrats are pushing back on Trump and trying to protect the rule of democracy in the United States — and as a down-ballot candidate that could turn the 2024 elections into a referendum on both.
Before Trump’s time in office, Vindman said his career was “apolitical”: He worked in the military under both Republican and Democratic presidents and said he could not recall if he had voted for some Republicans decades ago.
Yet, the reports on Trump he handled from his brother — as well as his dismissal from the NSC, which a federal investigation characterized as likely retaliation — forced him to enter the fray, he said.
“I ultimately became politicized by Donald Trump and his administration as they tried to discredit me,” he said.
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Vindman has cast himself as someone who has instead sought to fight that kind of autocracy in the military and around the world: A persistent voice for U.S. military aid to Ukraine, he now works for a multilateral group that aids prosecutors in Kyiv investigating war crimes in Ukraine.
And indeed, Vindman notes that he wrote what arguably became the most famous line of his brother’s testimony before Congress — an appeal to their father, a Jewish man who had brought them over to the United States.
“Dad, my sitting here today … is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States,” Alexander Vindman said in his testimony before Congress. “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”
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