Eugene Vindman, a Democrat and the brother of a key figure in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump in 2019, is projected to win his race for a congressional seat in Virginia against Republican Derrick Anderson.
The contest had been closely watched, as the district extends from south of Washington almost to Richmond, and is currently represented by moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is running for governor in 2025.
Both Vindman and Anderson played up their respective military records as part of their campaigns. Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, was deployed as part of the “surge” of soldiers to stabilize Iraq under President George W. Bush. He also served in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon as a special forces officer.
Vindman was a paratrooper, infantry officer and eventually a lawyer for the judge advocate general’s office while in the Army. He later moved to the National Security Council, where, as a senior ethics official, he was informed by his brother Alexander of the phone call that resulted in Trump getting impeached in the House for allegedly attempting to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump, who won his presidential race Wednesday, was acquitted by the Senate.
But both campaigns also saw their emphases on their respective candidates’ biographies come back to haunt them.
Anderson claimed that Vindman had embellished the military rank at which he retired. Vindman did not respond directly to the charge in a television interview, but said he is “entitled to be called ‘colonel.’”
“My opponent is lying about my record, just like he lied about his fake family,” Vindman said in that interview. The remark was a reference to pictures and video that Anderson had taken of himself with a female supporter and her children, in poses typical of candidates with their own families.
The material was not used in any ads from Anderson’s campaign, according to The New York Times, but did appear on the campaign’s YouTube page and on the site of the House Republicans’ political arm that serves as a clearinghouse for candidate material that can be used by outside political groups. On his campaign website, Anderson said he lives with a Dalmatian dog and is engaged to be married.
The incident spurred one of the more curious spats between campaigns in 2024, as a political action committee supporting Vindman sponsored TV ads using the images of the supporter and her family to call attention to Anderson’s “fake family.”
Anderson’s campaign retaliated by sending cease-and-desist letters to television stations, warning them against running the pro-Vindman ads featuring the supporter and her kids, even though the pictures and video were created to tout Anderson in the first place.
See full results from the Virginia House election here.