Ohio Senator JD Vance, the running mate of US presidential candidate Donald Trump, refused to take calls from Ukraine about F-16 deliveries, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The claim was based on text messages Vance has exchanged with Charles Johnson, described by the Post as a blogger “who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories” as well as a federal informant. Johnson provided some of those messages to the Post.
“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” Vance messaged Johnson last October. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”
Another message, which the Post did not quote, allegedly ridiculed “the mental state of a pro-Ukraine activist,” while another suggested that the US intelligence community was engineering media support for Ukraine by telling Johnson the spies should “up the doses of Xanax among the rank and file.”
Xanax is a tranquilizer usually prescribed for panic and anxiety disorders.
The Post has presented the messages as proof that Vance “gravitates to people on the political fringe” and validation of the Democrats’ branding of Trump’s running mate as “weird.”
Vance’s spokesman William Martin told the Post that the senator was never close with Johnson and that the two don’t share the same politics.
“Chuck Johnson spam texted JD Vance,” Martin said. “JD usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things he said.”
The 40-year-old freshman senator, tapped last month to be Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, has long been a critic of the current administration’s limitless support for Ukraine. He voted against the $61 billion aid bill to Kiev that was eventually rammed through Congress in April.
He also wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that Ukraine’s problem was not political, but mathematical: it needed more men than it could draft and more equipment than the US and its allies could provide.
The US Congress has approved almost $175 billion in aid to Ukraine since the conflict with Russia began in 2022. Ukraine has received an estimated $70 billion worth of cash, weapons, equipment and ammunition, while the rest of the money went to the Pentagon, US weapons manufacturers, and other programs.