Vice President JD Vance responded to his cousin Nate Vance who went public on CNN to voice his criticism of his treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Nate Vance appeared on CNN on Monday, sharing family photos of he and the vice president together as children before criticizing the vice president for the way he was handling the Ukraine war and behaved in a meeting with Zelensky.
‘Donald Trump and my cousin clearly believe they can placate Vladimir Putin,’ Nate Vance said to the French newspaper Le Figaro. ‘They are wrong. The Russians are not about to forget our support for Ukraine. We are Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots’
Nate Vance’s father is the brother of JD Vance’s mother. Both served in the Marines.
Nate Vance said he tried to contact JD’s senate office to talk to his cousin about Ukraine, but failed to reach him.
JD Vance was gracious in his response to his cousin but disputed that Nate had tried to contact him.
‘I always considered Nate the toughest guy I knew, and no matter what he says about me, my affection for him remains. I’m always happy to talk to him,’ JD Vance said in a statement to DailyMail.com.
The Vice President expressed confusion why Nate did not try to reach him directly through members of the family.
US Vice President JD Vance responded to his cousin who criticized his position on Ukraine
JD Vance’s cousin Nate voices his criticism on CNN of how he’s handling the war in Ukraine
JD Vance (left) and Nate Vance (right)
‘I am unsure why Nate felt the need to reach out to my senate office, rather than to his mom, dad, or sister, all of whom I am in contact with regularly,’ he said.
JD Vance said he purposefully did not reveal that his cousin was fighting in Ukraine to protect him.
‘I love my cousin Nate, and never spoke publicly about his service in Ukraine because I didn’t want to endanger his life more than it already was.’
On CNN, Nate Vance warned that Putin and the Russians would ‘eat’ Trump and JD Vance.
‘They will not hesitate to eat an American president or an American vice president. They don’t care what we think,’ he said. ‘They’re not our allies, and they never will be, not at least for a generation.’
It’s not the first time Nate Vance has gone public to criticize his cousin.
In January, Nate Vance spoke about his time in Ukraine in an interview with The Real Jim Morris Show.
‘Looking back on it, I’m an idiot, right? Like, my plan was pretty much ‘f**k it’ I’ll figure it out when I get there,’ he said.
Nate Vance on The Real Jim Morris Show
JD Vance wearing a Superman shirt as his cousin Nate
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as U.S. Vice President JD Vance reacts
Nate Vance said he volunteered to fight with Ukraine to learn what was really going on.
‘Anybody who says that adventure is not part of it kind of lying, you’re not being completely honest,’ he said.
Nate said he returned to the United States because he did not want his presence in Ukraine to be a problem for his cousin.
‘It does produce a certain potential security risk,’ ‘If something did happen to me, now the vice president is like “one of my g*d***ed relatives is a captive right? so it hamstrings his ability.’
Nate Vance said JD was not ‘lying’ in his book ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ about the way he was raised, reflecting that he was present for part of the vice president’s life.
‘His childhood was worse than the book made it sound,’ if you’re going to ask me for an honest opinion, if there’s any dishonesty,’ he said.
Nate Vance said he was currently writing his own book about his experience in Ukraine and what it would take for them to win the war in Russia and was currently looking for a literary agent and a publisher.
‘I’m like 99 percent done … I got about 85,000 words written. The difficult about finishing it is that I’m kind of living the last chapter,’ he said.
