that it “appears that the flag was unintentionally included in a collection of 50 flags that were provided for use by our delegations by an out-of-state volunteer and it has been discarded.” “As someone born in New York state who now lives in Northern Virginia I am not intimately aware of the variations of the state flag design and was unable to catch the error unfortunately. I will do my best to better educate myself on the history of Virginia in the future to ensure it never happens again,” McBride’s statement continued. Peter Ansoff, the former president of the North American Vexillological Association—a group dedicated to the study of flags—told Washingtonian that while the flag Vindman posed with may have been used during the Confederate era, it had no symbolic ties to the Confederacy itself, as it follows the specifications of the Virginia state flag that have been encoded in state law since 1861. The modestly dressed Virtus also appears on an iteration of the seal used by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in 2010. Cuccinelli, who told reporters back then that he cribbed the seal from an “antique state flag that hangs in the Virginia Capitol,” used the more-safe-for-work emblem for less than a week after public ridicule.