The swap of WNBA player Brittney Griner for Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” is a huge embarrassment for the United States.
But that’s not stopping the Biden administration from celebrating and patting themselves on the back for a job well done, even though former Marine Paul Whelan, who has been languishing in Russia since 2018, was not freed as part of the deal.
“This was not a choice about which American to bring home,” Joe Biden claimed Thursday. I have a hard time believing that. From a public relations perspective, there was likely far more for the Biden administration to gain by getting Griner home over Whelan.
But make no mistake, this was a bad deal in every possible way; it was a huge embarrassment for the United States and a victory for Russia.
Consider the facts: Joe Biden traded Viktor Bout, who was known as the “Merchant of Death,” for Griner, a WNBA player.
Bout was a former Soviet military officer who was serving a 25-year sentence in the United States for crimes like plotting to kill Americans, getting and transferring anti-aircraft missiles, and giving material support to terrorist groups, possibly even al Qaeda.
“Bout provided tons of guns and ammunition to some of the most vicious warlords in the world and empowered them to carry out unspeakable atrocities,” explained Bout biographer Douglas Farah. “He is responsible for enabling murderous groups to kidnap and train thousands of child soldiers; use rape as a systematic method of terror and control; torture through the mass amputations of arms, legs, ears and lips; slaughter civilians, and help the Taliban take power in Afghanistan. Griner may have been carrying vape cartridges that were banned in Russia but not in much of the world.”
“In the late 1990s, Bout was the No. 2 target for the United States, after Osama bin Laden,” Jonathan Winer, a senior official in the State Department during the Clinton administration, told Yahoo News.
Related: Meet the Merchant of Death, Viktor Bout
In contrast, Griner had a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage. Whelan was reportedly part of the negotiations for Bout earlier this year, but the Biden administration failed to secure his release, and there is no excuse for that. This deal was completely lopsided, and it’s hard to see how the Biden administration saw this deal as equitable and not merely as an opportunity to brag about the release of a pseudo-celebrity—even though most people had never heard of her until her incarceration—who conveniently also checks off the all the key diversity boxes.
When an American is wrongfully incarcerated by an enemy nation, this move continues a bad precedent set by the Obama administration for lopsided trades that threaten the security of Americans abroad.
In 2014, Barack Obama secretly exchanged five Taliban terrorists incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for deserter U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. To make the release happen, Obama kept Congress in the dark, and after the deal was made public, he falsely portrayed Bowe Bergdahl as a prisoner of war, not as a deserter. He also lied about the prisoners exchanged for Bergdahl, insisting that they were at low risk for rejoining the fight against the United States. They most certainly were not, and a few years after the swap, we learned that the Taliban terrorists Obama exchanged for Bergdahl had rejoined the Taliban.
The Obama administration also insisted that the Bergdahl swap wouldn’t set a precedent that could put military personnel or other Americans at risk for future swaps.
They were clearly wrong about that too.
