Griner For Bout: Not An Even Trade

Two things can be true at once.

Here’s one: It’s good that Brittney Griner is out of that Russian forced labor camp and back on U.S. soil. She’s no hero, but she’s an American.

This is also true: The deal the Biden administration struck to free Griner makes the world a more dangerous place. He traded a Russian warlord for her.

International arms dealer Viktor Bout was convicted of conspiring to kill American citizens. He sold arms to the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the rebels in Rwanda. Obama Attorney General Eric Holder described Bout as “one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers.”

His nickname was the “Merchant of Death.”

Yet, thanks to Biden’s weakness and desperation, Bout’s a free man. Free to go back to his deadly dealings, free to arm America’s enemies, while we got a WNBA player.

You simply don’t “trade” a professional basketball player for a professional arms peddler.

We’d better not hear any more about gun control or an assault weapons ban from an administration that just set an international arms dealer loose on the world.

Beyond that, you don’t leave behind a Marine, Paul Whelan, who was convicted of spying in Russia and is four years into a 16-year sentence.

Last night, former National Security Advisor John Bolton told The New York Post that in 2018 Whelan was detained on “concocted” espionage charges.

“The possibility of a Bout-for-Whelan trade existed back then,” said Bolton, 74, “and it wasn’t made, for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.”

Whelan was sentenced in June 2020 to 16 years in prison. US officials claimed Thursday that the Biden administration tried to secure the release of both Whelan and Griner, but Moscow refused to budge — insisting on a one-for-one swap of Griner for Bout.

“Obviously, there’s a lot of very understandable human emotion here in getting Griner released, but this is a very bad mistake by the Biden administration,” Bolton told CBS of the decision to swap Bout — convicted in 2011 of conspiracy to kill Americans by supplying a Columbian terrorist group with weapons — in exchange for a basketball player jailed for bringing less than a gram of cannabis oil into Russia.

Bolton added that Biden’s willingness to make deals such as this one put other Americans in jeopardy when rogue nations decide to snatch and hold U.S. citizens in hopes of striking sweet deals as a condition of their return.

As we welcome Brittney home, Russia is welcoming Viktor.

And the world just got a lot more dangerous.