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President Joe Biden’s 10-month effort to free Brittney Griner faced stubborn resistance from a Russian government bent on extracting maximum concessions for the WNBA star’s release.
But the president also faced opposition from his own Justice Department, which viewed Thursday’s one-for-one prisoner swap involving Griner and the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout as a mistake given the discrepancy of offenses by the two prisoners, said officials familiar with the matter.
Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was arrested outside Moscow in February for possessing a small amount of cannabis oil. Bout, whose arms fueled conflicts from Sudan to Rwanda to Afghanistan to Angola, is nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” and his illicit transactions with violent regimes and militant groups earned him a 25-year sentence in federal prison.
After the two passed within a few feet of each other on an airport tarmac in the Persian Gulf on Thursday, a public debate raged in the United States over how the government handles prisoner exchanges for citizens it considers “wrongfully detained.”
Supporters of Griner, civil rights leaders, and LGBTQ advocates who had pressured the White House to bring her home hailed the swap as a long-overdue remedy to a travesty of justice. Critics, including Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who is vying to become the next speaker of the House, said the trade was “unconscionable” and risked detentions of more Americans abroad.
Privately, those same disagreements also played out inside the administration and cut across familiar bureaucratic lines, said senior officials. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
Negotiating for an exchange of prisoners often involves complex political trade-offs within different parts of the U.S. government, and the Griner-Bout case was no exception.
Within the Justice Department, many officials resisted the idea of trading Bout before his scheduled release in 2029, according to current and former officials. “If she were my relative, I would want to do the swap,” said one. “But trading a notorious international arms dealer for a basketball player is madness.”
The most painful aspect of the exchange was that it excluded Paul Whelan, a U.S. Marine veteran who is serving a 16-year sentence on espionage charges that the U.S. considers bogus.
For months, State Department officials had advocated a swap involving Bout that would include the release of both Whelan and Griner, but Moscow refused unless the United States also secured the release of Vadim Krasikov, a former colonel from Russia’s internal spy agency, said officials familiar with the matter.
Krasikov is serving a life sentence for murder in Germany and Berlin had made clear that releasing him was a non-starter, said a U.
