The WNBA star was released in a prisoner swap and returned to the U.S. nearly 10 months after she was arrested in Russia.
The invitation Cherelle Griner received to the White House on Thursday morning was to meet with national security adviser Jake Sullivan. This wasn’t her first trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but it was the first time officials didn’t work to lower her expectations before she got there.
When she arrived, she was taken to the Oval Office and greeted not by Sullivan, but by his boss, President Joe Biden. The deal is happening, he told her. A minute later he got a phone call and they heard the news together: Brittney Griner was back in U.S. custody.
The call was patched through to Griner, who was standing on a tarmac in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, wearing a knit cap over her recently shorn hair. President Biden spoke first.
« It’s Joe Biden, » he said, according to a White House official. « Welcome — welcome home. »
Cherelle Griner was then led to a private dining room where she could speak with her wife — a free woman for the first time in 294 days — without Russian officials listening in. And sometime in the very early hours Friday, she was expected to greet her wife after she landed in San Antonio.
Government officials and sources close to Griner interviewed Thursday described a hectic final chapter to Griner’s time in Russia.
For months, U.S. officials said privately, and occasionally publicly, that Russia simply wouldn’t engage in negotiations. The United States offered to trade convicted arms merchant Viktor Bout, 12 years into a 25-year sentence, for Griner and former marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russian custody on espionage charges for four years. But Russia never showed a willingness to trade Whelan, several administration officials said on condition of anonymity.
« We have been raising Paul Whelan’s case with the Russians since the earliest days of this administration, » one senior administration official said during a background briefing.
A White House official told ESPN on Thursday that the United States at one point offered a straight trade of Bout for Whelan, who has 12 years remaining on his sentence.
