American president Joe Biden faced virulent online criticism for freeing Brittney Griner via prisoner swap for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout with the Russian government.
Griner originally faced nine years in a maximum-security penal colony for women for attempting to bring a small amount of medical hashish oil aboard a flight with her Russian Premier League team.
Many people are upset that Biden swapped a “merchant of death” like Bout for a basketball player. One such person is John Bolton, a former national security advisor to then-president Donald Trump.
Bolton told CBS, via The New York Post, that Trump rejected the deal that President Biden accepted.
“The possibility of a Bout-for-Whelan trade existed back then, and it wasn’t made, for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor 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 said.
“This is not a deal. This is not a swap. This is a surrender,” Bolton added. “And terrorists and rogue states all around the world will take note of this, and it endangers other Americans in the future who can be grabbed and used as bargaining chips by people who don’t have the same morals and scruples that we do.”
Bolton said rogue states will only be emboldened by the swap.
“It’s the kind of thing that says to terrorists and rogue states and other malign actors who would consider kidnapping or seizing Americans, that we’re willing to trade almost anything to get Americans back,” he said. “There are other ways to deal with hostage-takers through sanctions and other things, not swaps like this one.”
Trump has publicly blasted Griner’s release.
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