Why did President Obama engineer a prisoner swap with Communist Cuba involving Alan Gross, an American citizen who badmouthed his own country mere hours after he arrived back on U.S. soil?

It turns out that a cabal of left-wing extremists helped to make Gross's release happen.  More on that in a moment.

Just look at the first thing newly freed Gross did upon arriving back in America.  He pulled a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt, drawing a vile moral equivalency between the U.S. and the brutal, fascistic island hellhole he just escaped. 

Said Gross (italics added):

I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba.  In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected.  To me cubanos, or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented.  It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments' mutually belligerent policies.  Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment.  Two wrongs never make a right.  I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today.  It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months.  In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support.

What an odd statement for a man released as part of an international James Bond-style spy swap to make.  Just hours after coming back to America, he's praising President Obama's newly announced plan to normalize relations with Cuba.  It seems staged.

And I may be going out on a limb here, but condemning your own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get you repatriated from the clutches of a nasty dictatorship is more than bad form.  It reeks of sedition. 

Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a home for meddling leftist crackpots.  He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving internet access for Cuban Jews.  The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, imposing a 15-year prison sentence.

Gross was exchanged for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five –Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino – who had been held in U.S. prisons.  All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001.  Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.

It is also strange that as Gross prepared for his press conference, there was a portrait of  Communist mass murderer Che Guevara clearly visible in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross's lawyer, high-profile ambulance-chaser Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP.  The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank.  He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro's regime to death.

In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba's most infamous jailer stared down at him.

Gross thanked a laundry list of leftists for helping to free him.

Among them were Jill Zuckman of leftist PR firm SKDKnickerbocker, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).  SKDKnickerbocker also employs former resident Maoist in the Obama White House Anita Dunn and Democrat operative Hilary Rosen.

What exactly these people did and why they did it may surface in coming days.

But we already know that President Obama delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America.

First there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban's high command.  Not exactly a good deal for America. 

What else does our neo-communist, Alinskyite president have in store for us in his remaining days in office? 

Matthew Vadum (website) is an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., and author of the ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Ripping Off and Terrorizing American Taxpayers.  Follow him on Twitter.  E-mail him at matthewvadum [at] gmail.com.