Joe Biden, our all-American traitor-in-chief and general foul-up, is holding true to his nature, as he recently made the worst deal on a prisoner swap ever on December 8, 2022, aside from Obama's deal that swapped Bowe Bergdahl for four top Taliban jihadi terrorists, who now run Afghanistan's government.  Seeing the public relations fantasy dance through his head and hoping to get a win that would deflect from all his administration's miserable failures, from the economy to the border and more, Biden ordered the release of Viktor Bout, a miserable, death-dealing arms merchant who has left thousands of dead in his wake.  In exchange?  The return of Brittney Griner, a black, lesbian, anti-American, anti-God, anti-family, pot-headed basketball player, who has turned her back on America more than once.  Biden chose this swap rather than using the full weight of the U.S.'s resources to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran and a heterosexual male, who has spent the past four years in a Russian prison on false charges of espionage. 

Yes.  The P.R. optics heavily favored Griner over Whelan.

On December 8, the day the swap was announced, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) observed:

If [Joe Biden] is going to release a guy convicted of providing aid to a terrorist organization [and] conspiring to kill American citizens, he should have at least gotten BOTH Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan in return.

A U.S. Marine is left behind in another bad deal made by Biden.

All one is left to imagine is that the Biden regime really does want America's enemies to win.

Initially, Biden's negotiators sought to get both Griner and Whelan back in exchange for Bout, but Putin's counter-offer was only Griner in exchange for both Bout and Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who is serving a life sentence in Germany.  Krasikov was Putin's main focus, because he is a top Russian asset and a former colonel in Russia's intelligence service, the FSB (Russia's counter to the CIA), with an abundance of key Russian intelligence locked inside his head — intelligence that Putin fears he may already have provided to Germany's government. 

If it was truly a case of "our choice was Brittney or no one at all," as stated by Karine Jean-Pierre in a recent press briefing, for my money, any administration with any backbone and love for America would have chosen to walk away from a terrible deal that played into Putin's hands and gave him back a man — an asset known as "the Merchant of Death," with a river of blood on his hands — who is sure to now aid in helping Russia secure the best armaments for his war against the Ukrainians.  Getting Brittney Griner back was worse than getting no one back, since one can full well expect her to go right back to her anti-American activism on the basketball court after the shock of her experience wears off and relief sets in with the restored comfort of "home."  Viktor Bout will go back about his business of spilling gallons of blood across the world.

The American people should know that Viktor Bout was serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted of giving aid to a terrorist organization and plotting to kill Americans.  He was known to have sold weapons to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and rebels like those in Sierra Leone, wherever there was a civil war or some other violent conflict to be found.  And now he's loose and free to pick back up where he left off, depending on how tightly Putin holds his chain now. 

In the meantime, Paul Whelan, a former Michigan police officer and an Iraq War veteran, sits in a Russian prison with twelve years of a sixteen-year sentence of "hard labor" left to serve, simply because he traveled one too many times to Russia in troubled days and wanted to attend a friend's wedding.  He's been held all this time on the false charge that he was spying on Russia for America, which led to his arrest in 2018.

There isn't any doubt that this sorry, egregious, sordid affair will open the floodgates to every minor and major terror player and every dictatorial power across the globe.  We'll see these actors zeroing in on any American within their sights and reach as a new target for kidnapping, to be held for ransom and to extort key concessions from a U.S. administration that has shown itself to be weak beyond belief.

Biden has essentially invited dictators and rogue regimes alike to use Americans as tools that can be used against America's interests.  So any American with any sense should be extremely careful about where he travels these days, now that Americans are targets for unlawful detention and imprisonment. 

The Biden regime needed a win.  It didn't bat an eye.  It just sent an international arms merchant back to Putin's open arms and said, To hell with the Marine.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.