President Joe Biden took a swipe at former President Donald Trump while celebrating the return of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan from Russia.
I want to thank everyone in my administration who helped make this happen. Our work did not start just on day one. It started before day one,” Biden said during remarks at the White House. “During the transition, I instructed our national security team to dig into all the cases of hostages being wrongfully detained, which were inherently — well, we inherited them from the pri- — the prior administration.”
He added, “I wanted to make sure we’d hit the ground running, and we did. As of today, my administration has brought home over 70 Americans who were wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, many since before I took office. Additionally, I issued an executive order in 2022 authorizing penalties like sanctions and travel bans on those who hold Americans against their will. And my State Department has introduced new warnings for Americans about the risk of being wrongfully detained by a foreign government.”
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One reporter asked about Trump’s assertion he could have brought the Americans back without any concession, Biden asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?”
The Associated Press notes the deal set nearly two dozen people free including Whelan and Gershkovich, and for the U.S. and Russia, it is the “biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history.”
Whelan was arrested in 2018 and charged with spying — which he denied.
He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020. And as NewsNation notes, he “previously endured violence when he was in pretrial detention in Moscow at the hands of a guard who was later reprimanded for that. He has also endured verbal abuse at the labor camp that he’s was assigned to.”
“He was left out of a prisoner exchange in April 2022 that brought home yet another detainee, Marine veteran Trevor Reed. That swap escalated pressure on the Biden administration to avoid another one-for-one swap that didn’t include Whelan,” the outlet noted. “That pressure grew when basketball star Brittney Griner was detained for having vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. She was sentenced to nine years in prison but eventually freed in December 2022 during another one-on-one prisoner exchange with Russia for arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence in the U.S. When the swap didn’t include Whelan, it sparked outrage among his family and supporters.”
Meanwhile, Gershkovich was detained in 2023 and accused of espionage.
Last month he was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison.
The U.S. and the Wall Street Journal have both said the charge was false.
