Episode 4549: DEADLY SWAP: Merchant of Death for Basketball Star Brittney Griner

Viktor Bout, known as The Merchant of Death, for his notorious career as an arms dealer - has been freed from an American prison and allowed to return to Russia - thanks to the Biden White House trading him for WNBA player, Brittney Griner. Brittney endangers Americans in her own way, as you will hear, but Bout endangers the world, as he may well return to his old ways of selling weapons for fun and profit to terrorists (unless Putin appoints him to some job where his ruthlessness would come in handy.) In this podcast, we take a look at the colorful background of each of the contenders for this swap, so YOU can decide - by the end - whether it should have been Brittney Griner or Paul Whelan who was traded for Viktor Bout, or whether Biden shouldn’t have freed Bout under any circumstances. Though Brittney is a star basketball player, she’s also anti-American, calling for the National Anthem to no longer be played at any games! She was  convicted for smuggling drugs into Russia, albeit her own, and she knew - or should have known - that  would get her in trouble. Paul Whelan is a former Marine, who served for years - including in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was convicted for alleged espionage in Moscow, but the circumstances are murky. Before you decide who should have been swapped, consider this: a former U.S. national security adviser says that the Biden administration'sdeal with with Russia was “not a deal… not a swap.This is a surrender.”