FACT-CHECK: Did Griner’s Sentence Renews Pressure on Biden?

Immediately after a Moscow judge handed down Brittney Griner’s nine-year prison sentence Thursday, calls grew louder for President Joe Biden to find a way to bring her home.

“We call on President Biden and the United States government to redouble their efforts to do whatever is necessary and possible,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement.

U.S. officials and analysts had been resigned to a guilty verdict for Griner, a basketball star who plays for a Russian team during the WNBA offseason. But the cold reality of her sentence on a drug charge was a shock and renewed calls for Biden to secure her release — even as critics fumed that offering to swap prisoners with Moscow rewards Russian hostage-taking.

The result is a painful quandary for the Biden administration as it tries to maintain a hard line against President Vladimir Putin of Russia over his war in Ukraine.

“There’s nothing good here,” said Andrea Schneider, an expert on international conflict resolution at Cardozo School of Law. “No matter what Biden does, he’s going to be criticized — either that we’re giving too much or we’re not working hard enough.”

Kremlin officials had said that any potential deal could not proceed before her trial was complete, creating a glimmer of hope that the verdict might open the door for an exchange. But analysts called that unlikely anytime soon.

“I don’t think this is going to get resolved quickly,” said Jared Genser, a human rights lawyer who represents Americans held by foreign governments. “I think the fact that Putin has not said yes right away means that he’s looked at the U.S. offer and said, ‘Well, that’s their first offer. I can get more than that.’”

That U.S. offer, first presented to Russia in June, sought the release of Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine arrested in Moscow and convicted of espionage in 2020.

The Biden administration proposed to trade the two Americans for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is midway through a 25-year federal prison sentence for offering to sell arms to a Colombian rebel group that the United States then considered a terrorist organization.

The proposal has already reshaped U.S. diplomacy toward Russia, which had been frozen at senior levels since Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. A phone call about the matter on July 29 between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, was their first conversation since the war began. But it appeared to leave the Kremlin unmoved. The White House says Russia has made an unspecified “bad faith” counteroffer that the United States is not taking seriously.

On Friday, Lavrov told reporters that the two nations would continue discussing the issue through established channels. He repeated the Kremlin’s insistence that the United States not discuss the negotiations in public, though Russian media outlets began linking Bout’s case to Griner’s early this summer.

But the pressure is lopsided. While Putin has long sought Bout’s release, perhaps out of loyalty to a man with deep ties to Russia’s security state, the arms dealer’s continued imprisonment costs Putin little. Time, in other words, is in Putin’s favor.

Biden, on the other hand, finds himself squeezed from two sides.

On one side are Griner’s supporters. Her wife, Cherelle Griner, has made public pleas for Biden to cut a deal with Putin as soon as possible. Those pleas have been echoed by Sharpton, Democratic activist groups, television pundits, pro athletes and celebrities on social media. (Sharpton on Thursday also called for the release of Whelan.)

“How could she feel like America has her back?” NBA superstar LeBron James said in mid-July. “I would be feeling like, ‘Do I even want to go back to America?’”

That was before Biden’s proposal to free Bout became public. Officials said they disclosed the offer, which was confirmed last week by a person briefed on the talks, to increase pressure on Russia. But the revelation may have also reflected a desire to show Griner’s backers that Biden was not sitting on his hands.

“We believe it’s important for the American people to know how hard President Biden is working to get Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan home,” John F. Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said at the time. “We think it’s important for their families to know how hard we’re working on this.”

After Griner was sentenced Thursday, Biden renewed his commitment to “pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible.”

The White House would not say how Biden might achieve that goal, however. “I don’t think it would be helpful to Brittney or to Paul for us to talk more publicly about where we are in the talks and what the president might or might not be willing to do,” Kirby said.

But almost any additional offers would be sure to amplify criticism from Biden’s other flank — and charges that Biden was bending to extortion by Putin, a man he has called a war criminal.

“This is why dictatorships — like Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia — take Americans hostage, because they know they’ll get something for it,” Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., told Newsmax last week. “They know eventually some administration will pay. And this just puts a target on the back of every American out there.”

Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, echoed the criticism in a Fox News interview last week, saying that to free Bout would “likely lead to more” Americans being arrested abroad. And former President Donald Trump, who when in office prided himself on freeing detained Americans abroad, slammed the proposed deal in crude terms.

Bout, he said, was “absolutely one of the worst in the world, and he’s going to be given his freedom because a potentially spoiled person goes into Russia loaded up with drugs.” (Russian officials who detained Griner at a Moscow-area airport in mid-February found less than 1 gram of cannabis vape oil in her bags.)

Genser noted that Biden has an option beyond raising his offer. He could seek new ways to make Putin suffer.

“You need to dramatically elevate the cost to Vladimir Putin of keeping them detained,” Genser said. “It’s not only about giving Putin what he wants. It’s about simultaneously raising the pain for him.”

That is no easy task, however. Biden administration officials have spent months trying to devise ways to incur enough pain on Putin to make him cease his invasion of Ukraine. Like the freedom of Griner and Whelan, that goal, too, remains elusive.

Credit: New York Times.