With Russia Prisoner Swap, Biden Scores a Win Near the End of His Term
Even in the world of presidential multitasking, July 21 turns out to have been an extraordinary, whipsaw Sunday for President Biden.
At 12:09 p.m., he picked up the phone at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to talk with the prime minister of Slovenia as part of a high-stakes diplomatic gamble to seal a complicated, multinational prisoner swap.
Just 97 minutes later, he posted a world-stunning letter online abandoning his bid for re-election after a bruising pressure campaign by his own Democratic allies, climaxing the biggest crisis of his political career and signaling the end of his presidency after a half-century in public life.
By any measure, it was one of the darkest moments of his time in elective office as the inescapable reality of time, age and polls finally caught up with him. And yet it would lead to one of the most joyous days of his presidency barely a week and a half later as he orchestrated the release of imprisoned Americans from the dungeons of Russia.
For Mr. Biden and his team, the successful negotiation to free 16 people held by Russia on Thursday, including three American citizens and a U.S. permanent resident, offered sweet validation even as the clock is now ticking toward his final curtain call in office. When the president appeared with relatives of the liberated prisoners in the State Dining Room of the White House, it was clearly personal to him and he framed it as a mission on behalf of the larger American family.
“My dad had a simple proposition: Family is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Blood of my blood and bone of my bone,” Mr. Biden said before hugging the daughter of one of the freed prisoners. “I could think of nothing more consequential.” As he often does, he drew on his own experience of personal tragedy. “Having lost family,” albeit in a very different way, he said that bringing home these tortured souls now, well, “it matters, it matters.”
It clearly mattered to him too. Although he made no mention of the incredible timing of his diplomatic triumph, just an hour and a half before his political surrender, it reinforced a commitment to making his last five months in power count. He may be a lame duck now, but he has no intention of heading off quietly into the night — except to Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, where he planned to welcome home the Americans late Thursday night.
Mr. Biden’s staff made a point of talking up his diplomatic deftness in brokering the deal, bringing together seven countries in the largest such swap since the Cold War. And they emphasized that he and his administration had helped free more than 70 Americans wrongfully detained abroad during his tenure.
“This was vintage Joe Biden,” said Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. “If you had not had Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, I don’t think this would have happened.”
Mr. Sullivan, who has been personally invested in bringing home the hostages for years and had to deliver bad news to their families on many occasions, grew teary-eyed himself in the White House briefing room. “Today was a very good day,” he said, choking up.
It was Mr. Sullivan who set up the president’s critical call with Prime Minister Robert Golob of Slovenia on July 21, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share behind-the-scenes details.
The day before, on Saturday, July 20, Mr. Sullivan had been in Colorado for a meeting of the Aspen Strategy Group and worked the phones to bring together the deal. He was talking with his counterpart from Slovenia, which had agreed in principle to release two Russians held by that Balkan country as part of the swap to free the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the others held by Moscow.
But the two Russians would have to be pardoned, and the Slovenians said they could not do that in time, according to the U.S. official. So Mr. Sullivan asked if he could arrange a call from the president to the prime minister. After flying back to Washington, Mr. Sullivan called from his home that Sunday and connected the two leaders through the White House Situation Room, according to the U.S. official.
Mr. Biden was in isolation in Rehoboth recovering from Covid — and unknown to nearly the whole world, finalizing his letter withdrawing from the race. Even Mr. Sullivan, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, had no idea what the president was about to do when he patched through the call and only learned later — and not from the president.
During the phone call, which lasted just a few minutes, Mr. Biden implored Mr. Golob to facilitate the release of the two Russians in his custody. In making his pitch, Mr. Biden even offered to visit Slovenia, the U.S. official said. What Mr. Biden did not say was that he would only have a few months left in office to follow up on that idea.
Mr. Sullivan, asked about the timing of the call shortly before the withdrawal, said it was simply happenstance. “That’s when the pieces were falling in place,” he said.
It was hardly the only conversation Mr. Biden had during the months of haggling. He reached out personally to other foreign leaders, most critically Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, who for a long time had resisted releasing Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin convicted of murdering a Chechen separatist in Germany on state orders.
But with Mr. Biden pressing him, and the prospect of winning the release of Aleksei Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader who was in prison, Mr. Scholz finally relented. “For you, I will do this,” he told Mr. Biden in January, according to U.S. officials.
Mr. Navalny died in prison a few weeks later, temporarily sabotaging the deal. But Mr. Scholz still went along with releasing Mr. Krasikov in the end and got five German nationals imprisoned in Russia in trade.
“The deal that made this possible was a feat of diplomacy and friendship — friendship,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday. In a veiled reference to former President Donald J. Trump, who constantly berates and belittles America’s European partners, Mr. Biden added: “For anyone who questions whether allies matter, they do. They matter.”
No longer facing another election might have made it easier on some level for Mr. Biden to risk whatever political fallout there might be for the swap. It was an uncomfortable compromise. No one liked giving up a killer like Mr. Krasikov for innocent Americans like Mr. Gershkovich, the Marine veteran Paul Whelan and the journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, along with Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian opposition leader and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post who is a permanent U.S. resident.
Trading for hostages always raises the tricky question of whether it encourages the hostage-takers to do it again. Unsurprisingly, Republicans quickly made that point, most loudly Mr. Trump, who is seeking his old job back and denounced giving anything away to free American prisoners.
“To do so is bad precedent for the future,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site in a posting that did not even pause to celebrate the freedom for the Americans and others released. “That’s the way it should be, or this situation will get worse and worse. They are extorting the United States of America.”
But in fact, Mr. Biden and Mr. Sullivan decided early in his administration that the old politics no longer applied and that they should be willing to make trades, when justified, to free imprisoned Americans.
For all the predictable criticism that would come, they concluded that there was really no meaningful domestic political cost, nor was it clear that refusing to make deals would necessarily stop hostage taking. In that case, they reasoned that it was better just to get Americans home rather than stand on what they considered a pointless principle and leave innocent people wasting away in foreign prisons or terrorist sanctuaries.
They did so for Trevor R. Reed, an ailing former U.S. Marine held in Russia on what his family called bogus charges of assault, and they did so again for Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star arrested in Moscow on what U.S. officials considered trumped-up drug charges. Left out of all those deals, though, was Marc Fogel, an American teacher sentenced to 14 years in a labor camp after being found with medical marijuana. Biden aides said they would keep trying to free him too.
When Mr. Biden appeared on Thursday with the families of Mr. Gershkovich and the others, he laughed off a claim by Mr. Trump that if he were elected again, he would get President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to simply free American prisoners without receiving anything in return. “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” Mr. Biden asked.
With that, he headed out of the room. There was more to do. In fact, he had another important phone call to make, this one with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. There were, after all, more crises to confront, more hostages to try to free and not much time left.
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