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Officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) think it was a mistake for President Joe Biden to swap WNBA star Brittney Griner for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, dubbed the “Merchant of Death.”
Griner was arrested in February at a Moscow airport after being caught with marijuana vaping materials and sentenced to nine years in prison in August. Bout, one of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, was convicted in 2011 of conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to a designated foreign terrorist group to be used to kill Americans.
“If she were my relative, I would want to do the swap,” one DOJ official told The Washington Post. “But trading a notorious international arms dealer for a basketball player is madness.”
The Post said many officials within the department view the one-for-one swap as a mistake, given the glaring disparity between offenses.