“This is a position of strength, comrades."
The flame-haired Russian spy who shook the foundations of the NRA is mocking the U.S. for swapping a notorious arms dealer for basketball player Brittney Griner.
Marina Butina — now a politician — joins a raft of others in the intelligence community who are wondering whether the swap was too high a price to pay.
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“The fact that Russia pushed through the exchange of (Viktor) Bout, whom America fundamentally did not want to give away for many years, right now means that, like in The Godfather, we ‘made them an offer that cannot be refused,'” Butina said on the Telegram messaging app Thursday.
She added: “This is a position of strength, comrades.”
And Butina knows of what she speaks, spending years infiltrating U.S. conservative groups like the NRA before she was nabbed. She served 15 months in a U.S. federal prison before being sprung in 2019.
According to reports, the U.S. also wanted a former Marine, Canadian-born Paul Whelan, included in the deal but the answer was nyet.
While Griner is a basketball player who was busted for a small amount of drugs when she entered Russia, Bout is a very dangerous man.
U.S. DEA agents arrested him in Thailand in 2008 and he was extradited to the U.S. two years later. He was convicted of conspiring to sell weapons to a “designated foreign terrorist group.”
President Joe Biden said it “was not a choice of which American to bring home.”
But U.S. critics found common cause with the former Russian spy, claiming the U.S. had been scammed.
Whelan told CNN: “I don’t understand why I’m still sitting here. I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up.”
Former national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton also slammed the deal.
“This is not a deal. This is not a swap. This is a surrender,” he told CBS News.
“And terrorists and rogue states all around the world will take note of this, and it endangers other Americans in the future who can be grabbed and used as bargaining chips by people who don’t have the same morals and scruples that we do.”
And Dallas Cowboys linebacker Micah Parson tweeted: “Wait nah!! We left a marine?!! Hell nah.”
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun
