Elon Musk on Friday joined the growing condemnation over President Biden’s deal to free hoops star Brittney Griner, which gave Russia back its notorious “Merchant of Death” but left former Marine Paul Whelan behind in a brutal prison.
Musk gave his own opinions in response to a Twitter user who asked: “Does it surprise anyone the Biden regime would leave a Marine behind after they abandoned Americans in Afghanistan?”
“Never leave a marine behind. Never,” Musk tweeted firmly early Friday, hours before Griner, 32, touched down back home in America.
The Phoenix Mercury center’s release — in a swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Angel of Death” — was just the latest time that Whiner was not included.
After fellow Marine veteran Trevor Reed was freed in a swap in April, Whelan had asked: “Why was I left behind?”
“I have been held on a fictitious charge of espionage for 40 months,” he said from his Moscow prison at the time. “The world knows this charge was fabricated,” he said of the -16-year sentence the US has widely condemned.
“Why hasn’t more been done to secure my release?” he asked in a direct challenge to Biden, who took credit for freeing Reed in exchange for a Russian pilot who was a major international drug trafficker.
On Thursday, his brother David called the latest swap not to include him “a catastrophe” for the vet, who is widely considered a “hostage.’
Even Reed later called it “wrong” of the Biden administration to free him without Whelan.
Biden maintained Thursday that “we’ve not forgotten about Paul Whelan. We will keep negotiating in good faith for Paul’s release.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby maintained on the “Today” show Friday that releasing Griner “was the only deal we could get at the time.”
“This was not a choice between Paul or Brittney. The only deal we could secure was Brittney … we had to take that step to get to at least one of the two home,” he stressed.
“But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be options going forward to try to get Paul Whelan home,” he said, saying that the administration was “going to keep working at this very, very hard.”
“We’re going to keep having active discussions with the Russians to see what we can do to secure Paul’s release — that’s not going to be forgotten.”
