Is Anybody Awake Out There? Biden Just Released the ‘Merchant of Death’

Finally, someone was willing to say that the king wasn’t wearing any clothes. President Joe Biden announced that the United States was planning to release a Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death” in exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner.

What? This guy is one of the world’s worst criminals, responsible for deaths in the tens of thousands across the globe.

Someone within Biden’s administration, along with a couple of notable Democrats lashed out at this decision as a very lopsided trade. 

Viktor Bout, otherwise known as the “Merchant of Death,” was serving a 25-year prison sentence for conspiring to kill Americans, trafficking anti-aircraft missiles, and providing material support to terrorists. He was convicted in 2011 for 

conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the FARC, a U.S.-designated terrorist group in Colombia, to be used to kill Americans according to the Justice Department.

It is not likely that he has been reformed in his time behind bars. The man who oversaw his capture wrote in Foreign Policy that if Biden traded Bout, the decision “wouldn’t just be a slap in the face of the law enforcement officers and operatives who labored to bring Bout down, many of them risking their lives in the process” but “would also pose a grave threat to the national security of the United States and its allies.”

The unnamed senior Defense Department official also said, “there is a concern that [Bout] would return to doing the same kind of work that he’s done in the past.” 

Now this one man who was willing to call out the 

“Naked King” is not alone, there are named Democrats who are joining in with criticism. 

Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did not hold back. He said Biden’s decision to free the “Merchant of Death” was a “deeply disturbing decision.”