Washington D.C. – The Hill, August 06, 2024
A top hostage negotiator dismissed GOP concerns that the massive prisoner swap orchestrated last week will encourageRussian President Vladimir Putin to detain more Americans.
Roger Carstens, the special envoy for hostage affairs who was appointed by former President Trump in 2020, pushed back on the claims Monday, saying there was no precedent for that in his experience.
“The funny thing is, it’s just not proving true. I mean, there was a time when I had 54 cases. I’m now down to just over 20. So we’ve made hard changes. We’ve traded some bad people to get good people, innocent people, back,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And you would think that my numbers would be skyrocketing up, and yet they’re not. They’re going in the opposite direction.”
“So the math proves that assertion could be wrong when we make these hard decisions and the president makes the tough call to send someone back in a trade like this, our numbers are actually going down,” Carstens added.
The prisoner exchange last week, the largest since the Cold War, freed 16 people— including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan — in exchange for eight Russian nationals held in jails in the U.S. and Europe.
