Trump-appointed hostage negotiator pushes back on GOP prisoner swap criticism

A top hostage negotiator dismissed GOP concerns that the massive prisoner swap orchestrated last week will encourage Russian 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.

The massive swap appeared to rest on Germany’s decision to release a convicted Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a Georgian Chechen dissident in 2019. The exchange was met with some criticism from Republicans, who suggested that releasing Russian prisoners like Krasikov would only embolden Putin to target more Americans.

Carstens also noted risks are always taken in situations where Russian prisoners are released.

“It’s hard to determine what he’s going to do in the future. I mean, obviously we hope he goes back and does nothing,” he said about Krasikov. “There’s a phrase that the moral imperative outweighs the moral hazard.”

“What happens in the future with him, we don’t know. We can hope. We can take different mitigation steps to hopefully make sure that he behaves himself as life goes forward, but you always assume a risk in these situations,” he added moments later.

The White House has also played down the possibility that the exchange would lead to a thawing of relations with Russia on a host of other global security issues — in particular, the war in Ukraine. National security adviser Jake Sullivan noted there was no direct engagement between President Biden and Putin on the prisoner swap, but extensive talks with Russian officials.