Griner opened up on long trip home
WASHINGTON — WNBA star Brittney Griner didn’t want any alone time as soon as she boarded a U.S. government plane that would bring her home.
“I’ve been in prison for 10 months, listening to Russian. I want to talk,” Griner said, according to Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who helped secure her release and bring her back to the U.S. last week.
She then asked Carstens, referring to others on the plane: “But, first of all, who are these guys?”
“And she moved right past me and went to every member on that crew, looked them in the eyes, shook their hands and asked about them, got their names, making a personal connection with them.,” Carstens recalled. “It was really amazing.”
Ultimately, Griner spent about 12 hours of an 18-hour flight talking with others on the plane, Carstens said. The two-time Olympic gold medalist and Mercury star spoke about her time in the Russian penal colony and her months in captivity, Carstens recalled, although he declined to go into specific details.
“I was left with the impression this is an intelligent, passionate, compassionate, humble, interesting person, a patriotic person,” Carstens said. “But above all, authentic. I hate that I had to meet her in this manner, but I felt blessed having had a chance to get to know her.”
Although Griner is undergoing a full medical and mental evaluation, Carstens said she appeared “full of energy, looked fantastic.”
Griner, who also played basketball in Russia, was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in February after Russian authorities said she was carrying vape canisters with cannabis oil.
The U.S. State Department declared Griner to be “wrongfully detained.”
President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that the U.S. had secured Griner’s release. In exchange, the administration released arms dealer Viktor Bout, who had been serving a 25-year sentence for conspiring to sell tens of millions of dollars in weapons that U.S officials said were to be used against Americans.
But the U.S. was unable to secure the freedom of Paul Whelan, who has been held in Russia for nearly four years.
Administration officials have stressed repeatedly that they are still working to release Whelan, whom Russian officials have jailed on espionage charges that the U.S. government says are baseless.
“They hold Mr. Whelan differently because of these espionage charges,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Sunday. “So we’re working through that now. We are now more informed, clearly having gone through this process over the last few months. We’re more informed. We have a better sense of the context here, where the Russia’s expectations are and we’re just going to keep working on it.”
Carstens, the U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator, said “there’s always cards” to play in securing an offer for Whelan and said he spoke with the jailed American on Friday.
Carstens spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and Kirby appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”