Paul Whelan Will Get His Day!

Biden said it's not over.

The far right and many of the so called "Never" ones are beyotching about a Canadian American security official being held in a Russian penal colony. He was charged with espionage. It is a far more serious crime than Brittney Griner having a few vape cartridges with CBD oils.

The noise is whining about how the president failed to get am American out of Russia.

President Joe Biden vowed that he will get Paul Whalen released. 

A little bit about Whalen. He is a Canadian-American security specialist who served in the U.S. Marines until his discharge. He enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1994. He took military leave from Kelly Services to serve with the Marine Corps Reserve from 2003 to 2008, including service in Iraq. He held the rank of staff sergeant with Marine Air Control Group 38 working as an administrative clerk and administrative chief, and he was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After a court-martial conviction in January 2008 on multiple counts "related to larceny", he was sentenced to 60 days restriction, reduction to pay grade E-4, and a bad conduct discharge. The specific charges against him included "attempted larceny, three specifications of dereliction of duty, making a false official statement, wrongfully using another’s social security number, and ten specifications of making and uttering checks without having sufficient funds in his account for payment."

He was arrested in 2018 at his hotel on allegations of espionage. 

Whelan was arrested in the Moscow area by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which later confirmed his arrest. Whelan's twin brother David said Whelan arrived in Moscow on December 22 to attend the wedding of a former fellow Marine at the Hotel Metropol Moscow and to assist the groom's family members on their first visit to Russia, a country he had visited many times. He said his brother planned to return to Michigan on January 6, 2019, via Saint Petersburg.

Per MBK News, an outlet run by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Whelan had $80,000 in cash "temporarily confiscated" during a customs inspection at Domodedovo Airport. David said his brother entered Russia using his U.S. passport. He said his brother had not been in contact with his family. He was formally charged on January 3, 2019.

According to the Russian news agency Rosbalt [ru], Whelan was apprehended in his hotel room at the Metropol while concluding a long outing with a Russian citizen, who handed him a USB drive containing "a list of all the employees at a classified security agency". The independent Latvian-based publication Meduza reported that the wedding attendees all banded close together for the duration of the holiday, and were taken aback by Whelan's decision to spend the day alone.

The BBC cited family members of Whelan, who said Whelan previously bragged about knowing an agent of the FSB, and was privy to an unusual cache of personal details about his friend, including which intelligence training school he attended (biographical information typically reserved for a very close circle).

As Whelan said about the arrest, his long-time friend had appeared suddenly in the hotel, followed by authorities, who later arrested him.

According to the lawyers, they could not provide the name of the Russian long-time friend due to Russian secrecy rules, but Whelan's family identified the person as Ilya Yatsenko, whom the Russian newspaper Kommersant described as a major in the FSB's Department "K", which monitors Russian economic crimes.

Former Obama and later Washed Up 45 ambassador Jon Huntsman failed to get him out.

Washed Up 45 did not do anything. Mike Pompeo did nothing.