Tipsheet

Remember the Russian Arms Dealer We Released in Exchange for Brittney Griner? Well...

Joe Biden’s record of being the worst American foreign policy mind continues with the latest development on the activities of Viktor Bout. To refresh, he’s the infamous Russian arms dealer we released in exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner in 2022. To the shock of no one, Bout is back to arms dealing, with his latest customer being the Iran-backed Houthi rebels (via WSJ): 

Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” walked out of a U.S. jail almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants. 

The 57-year-old, whose life reportedly inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie, “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage, spent decades selling Soviet-made weapons in Africa, South America and the Middle East before being arrested in 2008 in a U.S. law enforcement sting operation. 

Since his release, Bout has joined a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023, seemingly turning the page on his days as an arms broker. But when Houthi emissaries went to Moscow in August to negotiate the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons, they encountered a familiar face: the mustachioed Bout, according to a European security official and other people familiar with the matter. 

So, this man bungled Afghanistan, continues to sink us deeper into this Ukraine quagmire, has proven to be ineffectual in Gaza—the broken pier perfectly captures Biden’s failed foreign policy—and now just delivered the Houthis another avenue from which to procure weapons. I know there are other disasters from Mr. ‘America is Back,’ but the knifing he took from his party illustrates the weakness of this presidency. 

When you’re a weak old man, you’ll get bulldozed. That’s Joe Biden. 

The Houthi terrorists got a new arms man, thanks to the Biden foreign policy. It’s not as bad as Obama’s deal for Bowe Bergdahl, but it's close.