With Russia Prisoner Swap, Biden Scores a Win Near the End of His Term

The prisoner exchange offered a measure of validation for President Biden soon after he abandoned his bid for re-election.

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President Biden announced on Thursday at the White House that three American citizens and a U.S. permanent resident freed by Russia were heading home, as their families stood beside him.

Even in the world of presidential multitasking, July 21 turns out to have been an extraordinary, whipsaw Sunday for President Biden.

At 12:09 p.m., he picked up the phone at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to talk with the prime minister of Slovenia as part of a high-stakes diplomatic gamble to seal a complicated, multinational prisoner swap.

Just 97 minutes later, he posted a world-stunning letter online abandoning his bid for re-election after a bruising pressure campaign by his own Democratic allies, climaxing the biggest crisis of his political career and signaling the end of his presidency after a half-century in public life.

By any measure, it was one of the darkest moments of his time in elective office as the inescapable reality of time, age and polls finally caught up with him. And yet it would lead to one of the most joyous days of his presidency barely a week and a half later as he orchestrated the release of imprisoned Americans from the dungeons of Russia.

For Mr. Biden and his team, the successful negotiation to free 16 people held by Russia on Thursday, including three American citizens and a U.S. permanent resident, offered sweet validation even as the clock is now ticking toward his final curtain call in office. When the president appeared with relatives of the liberated prisoners in the State Dining Room of the White House, it was clearly personal to him and he framed it as a mission on behalf of the larger American family.

“My dad had a simple proposition: Family is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Blood of my blood and bone of my bone,” Mr. Biden said before hugging the daughter of one of the freed prisoners. “I could think of nothing more consequential.” As he often does, he drew on his own experience of personal tragedy. “Having lost family,” albeit in a very different way, he said that bringing home these tortured souls now, well, “it matters, it matters.”

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