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August 2, 2024 27 mins
Gary hosts the show solo today and starts off with a breakdown of how the U.S./Russia prisoner swamp happened.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI
AM six forty the Gary and Shannon Show on demand
on the iHeartRadio app. It is August second. Shannon's out today.
Back on Monday. A lot to get through today, man.
I was reading through a couple of different descriptions of
the incredible deal to get Evan Gershkevich and three other

(00:22):
Americans or American interests out of Russia and the twenty
other people that were involved in this massive, massive prisoner swap.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
So we'll go through some of the details about that.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Gavin Newsom, governor of the state of California, is now
asking that Harvey Weinstein be brought back here to California.
Just let them die in New York. That kind of
seems like what's going to happen. Wall Street's not having
a great day. The dal Jones industrial average was down
more than nine hundred points earlier. Next hour, we'll give
it a little bit of time to breathe and then

(00:54):
talk about what's going on on Wall Street, and then
a couple of fun things. Number One, how dogs help
their owners become healthier. As a renewed dog owner, I
suppose I've had a puppy for about a month. Now,
I feel healthier, or I'm supposed to. Also, what's going
on with all of the stuff that you put under

(01:15):
the airline seats. We'll be doing Terror in the Skies
a little bit later since it's Friday. Also, we do
a lot of fun stuff here on KFI, including the
nine news Nuggets you need to know at the end
of our show. Also what you Learned segment, so you
can always let us know what you learned this week
on The Gary and Shannon Show. All you got to
do is leave us a quick message on the iHeartRadio

(01:38):
app Talkback. You just hit that little microphone, say your piece,
tell us what you learned this week on the Gary
and Shannon Show, and we'll get to that late in
the show today.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
That's when it became real. We flew over Ireland, then
Canada and into America, and then I knew I was home,
looking forward to seeing my family down here and just
recuperating from five year, seven months and five days of
just absolute nonsense by the Russian government.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well that is a.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Paul Wheeland, former marine who was arrested a few years
ago on a actually was a pleasure trip. He was
actually in Russia to help a friend to go to
a friend's wedding, but to also help that friend's family
kind of negotiate their way through Russia, a place that
he had been many times. Of course, Evan Gershkovich, the
Wall Street Journal reporter, was the biggest name supposedly of

(02:25):
the Americans that were released in this deal that came
together yesterday. But as you look at what happened, this
was an amazing amount of international foreign relations, diplomacy, balancing Act,
magic Act in some cases, and all of it was
all of it was very very well put together. You

(02:46):
don't have to like the whatever, you don't have to.
There's not a political statement one way or the other.
This was an incredibly well put together plan that even
up to the very end, until the plane carrying Americans
much down in Anchor A, Turkey yesterday, there was still
a chance that this thing was going to go sideways.
And yes, there is some criticism of the kinds of

(03:11):
people that we release in order to get back journalists,
basketball players, marines on vacation, that kind of thing. We
give back bad guys, We give back actual spies, weapons,
weapons dealers, and murderers. So all of that goes into
this story about how this prisoner swap, the largest, the

(03:36):
most impactful prisoner swap we've seen since the Cold War,
and how all of it came together kind of by
the seat of everybody's pants.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Evan Gershkevich was a reporter.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
He was talking about how he, in fact, he was
working on a story specifically about how Vladimir Putin had
taken on a policy of stealing, slash, kidnapping foreigners, most
of them Americans or Western you know, citizens of Western countries,
capturing them and then using them as pawns, you know,

(04:13):
drumming up some fake espionag charges and then using them
as pawns to try to deal with these other countries
and get his favorite bad guys out of those other
countries' prisons. He goes to a restaurant, does Evan Gershkevich
actually to meet one of his contacts, and is picked up.

(04:34):
And again it's because he was putting pressure on and
asking questions about Vladimir Putin and his policy of kidnapping foreigners.
And the Wall Street Journal, the reporters that work with,
the editors that work with Evan Gershkovich realized that specific
day that they couldn't find him, and he wasn't responding

(04:56):
to his phone. It was he wasn't responding to any messages,
and his phone stopped pinging, his location was off, and
they knew something was wrong. So they contacted his mother,
Evan Gershkovitch's mother, Ella, and that was just a year
or so ago, and they told him sorry. They told

(05:17):
mom Ella that there was a problem and that Evan
Gershkovich had become basically the character in the owned the
story that he was writing about Vladimir Putin's kidnapping of foreigners.
While this happened, the Americans had been at least in
conversations about getting Paul Wheelan back from Russia in exchange

(05:41):
for somebody. And one of the things that they were
trying to do was wrap up the Alexi Navalney imprisonment
in all of this and work a deal where they
could get Paul Wheelan, they could get Alexi Navalny, and
the Germans would give up the bad that we've all
heard about, this assassin that killed somebody in Berlin, and

(06:05):
the Germans were dead set against this. Well, a wrench
gets thrown into that in February, when Alexi Navolny died
in prison. So if you go back a few years
before that, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, had been
calling the German National Security Advisor his equivalent, basically to
see if in fact they could work out a deal.

(06:28):
And the White House was working to see if Russia
would accept a deal that would bundle a bunch of
the Russians that we have here in America. But they're
all non violent charges, non espionage and things like that.
The problem is Russia doesn't care about them. They don't
care about their citizens the way we do. They don't
care about somebody who gets caught on some financial crimes

(06:50):
thing here in the United States and we put him
in jail through the American legal system. They just don't
give a writ. So they wanted the big guy. They
wanted the guy out of Germany. In November, this is
November of last year, Washington orders offers the Kremlin four
undercover operatives for military and foreign intelligence agencies that were

(07:11):
held in Europe. They're called illegals, and they create you know,
this false identity. These are the ones that the movies
are made out of. There's a third, a Russian military
intelligence officer using the identity of a Brazilian academic, and
Poland had arrested a fourth born in Moscow Spanish passport
on espionage charges near the Ukrainian border. So all of

(07:33):
these things, all of these characters are playing a part
in this. But there is a there's a very important
press conference if Vladimir Putin gives and there's a comment
that he made in that press conference right before the
end of the year, which was clearly a message to
the United States and to Western countries about exactly what

(07:55):
deal he would be willing to make. We've been telling
you the story about what happened to get specifically to
get the prisoners back. There's a massive prisoner swamp that
involved twenty four different people, several different countries, and we'll
get back to that here in just a second. For
the third time in the last four seasons, Mike Trout

(08:16):
he's not going to play a full season of baseball.
He's going to miss the rest of this season. They
said there was a second meniscus tair of his left knee.
His rehab assignment in Triple A lasted two innings. He
came back to Southern California for evaluation after he had
some discomfort in his knee. The MRI came back clean,
trout cid. He expected a restart of his rehab process,

(08:37):
and then his leg hurt really really bad, so they
said there's another one that's going to have to another
meniscus tear that's going to have to be surgically repaired.
Day seven of the Olympic Games, we're going to see
twenty five sets of metals handed out today, knockout stage.
The men's soccer tournament is underway, France taking on Argentina
and a massive quarterfinal US trailing Morocco. We saw of swimming.

(09:00):
We'll do a lot of track and field today. There's
some three on three basketball and swimming, all of that stuff.
So this prisoner swamp, in fact, I would Jacob, would
you say, this is kind of a breakdown of everything
that we're doing, this prisoner swamp, everything that we've known
absolutely Okay, then hit the button.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
So why doesn't somebody tell me what they think.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Is going on? Those can be hard explain this to
me like I'm a two year old. Okay, you need
a breakdown with Gary and Shannon. All right, So you
remember the name Alexi Navalney.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
He was this British dissident, sorry, a Russian dissident who
had unveiled a lot of stuff about Vladimir Putin, how
he was an absolute maniacal tyrant who was hoarding money.
One of the key pieces of what made Alexi Navoalney
as famous and as hated by Putin as he was

(09:56):
is he put together a video that showed Vladimir Putin
one point two billion dollar Black Sea mansion, and Putin
hated this guy, so he put him in prison. There
were discussions to get alexiing Navalney out of prison, or
at least pressure internationally to do so, and one of
the things that they were talking about was trading this

(10:18):
Vadim Kasakov, who is literally a Russian hit man who
had killed a guy in Berlin in a park in
broad daylight. The Germans captured him, the Germans put him
in prison for the rest of his life, and there
were discussions about if the Germans were able to give
up this hitman, maybe Alexi Navalney gets out of prison.

(10:40):
While that is all going on, in the background, Evan
Gershkevich last March gets picked up by the Russian FSB
stuck in jail. They accused him of being of being
a spy. And it's all because he was putting similar
pressure on Vladimir Putin. In fact, he was talking about
and working on stories about Vladimir Putin and his let's

(11:02):
see his propensity to kidnap foreigners and hold them hostage.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Basically. Now, again, all.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Of this is a very weird thing because the United
States has been working with Germany trying to pressure or
entice Germany to give up this Russian hitman so that
they can get some of their prisoners back. Now, in
January of this year, Evan Gershkovitch's mom flew to the
World Economic Forum in Davos to meet with Oloff with

(11:31):
a guy with Oloff Schultz's chief of staff, Olof Schultz
being the German Chancellor, to try to convince him and say, listen,
you have the key to getting my son out of jail.
The key is this Russian hitman. In February, just this year,
Tucker Carlson sits down with Vladimir Putin and brings up

(11:54):
the issue of Evan Gershkovitch. And near the end of
this conversation that he had with Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson says,
Evan Gershkevich is not a spy, clearly, he's just a
kid and he's just being held hostage. Maybe maybe it's
a bad look for you to hold this reporter in
an attempt to get a hit man, convicted murderer out

(12:17):
of jail in Germany and putin leans in. If you
saw this interview and he said what he wants in
return is a person serving a sentence in an allied
country of the US, a very very clear message because
remember in December he had done the same thing. He
said that he wanted one specific person. Everybody knew who

(12:40):
he was talking about. Well, again, February is when all
of these different countries come together at the Munich Security Conference.
This is an un you can bet not on the agenda,
but definitely something that everybody was talking about was this
form of what they thought was going to be a

(13:02):
deal to get Alexi Navolney Evan Gershkevich out of Russia
in exchange for Vadim Maxic kassik Kov or whatever's name
is this Russian hit man. But that day Alexi Navolney
dies in a prison in Siberia. He dies mysterious circumstances,

(13:24):
and at first there was some concern that the whole
thing was going to blow up. In May, the German
Federal Intelligence Service opened its own investigation, introducing new stipulations. Okay, listen,
if we are going to release Vadim Kasakov, then Germany

(13:45):
gets as many prisoners back as possible as possible. Smash
cut to July. President Biden sends a letter to Oloff
Schulz a request that this be finally done, where Germany

(14:06):
releases this guy that they have convicted of murder and
in fact from his self quarantine in his home. Remember,
the president tested positive for COVID, had to leave Vegas
go back. This was the day that he announced he
was dropping out of the presidential race. He was on
the phone with Slovenia saying, if you can put together

(14:30):
your end of the deal and release some of your
people to Russia, this whole thing may come together.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Eventually. They were able to pull.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
All of the strings, dozens and dozens of lear jets
back and forth across Europe, putting together this whole plan,
making sure that all of the prisoners were going to
their respective places. And even yesterday when I was listening
to some of this, originally were listening to different reports
from different news agencies. They were very careful to say,

(15:05):
until the planes touched down in anchor A, Turkey, we
don't know if this is real or not. Obviously, the
Americans are back on American soil, so that's that is
a done deal. But the amazing amount of work that
it took from all of these different countries. News out
of DC is that Vice President Harris's campaign has announced

(15:25):
raising three hundred and ten million dollars last month, considering
it wasn't even a full.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Month for them.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
The Democratic National Committee the affiliated entities far outpaced former
President Trump's campaign, but Trump's campaign still brought in one
hundred and thirty nine million for the month of July,
which has nothing to sneeze at. So the vice president
Vice President's campaign says it goes into August with three
hundred and seventy seven million on hand. That's above the

(15:53):
three twenty seven that is for Trump's team. Several suspects
have been arrested in violent protests that came after the
fatal stabbing of three kids in Northwest England. Prime Minister
there Caro Starmer has condemned the unrest, says it's far
right hatred.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
He's found to end in Mayhem, says.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
The police across the UK will be given more resources
to stop a breakdown in law and order on our street.
Speaking of more than thirty two hundred people arrested on
college campuses over the spring during those pro Palestinian tent encampments,
many of the students have already seen those charges dismissed,
but the cases have yet to be resolved for a
bunch of other people at campuses, they said they saw

(16:33):
the highest number of arrests.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
This is a new.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Analysis from the Associated Press. We're talking about this very
very detailed prisoner swap that led to this probably the
biggest since the Cold War deal to return Russian prisoners
to Russia and hostages arguably back to the countries that

(17:01):
from who whence they came? Four Americans came back last night.
There were eight Russians that made their way back into Russia,
greeted by Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and the biggest one
in terms of name recognition, the biggest Russian was Vadim Kazakhov.
This guy is a Russian hit man, former intelligence officer

(17:22):
who was convicted of murdering a guy in a park
in Berlin. This he was found guilty of murder back
in twenty twenty one in Germany. They said that he
had committed an act of state terrorism on behalf of Russia,
carrying out this very public execution to get rid of

(17:44):
one of the Kremlin's opponents. And the murder itself was
of a guy named Zeleem Khan kang Goshvili. They said
that he was a rebel leader, and Russia said he
was an Islamist extremist who was targeting Russian security forces. Now,

(18:05):
the reason they know it was Vadim Krazakov, among others,
is his tattoo on his left shoulder. You could see
a tattoo of a crowned panther skull encircled by wings.
That is a very specific tattoo that links him, I
use that word importantly links him to the special force

(18:27):
of Russia's Interior Ministry called the Lynx. It's been deployed
to fight terrorism in other places around the world and
the Caucuses. And his right forearm also has a tattoo
of a snake poised to strike.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
So here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
This Vadim Krazakov has been doing all kinds of work
for Vladimir Putin, and they were both former officers in
the biggest spy agency there in Russia, the FSB.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
That's probably where they met.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Asakov may have even been a member of the personal
security detail for Vladimir Putin. Family members say that he
talked about having shot target practice with Vladimir Putin at
an FSB shooting range. German prosecutors said that Krasokov was
probably working with the FSB department that specializes in wet

(19:22):
operations abroad when he pulled this murder back in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
He's a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
He served in an Interior Ministry special forces unit and
an elite FSB anti terrorism squad. German prosecutor said that
he was involved in killings inside Russia. There was a
Russian businessman back in twenty thirteen who was killed. Another
one would have been in the year two thousand, a
former advisor to Putin who got into an argument with Vladimir.

(19:49):
He was killed by a guy who approached on a
bike and killed him with a single shot to the head.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Oh remember that shooting in twenty thirteen.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Also a guy who rode up on a bicycle shot
the guy point blank. Oh and then in twenty nineteen,
the guy in Germany was killed by a guy on
a bike riding up shot point blank. Throughout the entire investigation,
Vadim Krazykov claimed that he was there as a tourist.
He was there because he was having an affair with

(20:19):
a married woman, and he said his name was Vadim Sokolov.
In fact, until yesterday the Russian government also said that
he was just some tourist. It wasn't until yesterday that
they admitted that he was an FSB agent, that he
was a military card carrying member of the FSB, and

(20:43):
that he was in fact Putin's buddy. They got who
they wanted, and we got an important journalist back, among others.
The politics of this thing now are playing out. Was
this a last minute thing before President and rides off
into the sunset? Was there something to fear of whether

(21:04):
or not President Trump is going to be back in office.
The Kremlin, like I said, had acknowledged for the first
time that some of the Russians that were held in
the West were in fact spies. Of course, families of
free dissidents meanwhile express their joy at the surprise release.
In fact, I talked about Evan Gershkevich's mother, Ella. She

(21:25):
was called to the White House and was told nothing,
just that she was going to be meeting with the president.
And she told the Wall Street Journal, well, usually they
don't ask you to meet the president if it's bad news.
So President Vladimir Putin hugged each of the eight Russian
retorneys at at Moscow Airport praised them with state awards.

(21:48):
Among them was that Vadim Krazykov that I've been mentioning,
this Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in
Germany for the twenty nineteen killing of a former Chechen
fighter in a park in Berlin. Now there was some
criticism about that kind of a deal, the kinds of
people that we give back to Russia in order to

(22:09):
get something like a journalist out of captivity. Jake Sullivan
is the National Security Advisor.

Speaker 5 (22:16):
These are hard decisions, As the President has said, you
have to think hard about who you release in a
prisoner exchange. That's been true for decades. But at the
end of the day, the President looked at this deal
and he said, what we are getting the value of
human life, the value of putting families back together. The
value of standing up for freedom of the press far

(22:36):
exceeds what we are giving up by sending a few
more criminals back to Russia.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Now here's another undercurrent in all of this.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
Obviously I mentioned when I was talking about the breakdown
of when each of these conversations was taking place. The
day that President Biden dropped out of the presidential race,
he had been on the phone with the leader of
Slovenia to try to get them to buy into this deal,
because they became an important piece in this gigantic trade deal.

(23:06):
And there are questions about whether this is now a
political thing. Was there something to President Biden not having
to run for office that helped push this thing over
the edge? Is there something in there where he's got
nothing to lose, he's not up for reelection. Can he
make a deal now that he doesn't necessarily have to

(23:27):
answer for it.

Speaker 6 (23:28):
I still get it done, even though I was to
seeing in a second to not I'm stuck with me
as president for a while. There's no way out. Okay,
they got me for at least another one hundred or
ninety days or so.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
So that did not even do.

Speaker 6 (23:41):
With that It had to do with the opportunity of
trying to convince it that's the one last country to say, Okay,
they'll step up now.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
There was also part of that undercurrent is do foreign
allies of ours have some concern about whether or not
Donald Trump is going to be elected president and if
that would have impacted anything going forward, would Russia have
been more reluctant to give up the prisoners that they have,
or would our allies be more reluctant to get involved

(24:11):
in a deal like that. Ohio Representative Warren Davidson, Republican
on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House, said maybe
there is something to that.

Speaker 7 (24:19):
The expectation around the world that Donald Trump may well
be the next president is resulting in shuffling in foreign policy.
If you look at NATO countries, they're trying to insulate
their policies in Ukraine from the Trump administration. So world
leaders are reacting to the possibility, hopefully the probability that

(24:40):
Donald Trump is in fact the forty seventh president of
the United States, and maybe it had an influence. I
don't know, but I am glad that these prisoners are free.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
John Kirby, White House spokesperson International Security Council had said,
there's no evidence that anybody was afraid of, concerned with,
or even talking about former and Trump when these deals
were being made.

Speaker 4 (25:01):
There's absolutely zero evidence at all that this deal was
brought about because of some potential fear of who might
be the next president. This deal was brought about because
the president had President Biden had alliances and partnerships and
trust he could build on, particularly with the German Chancellor.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Okay, so as great as this deal is, we get
four Americans back or Americans American interests. I guess there
is the sister of an American school teacher who says
her family feels collectively stabbed in the back because her
brother was not part of this deal. Mark Fogel, sixty
three year old American arrested at a Moscow airport three

(25:42):
years ago for having medical marijuana in his luggage, which
his family and his lawyers say was prescribed to him
for severe spinal pain. And again, like we saw with
the Britney Grinder case, where that amount of the amount
of hash oil that she had usually would result in
a two week prison sentence and instead she got nine
years in this case, very similar. Mark Fogel had medical

(26:06):
marijuana in his luggage and was sentenced to fourteen years
in prison on drug charges. Still in prison on a
penal colony, and fogel Mark's sister said, the last thirty
six hours have been gut wrenching. We really hoped that
they were going to get Mark on that plane.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
She said.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
Mark called me yesterday morning, and when I realized that
he was in Rabinsk, I knew that things were not
going well because he should have been gone, She said.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
It's been a roller coaster.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
On Thursday, Jake Sullivan described Mark Fogel as wrongfully detained
for the first time at this White House press briefing
and said that they are still actively working to get
his release from Russia. Let's not forget there are also
Americans currently held in Gaza. There are plenty of hostages,
American hostages, prisoners that are still being held in other places.

(26:56):
This is not the be all end all, although it
is a huge deal, it's not the end of these
hostage negotiations all right. Up next, the Olympics still setting
people's minds on fire. What's going on with women's boxing.
We'll try to get to the bottom of it. Yes, Jacob,
it's going to be another Gary and Shannon Show breakdown

(27:18):
that's coming up next. You've been listening to The Gary
and Shannon Show, you can always hear us live on
KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every
Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio
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