Vice President Kamala Harris was integral in negotiating the release of three U.S. citizens and one American green card holder, including Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich, according to national security adviser Jake Sullivan .
President Joe Biden and Harris have made the return of wrongly detained Americans abroad "an absolute priority" of their administration, Sullivan told reporters on Thursday during a White House briefing.
"Vice President Harris actually had an opportunity to engage with [ German ] Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz earlier this year at an opportune, timely moment at the Munich Security Conference where she talked about this issue with him," Sullivan said. "That followed on [from] the conversation that the president had just a short time before that, and was in the run of high-level engagements and a back-and-forth that the president and chancellor were having, that Vice President Harris was actually able to sit face-to-face with Chancellor Scholz."
Sullivan described briefing Biden and Harris and "getting peppered with questions by both the president and the vice president."
"She was a participant in, very much a core member of the team that helped make this happen," he said.
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But Sullivan also became emotional when he recounted Biden's role in the negotiations, which included the exchange of Whelan, Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Vladimir Kara-Murza with the likes of German-held Vadim Krasikov. Krasikov had been imprisoned in Germany after killing Russian dissident Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019.
"Guys, I can just say this was vintage Joe Biden rallying, rallying American allies to save American citizens and Russian freedom fighters, and doing it [with] intricate statecraft, pulling his whole team together to drive this across the finish line," he said. "His goal has always been to put the families first, the families who [were] enduring an unimaginable ordeal."
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