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 Americans or American interests out of Russia and the twenty other people that were involved in this massive, massive prisoner swap.
So we'll go through some of the details about that.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Well that is a.
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 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 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 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 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.
Evan Gershkevich was a reporter.
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, 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. 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
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 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 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
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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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.
So why doesn't somebody tell me what they think.
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.
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 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 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. 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 see his propensity to kidnap foreigners and hold them hostage.
Basically. Now, again, all.
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 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 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
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 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 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, 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 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 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 your end of the deal and release some of your people to Russia, this whole thing may come together.
Eventually. They were able to pull.
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, 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 raising three hundred and ten million dollars last month, considering it wasn't even a full.
Month for them.
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 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.
He's found to end in Mayhem, says.
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 the highest number of arrests.
This is a new.
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 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 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 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, 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 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.
So here's the thing.
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.
That's probably where they met.
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 operations abroad when he pulled this murder back in twenty nineteen.
He's a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
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. He was killed by a guy who approached on a bike and killed him with a single shot to the head.
Oh remember that shooting in twenty thirteen.
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 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 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 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 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. 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 get something like a journalist out of captivity. Jake Sullivan is the National Security Advisor.
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 exceeds what we are giving up by sending a few more criminals back to Russia.
Now here's another undercurrent in all of this.
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. 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 answer for it.
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.
So that did not even do.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
She said.
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.
It's been a roller coaster.
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. 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 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 app