Former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed was imprisoned for two years and eight months in Russia. Reed was studying in Russia and was arrested one night for being drunk and disorderly. Reed says that after a shift change at the time his girlfriend was coming to pick him up, the second set of police officers called in Russian intelligence agency officials and everything changed. New charges were added to his account. When war broke out in Ukraine, Reed says he believed his chances of being released entirely vanished. Yet two months later, on April 27, Reed was finally released in a swap of political prisoners negotiated between the Biden administration and Russian officials.
Reed and his family, all of whom fought for 985 straight days—over 23,000 hours—to secure his release, say Reed is back home with his family because of the Biden administration and elected officials who were willing to do what was right. On Monday, the Reed family spoke with CNN's Jake Tapper and had some very choice words for right-wing faketriots like Marjorie Taylor Greene and her “cronies” who first impeded the vote for and then voted against a bill that would have secured Reed’s release sooner. House Resolution 186 was released in the beginning of March 2021 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Greene decided to demand a roll call on all votes in order to delay the Biden COVID-19 stimulus package.
The only thing Greene was successful in doing that day (besides possibly fundraising off the ignorance of her base) was to delay aid to Americans at home and Reed abroad. Reed and his family have not forgotten.
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In an interview with Tapper, Reed and his family slammed Greene and others for their mindless political theater. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is not our representative,” said Joey Reed, Trevor’s father. He explained Greene’s decision to delay the votes on the bill supporting Trevor’s release came on the day before Reed’s appeal hearing in Russia was to take place. Reed’s father explained that regardless of her need to gum up the works, the decision by Greene to include Trevor’s resolution into her entirely political move meant that Greene “and her cronies, and that small group of idiots voted against it.” Joey shakes his head in disbelief. “So you voted for Putin?”
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Trevor Reed told Tapper he planned on “going ... to every single one of their campaigns and thank[ing] them personally about that.” Specifically, Reed says he wants to “thank them for voting against a bill that was only about getting American political prisoners out of Russia. How do you justify that?” Greene hasn’t commented on the report because you can’t justify it.
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Reed went on to remind everyone that Greene is an embarrassment of a person. “That's embarrassing to me that anyone who represents the United States would vote against something, you know, like that. I’m sure that the Russians loved that. I’m sure that, you know, they're all big fans of all of those congressmen who did that. That is completely unacceptable to me. It's embarrassing.”
Reed, who speaks in a measured and soft tone, is clearly at peace with how focused his frustrations are, promising that if he sees another candidate pull a similar move against another imprisoned American abroad, he will “be at every single campaign that that person runs for the rest of their life to tell everyone that they did that.”
Probably the oldest hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party since Richard Nixon is that conservatives are big supporters of our military service members. They have been able to perpetuate this myth because of their financial support of the military industrial complex and the hawkish politics they have endorsed for decades. Dropping lots of bombs costs lots of money, and there are people who make lots of money building those bombs.
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However, this financial support for the weapons of war and the machine that produces and necessitates war has not extended to the human beings who do all of the bomb-dropping, all of the fighting, and suffer all of the psychological and physiological consequences of war. You can see it in every bill and every program conservatives have chipped away at that would simply help military families put food on their tables and cover medical expenses for health issues our military veterans have acquired during their time serving our country.