Prisoner Swap: The recriminations have begun, much of it from the right wing, about the exchange of basketball player Brittney Griner for the world’s most notorious arms dealer, Victor Bout.

  A Fox News reporter hounded the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, with contentious questions about the exchange that sent the “Merchant of Death” back to Russia for a “professional athlete.”

  California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who’s politicking to become Speaker of the House, said the exchange for Bout had “made us weaker.” He said, “It’s made Putin stronger, and it’s made Americans more vulnerable.”

  And here’s just one example from Twitter: “The White House is calling her a Hero and Role Model! She was smuggling drugs & Hates America.”

  Critics seized on the Biden administration’s failure to include in the release former Marine, Paul Whelan, or to just get only Whelan, who’s  been in a Russian prison since his 2018 arrest on charges of being a spy.

  It evidently offends the right wing that Griner is a Black woman, a married lesbian and, a political  liberal who, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, called for the arena to stop playing the national anthem at her team’s basketball games.

  Her supporters, though, skip over the fact that she brought illegal cannabis oil into a totalitarian country and that her arrest for a foolish act created a huge diplomatic and domestic political problem for the Biden administration. She was not “wrongfully” detained. She may have been used as a pawn, but she admits that she broke Russia’s unforgiving law.

The Long Count: Republican Kari Lake, who lost the Arizona governor’s race by 17,000 votes, has sued to contest the results that were certified this week by Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who won the governor’s race.

  Lake ran as an election denier supporting Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged. She basically said during her campaign that the only result she would accept as legitimate in the governor’s race would be if she won. 

  Since the November 8^th election, she has been soliciting video statements from voters who had to wait on long lines and sometimes faced breakdowns in the voting technology. There were, in fact, a lot of problems, but election authorities said no one was prevented from voting.

  “If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Lake tweeted last night. “Stay tuned, folks.”

  One man responded, “Lmfao. Just go away. You lost. Get over it. Move on. Go spend all your campaign money on lighting or something.”

Trump World: A federal judge in Washington yesterday declined to hold Donald Trump’s representatives in contempt for failing to comply with the subpoena for all the government documents the former president took with him when he left office. The judge told the Trump team and the department of Justice to just resolve their issues.

From the Pitch: Grant Wahl, 48, a prominent American soccer journalist, died in the press box during the Argentina-Netherlands match while covering the World Cup in Qatar. The veteran of CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated was reporting for his own Substack online  report, “Fútbol with Grant Wahl.” His wife is Dr. Céline Gounder, who served as a Covid epidemic adviser to President Biden and is a contributor to CBS News. 

  Down on the field, Argentina tied the Netherlands 2-2 then beat them 4-3 on penalty kicks. Croatia knocked Brazil out of the tournament, also after a tie and penalty kicks.

The Obit Page: Joseph Kittinger, who in 1960 jumped from a balloon gondola 20 miles above Earth then free-fell and parachuted to the ground, has died in Florida at age 94. In the early days of planning for manned space flight, he was testing whether a human could survive such a parachute jump.

  Protected by insulated clothing against temperatures of 94 degrees below zero, he free fell for 13 seconds, before deploying a stabilizer parachute, then free falling again for another 4 minutes and 36 seconds before opening his regular parachute. 

  Kittinger later flew 483 missions as a fighter pilot over Vietnam before he was shot down and taken prisoner.

The Spin Rack: With an increase in cases of Covid, Flu, and the respiratory ailment RSV, New York City health authorities advised people to resume wearing high quality medical masks indoors and in crowded settings. — Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy Hong Kong media mogul, was sentenced to more than five years in prison for fraud. The 75-year-old Lai was accused of violating the terms of a lease contract related to Apple Daily, his pro-democracy newspaper shut down by the government last year. — The French government announced it will give young people free condoms in order to prevent the spread of venereal diseases. — A Pennsylvania court ruled that the City of Philadelphia must remove the plywood box covering the statue of Christopher Columbus that’s been the subject of debate and protest over colonialism and national heritage. Columbus statues have been removed in other cities and Philadelphia covered theirs with a box two years ago.

Below the Fold: Maxwell Frost, a member of the so-called “Generation Z” and at 25 the youngest candidate elected to Congress this year, was denied an apartment in Washington because of bad credit. Frost got into debt during his campaign.

  His problem has become an example of how expensive it is to live in DC, particularly for a young person.

  If the landlord is worried about Frost’s debt, he should check the US government. 

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