an American detained in Russia<\/a>, despite stating earlier that the United States gave Moscow \u201cnothing in exchange\u201d for the freed American.\n <\/p>\n\n \u201cIf you were to put those sanctions on, or whatever you want to call them, you could forget about him,\u201d Trump told CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins, referring to Stephen Hubbard, who had been imprisoned in Russia for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cYou\u2019d never see him again,\u201d Trump added, arguing that easing sanctions was part of smoothing over negotiations to end Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine.\n <\/p>\n
\n Earlier Wednesday in the East Room, however, Trump said, \u201cWe gave nothing in exchange, which is very rare.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The measures Trump most recently waived were part of legislation named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, which Trump signed earlier this year. Some Republicans \u2014 including the late senator\u2019s sister, Sen. Darline Graham, for whom Trump is campaigning Wednesday night \u2014 have expressed their disagreement with the president\u2019s move.\n <\/p>\n
\n When Collins asked Trump what Graham said to him about the sanctions, the president immediately pivoted to talking about the freed American.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe were in the midst of negotiating (Hubbard\u2019s release), and a lot of stupid people said, and people that don\u2019t know how life works, they said, \u2018Why aren\u2019t you putting Russia sanctions,\u2019 and all this, in the midst of a negotiation to try and get a long-term hostage back from Russia.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Trump posted on Truth Social<\/a> earlier Wednesday that \u201cNumerous people, who requested that sanctions be immediately imposed on Russia, have called to apologize to President Trump in that they didn\u2019t know that he was negotiating the release of Stephen Hubbard.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump directly tied the waiving of Russia-related sanctions to the release of an American detained in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":941578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-941577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/941578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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