House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has defended the Biden administration for exchanging notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA star Brittney Griner in a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia that left Marine veteran Paul Whelan languishing in a Russian jail.

In one of her last press conferences as Speaker of the House, Pelosi suggested that the White House had no other choice. The administration faces criticism for swapping the WNBA star for the former KGB agent who tried to arm the Taliban and al Qaeda.  

Griner has been detained by Moscow since February on marijuana-linked drug charges, and was recently sentenced to nine years of grueling labor in a Russian penal colony. 

Bout, 55, was snared by the DEA in a devilishly complicated sting operation in 2008 in which he thought he was selling arms to the FARC – Colombian rebels – to shoot down US passenger jets. He was the inspiration for the lead character played by Nicholas Cage in Lord of War.

The Biden administration had been under intense public pressure to get the celebrity basketball player out, against the backdrop of the worst diplomatic relations between the White House and the Kremlin since the Cold War.

Pelosi suggested at her weekly press conference that Bout, once nicknamed the ‘merchant of death,’ was the administration’s only ‘leverage’ to free her.

Biden has been put under scrutiny for his failure to secure the release of Whelan and other Americans including Marc Fogel.

The criticism was compounded by anger over Bout’s…