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Hours after President Joe Biden called his Russian counterpart a “killer” who would “pay a price” for spreading lies aimed at keeping him out of the White House, Texan Trevor Reed’s parents said Wednesday that they worried that their imprisoned son had become collateral damage as U.S.-Russia relations deteriorate.
“We’re concerned about the heightened rhetoric between our countries,” Joey Reed said as he joined a number of Republican lawmakers calling on strongman Vladimir Putin to release his son, a former Marine who’s been behind bars in Russia since August 2019 on charges that the U.S. government has deemed laughable.
“We’re fearful that this will affect our son in the long term, and we just want to get him home before our two countries get more angry with each other,” Reed said. “Our peoples are not the enemies; the Russian people are not our enemy.”
The Biden administration has taken a hard line over the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Solarwinds cyberattack and a new intelligence assessment this week that found Russian government meddling in last year’s presidential election, including by using some in Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Biden made his comments in an interview aired Wednesday on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Reed, born in Fort Worth, is one of two former Marines being held in Russia in what the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, has called a “mockery of justice.”
The other is Paul Whelan, and his supporters have likewise expressed concern that he’s become a bargaining chip and that tensions have made his release less likely.
Resolutions are pending in the House and Senate demanding their release.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas joined Reed’s parents on a video call aimed at drawing attention to their plight. Also on the call were House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and fellow Republicans August Pfluger of San Angelo and Michael McCaul of Austin.
“The United States will not tolerate an American citizen being held by the Putin regime as a political pawn,” said Pfluger, whose district includes Granbury, where Reed’s parents live. “Free Trevor Reed.”
“It’s time to bring Trevor home,” said Cornyn, who introduced the Senate version of the resolution.
The House last year approved a resolution co-sponsored by most Texas members calling for Reed to be returned, but that measure expired when the new Congress was sworn in in January.
Reed was pursuing a degree in international relations at the University of North Texas when he went to Moscow for Russian lessons in May 2019. He was arrested in Moscow after getting drunk at a party with his Russian girlfriend’s co-workers.
Police say that en route to the station, he grabbed the arm of the officer who was driving, causing the vehicle to swerve and endangering the officers. The judge ignored 59 minutes of traffic camera video that showed no swerving. Reed received a nine-year prison term.
Sullivan called the prosecution claims “so preposterous that they provoked laughter in the courtroom.”
“America will not tolerate this corrupt regime holding US citizens hostage under false pretenses,” said McCaul, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The nightmare for these two brave Americans and their families must end immediately. Texas and America stands with Trevor.”
Whelan is serving 16 years of hard labor for an espionage conviction. The 50-year-old from Michigan was arrested in his Moscow hotel room in 2018 with a thumb drive that Russian authorities said held classified information. He says he was set up.
Advocates suspect that Russian authorities nabbed Reed and Whelan in hopes of using them in a prisoner exchange.
Russian media outlets have pointed to two Russian criminals held in the U.S.: Viktor Bout, an arms trafficker, and Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was convicted of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine.
The White House has also called for Reed and Whelan to be released.
Reed was recently transferred without notice. The Russian government said that was a mistake. Reed’s parents said he was put in a cell at the Butyrka prison psychiatric unit with seven other prisoners, some of them murderers.
Reed was returned to his old prison after lobbying by the U.S. Embassy. His family said he wrote them to describe what happened.
“Our authorities and the ambassador, the embassy in Moscow, are investigating this,” McCaul said. “Because if that was not a mistake, done intentionally as an act of punishment or torture, then we possibly could be looking at international law violations.”
Reed’s parents will continue to appeal his sentence in Russian courts, but they do not expect to win.
“All we asked for from the beginning is that he’d be given at least the same fairness in his trial as regular Russian citizens,” Joey Reed said, “and that was not the case.”