Son of Idaho woman among Americans released in prisoner swap between US and Venezuela

An Idaho mother who has petitioned for her son’s release from a Venezuelan prison got the phone call Wednesday morning that she’s been waiting on for more than 15 months.

Elaine Cristella, of Meridian, said U.S. officials surprised her with the news that Joseph Ryan Cristella, 40, was among a group of 10 Americans that the Biden administration secured in a prisoner swap Wednesday with Venezuela. She was astonished and grateful, especially after previously hearing her son might be released last month.

“I’m just, I’m overwhelmed to tell you the truth. I was, like, ‘What?’ ” she told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “Between (Nov.) 30 and now was like the most stressful ever because nobody knew whether we were coming or going.”

Her son, who last lived in Orlando, Florida, spent more than 450 days at an infamous military prison in Caracas. He’s now en route to a military base in San Antonio, where he will receive a medical evaluation and could stay up to a week. His mother was looking at flights out of Boise to spend Christmas with her son and spoke with him while he was on the plane back to the U.S.

“He sounded upbeat,” she said. “When he was let go … they gave him nothing. The clothes on his back, that’s what he has. So we’ll just have to figure it out day by day.”

A notorious businessman who was charged in a massive corruption case in Miami and is close to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was released from federal custody Wednesday morning in the exchange for Cristella, nine other Americans detained there and a U.S. fugitive from justice, President Joe Biden’s administration confirmed.

Six of the Americans, including Cristella, were considered by the U.S. to have been “wrongfully detained,” in exchange for the release of Alex Saab, one of the Venezuelan leader’s most trusted confidantes, after months of quiet negotiations between the two countries, sources said.

As part of the deal, Maduro also agreed to the release of 20 Venezuelan prisoners as well as Roberto Abdul, who was charged with treason after organizing a recent primary election that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won to be a presidential candidate in 2024. The Maduro government has since banned Machado from running next year.

Maduro also turned over to the U.S. authorities Malaysian national Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard,” who is charged with bribing U.S. Navy officers and has been a fugitive from U.S. justice after fleeing to the South American nation.

In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. welcomes the release of the 20 Venezuelan political prisoners and “the reinstatement of all Venezuelan political candidates.”

In a call with reporters earlier in the day, Biden administration officials declined to say whether Maduro had agreed to let Machado appear on the ballot in 2024 as part of the secretive negotiations.

“Right now what we’re thinking about is that Maria Corina Machado was able to present her appeal to the Supreme Tribunal for consideration, and our expectation is that that decision will be done promptly,” a senior administration official said.

Maduro’s regime did not mention Machado in its own statement, which confirmed the prisoner exchange and announced that Saab would soon be on Venezuelan soil.

“The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela joyfully celebrates the release and return to his homeland of our diplomat Alex Saab, who until today was unjustly kidnapped in a U.S. prison,” the regime said in a press release.

Saab, the regime said, would be welcomed back “with pride after having suffered three-and-a-half years of illegal detention under cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, violating his human rights and the Vienna Convention that grants him diplomatic immunity.”

Saab’s U.S. legal team — attorneys Joseph Schuster, Neil Schuster, Celeste Siblesz Higgins and David Rivkin—issued a statement saying they were grateful to President Biden and President Maduro for “coming to an agreement.”

“That agreement allows a Venezuelan diplomat to return home after serving over three and a half years in custody” in Miami and Cape Verde, the team said. “We believe that Special Envoy Saab would have been found not guilty if he’d gone to trial.

“We are thrilled that Special Envoy Saab will finally be reunited with his devoted wife and wonderful children. We are also very happy for the American citizens who will be able to rejoin their families for Christmas.”

Biden administration officials say the prison swap was “the result of many, many months of negotiations,” regular consultations with Biden and “an extensive amount of work involving our senior leadership.”

“These individuals have lost far too much precious time with their loved ones, and their families have suffered every day in their absence,” Biden said late Wednesday after the former hostages were safely in U.S. custody. “I am grateful that their ordeal is finally over, and that these families are being made whole once more.”

The developments, he said, were “a positive and important step forward,” as he reminded Americans that they should not travel to Venezuela. Earlier in the day, while onboard Air Force One, Biden told reporters: “It looks like Maduro, so far, is keeping his commitment on a free election. But it ain’t done yet. We’ve got a long way to go. But it’s good so far.”

The U.S. used international connections to achieve the prisoner swap, leveraging its relationship with other countries, notably Qatar, which facilitated conversations between Maduro and the U.S. over clearing a path toward 2024 presidential elections, an official said.

“This is part of our president, President Biden’s strong prioritization of the safe return of all Americans held hostage and wrongfully detained abroad,” another senior official said.

“The consequences of this difficult decision will be to reunite parents with their children and grandchildren,” the official added, “and to ensure that one of the most notorious fugitives from justice, Fat Leonard, is returned and held to account for his fraud.”

As the exchange unfolded Wednesday, officials stressed that it remained “fragile” and remained cautions, knowing that it could fall apart at any moment.

The exchange took nearly fell through at multiple turns, McClatchy and the Miami Herald have learned. The United States sought the release of all American citizens being held in Venezuelan jails — including those designated wrongfully detained by the State Department, and those who are not — as well as the extradition “Fat Leonard.”

Saab’s knowledge of the inner workings of the Maduro regime was considered a potential goldmine of information by U.S. officials and law enforcement, which led to criticism Wednesday of the decision to release him from U.S. custody.

“We welcome reports that Americans are returning home after years of imprisonment under the Maduro regime,” Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “However, we remain deeply troubled by the weakness of the Biden administration — which continues to be extorted by foreign adversaries using Americans as pawns. Alex Saab ran Maduro’s global money laundering empire and his relationships with Hezbollah and drug cartels. He is now free to do so again. Today’s swap strengthens Maduro and makes Americans less safe around the world.”

Carrie Filipetti, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Cuba and Venezuela in the Trump administration, also slammed the Biden policy directio on Venezuela, saying “there is nothing publicly” that suggests Maduro will hold free and fair elections next year. She cited a European Union Electoral Observation Mission that listed 23 steps the regime needs to take — some of which would take 18 to 24 months to implement — for the elections to be fair.

“We haven’t seen any progress on that, we’ve seen worsening conditions for civil society, almost a criminalization of civil society in the country, an increased in censorship. There’s almost 300 Venezuelans that are political prisoners,” she said. “None of the conditions that would be requires for an election to be free and fair are currently in Venezuela and there currently doesn’t seem to be a trend that suggests they are getting closer to that.

Filipetti noted that in exchange for what she said is very little, the U.S. has given up two of the key pieces of leverage against the regime, which Maduro had been pursuing: the return of Saab and the lifting of sanctions on oil, some of which the administration previously agreed to.

Saab, a Colombian businessman, was claiming diplomatic immunity as a defense in a $350 million money-laundering case that had yet to go to trial in Miami. He was accused of paying bribes to Venezuelan officials for government contracts. For nearly a year, he had worked as a confidential informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and turned over $12 million of his profits to the DEA before he failed to surrender in 2019, federal court records show.

His release marks a breakthrough for Maduro, who sought the return of his right-hand man and fixer ever since he was detained by Cape Verde authorities in 2020 on an Interpol red notice. After his arrest, Saab claimed to be a special envoy traveling for Maduro to Iran on a gold-for-gasoline trade mission.

At the time, U.S. officials were so concerned with the lengths Maduro would go to release Saab that the Trump administration sent U.S. Navy ships to patrol off of Cape Verde’s coasts. Saab was extradited to the United States in October 2021 on money-laundering charges stemming from his housing contracts with the Venezuelan government and transfer of millions to the United States and other countries. Saab, who had faced up to 20 years in prison, remained in U.S. detention pending trial until his release on Wednesday.

Before the deal was struck, Biden administration officials had been adamant they were powerless to negotiate over Saab’s fate, noting he was the subject of an ongoing Justice Department case.

Saab was among dozens of Venezuelan officials, businessmen and contractors who have been accused in Miami federal court of collectively stealing billions of dollars from their government in corruption schemes allegedly involving Maduro, the late president Hugo Chavez and other high-ranking officials with Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA.

But Maduro’s willingness to negotiate a larger deal that would secure the release of all Americans held in the country enticed President Joe Biden, who was intimately involved in the final arrangement, two officials said.

On Wednesday, a senior administration official insisted that the White House did not interfere with the Department of Justice and the release of Saab was done under Biden’s authority to grant clemency.

“The president made what was a difficult choice, but the right choice to grant clemency,” an official said.

Saab is the only prisoner released by the U.S. as part of the swap, and the deal does not involve clearing Maduro of criminal charges he currently faces in the U.S., or the lifting sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company, U.S. officials insisted.

“In order to make this exchange, the president had to to make the extremely difficult decision to offer something that the Venezuelan counterpart actively sought,” the official said. “And he made the decision to grant clemency to Alex Saab with a pending trial for money laundering and allow his return to Venezuela in what was essentially an exchange for 10 Americans and a fugitive from justice for one person returned to Venezuela.”

The deal comes three weeks after Maduro missed the Nov. 30 deadline set by the White House to begin releasing all U.S. citizens held in Venezuelan custody, in exchange for limited sanctions relief on Venezuela’s oil sector rolled out weeks prior. Despite vowing to snap sanctions back in place if Maduro failed to comply, no sanctions were reimposed as talks quietly continued over the swap.

In addition to relying on Qatar, the U.S. also appeared to have leaned on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, taking advantage of recent talks hosted in the eastern Caribbean country. The talks were led by the Caribbean Community and Brazil and were involved Maduro’s threats to invade an oil-rich territory of neighboring Guyana. Following a day of negotiations over the border dispute, Maduro agreed to back off his threats.

“Venezuela is not making progress on electoral conditions. They’ve arrested more Americans, which of course is part of their game so that they can get the United States to make deals like what we’re seeing today. But they’re also threatening to invade a sovereign nation and this is the moment when the U.S. government decides to relieve pressure on that country,” said Filipetti, who heads the Vandenberg Coalition, a conservative foreign policy-focused nonprofit. “If anything that just encourages the kind of behavior that we’re seeing from the Maduro regime, and that’s why I think it’s a really flawed policy direction that we’re headed in.”

Administration officials say Venezuela is now back in line with the commitments Maduro made in Barbados over the prisoners’ release and the 2024 presidential elections, and the prisoner swap opens the “door for us to continue to engage in dialogue so that when Venezuela holds elections next year, they are competitive and inclusive, and that will allow Venezuelans to really determine the future of the country.”

Administration officials on Wednesday declined to name the Americans who were being held pending notification of their families and their release into U.S. custody.

Geoff Ramsay, an expert on Venezuela at the Atlantic Council in Washington, says he knows of at least nine Americans who had been held. They are: former Green Berets Luke Denman and Airan Berry, as well as Jerrel Kenemore, Eyvin Hernandez, Savoi Wright, Abraham Coakley III, Hamid Ortiz Dahud, Jason George Saad and Cristella.

Cristella, Hernandez, Kenemore, Wright were among those who were “wrongfully detained,” the administration confirmed in a statement announcing their safe departure from Venezuela. After months of lobbying, Elaine Cristella finally won the designation from the Biden administration for her son in July.

Hernandez, a deputy public defender from Los Angeles, had been wrongfully detained in Venezuela since being abducted by armed men at the country’s border with Colombia while on vacation in March, U.S. officials and friends of the Hernandez family told McClatchy and the Miami Herald.

Cristella was similarly traveling through Colombia late last year before he was apprehended in the country’s border region and transferred to a prison of Venezuela’s military counterterrorism unit.

Neither Denman nor Berry, the former Green Berets, are designated as wrongful detainees. The two pleaded guilty in Venezuelan court to taking part in a scheme to overthrow Maduro during the Trump administration known as Operation Gideon, a botched plot that landed them both 20-year prison sentences.

Miami Herald reporters Nora Gámez Torres and Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this report.