Hostage deals are tempting especially when family members mount pressure campaigns, but they ensure that more hostages will be taken. After disastrous hostage deals with Iran and Russia, the Biden-Harris administration appears to have gone for a trifecta with a hostage deal with Communist China.

The Biden administration brokered the release last month of David Lin, a U.S. citizen jailed in China for 16 years, by trading him for an unidentified Chinese citizen in U.S. custody, according to three people familiar with the deal.

The State Department hasn’t publicly disclosed that it exchanged Lin for a Chinese national and declined to answer questions about how it negotiated his freedom after his Sept. 15 release. That’s a marked difference from the very public prisoner exchanges that the U.S. has brokered with Russia in recent years.

Lin was an economic adviser and then a missionary arrested by the CCP seemingly over his religious activities. He’s been in prison for a long time so it’s a sympathetic case, but it appears likely that we traded a spy for a hostage.

The fact that no one will name the ‘Chinese national’ we released suggests that this individual was high value and that national security has once again been compromised.

Hostage deals are never ‘one and done’. Doing hostage deals with China, Russia and Iran in particular is a disastrous policy because there are plenty of U.S. citizens traveling back and forth to these totalitarian dictatorships and so anytime their regimes want to free one of their spies, criminals or terrorists, all they have to do is take an American hostage.

We can either have open travel to these places or hostage deals. We can’t have both.

But right now we do. And that just means the hostage taking and hostage deals never end.

‘The Truth About Kamala’ is a serious look by the Freedom Center Investigates project at Kamala, her past, her origins, and her associates.

It’s the story of who she really is, what she’s done, and what she stands for.