President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that gives the United States more “tools” to free American hostages – while his administration has already recovered 72 captives in the first eight months of his term.
The signing of what was Trump’s 201st executive order was captured in an Oval Office video.
The order creates a new mechanism to declare a country that participates in hostage taking practices a “State Sponsor of Wrongful Detention” and provides for “legal tools” to address the practice, according to a White House fact sheet.
During the signing, Trump asked Adam Boehler, Special Envoy for Hostage Response, for an accounting of hostage retrievals so far.
Boehler held up a graphic and said, “Mr. President, you’ve brought back 72 hostages since your term. If we compare that to President Biden, he’s gotten 20 taken. So, he’s 20 negative –“
“Twenty taken,” Trump interjected. “They don’t take our people so often.”
“And we paid nothing,” for hostages’ freedom, the president added, while “they paid six billion” in a hostage swap.
President Joe Biden boasted near the end of his term that he had secured the release of more than 100 American hostages and then later dropped that number to 70. However, covering those comments, the National Review wrote, “As with many things Joe Biden boasts about, it is not clear where he’s getting his numbers.”
Trump continued after his signing, “Once you pay money, then a lot of people start disappearing. They start grabbing reporters, too,” he added, looking at the journalists covering the signing. “They think the reporter is going to get a lot of money.”
“And to me they would,” he said to some laughter from the press corp. He quickly added, “You would be, you’ll be well taken care of. I want to stress that. Otherwise, we have headlines. No, I’m not smiling about it.”
White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka explained some of the tactics detailed in the order.
“With this EO you are signing today, you are drawing a line in the sand that U.S. citizens will not be used as bargaining chips,” he told the president. “And it provides your secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the same tool set to punish states who take our citizens wrongfully the same way that we can punish those who sponsor terrorists. This is very significant.”
Gorka later went on to say that aides had been told by families of American hostages that the Biden administration told them “not to talk about their missing loved ones – to be quiet, not to create any pressure” on President Biden and other White House aides.
By contrast, he said, “this administration has met with these families on a weekly basis.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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