“The president is going to meet with his team and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that.” Those are the words of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in answer to a question at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. The question was about Vladimir Putin’s suggestion in Helsinki that the U.S. and Russia exchange interrogation subjects: We would interview the Russians indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for election interference, and the Russians would interview the American-born British businessman Bill Browder and former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

The Kremlin entertains a bizarre vendetta against a number of Americans, Browder and McFaul chief among them—Browder because he is primarily responsible for getting Congress to sanction Russia after its government wrongly imprisoned Browder’s friend Sergei Magnitsky and probably tortured him to death; McFaul because the Kremlin believes he encouraged anti-Putin sentiment during his ambassadorship from 2012 to 2014. But of course that the U.S. government would facilitate the Kremlin gaining access to these two men is almost unbelievable.