A pilot who voted for President Donald Trump and has been detained for months in West Africa has blasted the administration for being “useless” in helping him get home.
U.S. citizens Brad Schlenker, 63, and Fabio Nunez, 33, were flying a family of five to Dubai in December when they stopped to refuel in Guinea.
When they landed, they were met on the tarmac not by a refueling truck, but by dozens of armed Guinean military personnel, who arrested them and held them for three months in a military prison, according to multiple news reports.
Last month, the pilots were released on bail, but they’ve been ordered to remain in Guinea’s capital of Conakry while they await trial on charges of unauthorized landing and breaching national security, Semafor reported.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has been taking a low-key approach to freeing the men that has turned out to be “useless,” Schlenker, who has a wife and kids, told Semafor.
“I voted for this administration because they were supposed to protect Americans,” he said.
State Department officials have been engaging behind the scenes with officials in Conakry, but the administration has said very little publicly about the case.
U.S. officials regularly visited Schlenker and Nunez in prison, and Washington “remains engaged on this case,” a State Department spokesperson told Semafor.
“The Trump administration has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans,” the spokesperson said.
The White House also said in a statement that Trump is “always concerned about Americans detained abroad.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
But Schlenker said that people close to the situation have told him that if Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or another high-profile administration official “just picked up the phone, we’d be out of here.”
He and Nunez, who are freelance pilots, say they have radio transcripts that confirm they received clearance to land.
In February, Schlenker appealed to Rubio and Trump to help him, to no avail, WGN9 Chicago reported.
Schlenker told Semafor he thinks Guinea’s extensive mineral resources, including some of the world’s largest deposits of bauxite and iron ore, are “weighing in on this situation.”
The Trump administration is courting Conakry as part of a wider push for secure access to African minerals.
Guinea, meanwhile, has been trying to navigate a “middle path” as Washington, Beijing, Paris, and Moscow all vie for commercial influence in the region.
Sources told Semafor that officials in Conakry were likely trying to avoid the possibility of anti-Western nationalists seizing on the pilots’ case as a violation of Guinean sovereignty, thereby sparking a domestic scandal.
