Bernie Sanders Fooled By Russian Pranksters

Two Russian pranksters claim that they called Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders late last year and fooled him by posing as teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg with an offer to support his campaign. These pranksters have previously targeted several high-profile American politicians as well.

Pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov said they called the candidate in December 2019. They posted an audio recording of the call to YouTube on Thursday; however, the Sanders campaign has not yet verified whether the recording is authentic.

The recording was released following Sanders’s success in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

The video starts with a man who sounds like Sanders, introducing himself and praising Greta for her achievements and efforts to combat climate change. “I just wanted to congratulate you on the extraordinary role you are playing in rallying young people and people throughout the world on this terrible, terrible crisis of climate change,” he says.

The recording has a female who pretends to be Thunberg as Stolyarov plays her father, Svante. “They offer to lend support to the Vermont senator's campaign. Sanders suggests ‘Greta’ make a public statement in support of him and that they do an event together the next time she visits the United States,” said Fox News.

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“Let us continue to talk and when you come to the United States I will bring some people together and we can do some interesting things, and if you wanted to make a statement in support of my candidacy and the program we have outlined for climate change, I would be very very appreciative,” Sanders said.

The fake Thunberg proposed to record a hip-hop song with Sanders, Billie Eilish, and Kanye West. “The pranksters then say they are slated to visit Russia and need advice on how to behave,” as reported by Fox News.

“I think what you don’t want to do is simply walk in there and get used,” Sanders said. “Russia and [President Vladimir] Putin has been very bad, as far as I know, on climate change. They have a lot of oil, oil is important for their economy, they make a lot of money on oil.”

The pranksters tried to fool Sanders by saying that he was recruited by the KGB in 1988 when he visited Russia and has been a “sleeper agent” since then. “Now it’s time to wake up and fulfill your mission, become president of the United States, build communism in the United States and work for Russia!” the prankster said before Sanders hung up.

The call is reportedly part of the duo’s “Stars Save the Earth” project where they place calls to politicians and celebrities, pretending to be Thunberg. “Many laugh at Bernie Sanders [and say] that he is a KGB agent and wants to build communism in the U.S. Since he calls himself a democratic socialist, we decided to play up this topic – the topic of Sanders being a recruited Russian agent,” Kuznetsov said.