How does Sacha Baron Cohen keep duping American leaders into sitting for his bogus interviews?

Email correspondence between Cohen’s team and former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), obtained by POLITICO and reproduced here, offers some answers.


Fifteen years after “Da Ali G Show” fooled prominent politicians into sitting for embarrassing TV interviews, the British comedian’s new show is again wreaking havoc in American politics. Voters could rightly wonder how the people charged with governing them keep falling for Cohen’s ruses.

In Walsh’s case, Cohen’s team used fake identities and dummy websites, and concocted media opportunities over the course of several months. It also leaned on flattery, intrigue and the disarming use of the word “Liberty” to reel the former congressman into a TV appearance in which he endorsed arming young children with heavy weaponry.

Walsh was among four current and former Republican members of Congress who endorsed a phony program to provide firearms training to pre-schoolers in interviews with Cohen, who posed as an Israeli anti-terrorism expert named Col. Erran Morad for his new Showtime series, “Who Is America?”

Last October, a woman calling herself Ashley Winthrop emailed Walsh on behalf of the made-up production company First Liberty Pictures and invited him to be interviewed for a “docu-style series” about terrorism to be broadcast on Israeli television.

“For the on-camera appearance,” Winthrop proposed, Walsh “would meet with a gentleman from Israel who … has developed unique anti-extremist techniques that very few in the world are privy to.”

As it turned out, those unique and little-known techniques involved a made-up program to train children as young as 3 in the use of semi-automatic rifles and provide “a rudimentary knowledge of mortars.”

But Walsh, who is now a radio show host, would not learn of this fictional firearms program for several months. Walsh’s wife, Helene, who handles his schedule, responded to express interest, but a proposed December interview fell through.

Undeterred, Cohen’s team tried another tactic: flattery.

In February, Walsh received an inquiry from “Alexis Rothe” from the fictitious Yerushalayim Television. In an email, “Rothe” informed Walsh he had been named to Israel’s “70 at 70” list in honor of the 70th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

“The people of Israel understand that they owe their very existence to the unwavering support of powerful figures like Congressman Joe Walsh,” she wrote. “We have already sat with Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Bono, and Steven Spielberg.”

This time, the former congressman was able to make the proposed interview date work.

Unfortunately for the Walshes, they apparently forgot Ronald Reagan’s dictum, “trust but verify.”

Walsh’s wife checked out the website domain from which Alexis emailed him, yerushalayimtv.com, which is now defunct but at the time was live and appeared to list television content in Hebrew.

“Since we don’t read Hebrew, we could not verify ourselves,” she told POLITICO.

So Helene Walsh wrote to “Rothe” asking, “Could you please send me the website (in English) for Yerushaleyim TV? Would like to check out the station/company/content.”

Cohen’s team ignored the request, but Walsh went ahead and sat for an interview anyway. In a studio in Washington at the end of February, Cohen’s team presented the former one-term congressman with a real statuette for his fake award for “significant contributions to the state of Israel.” Walsh went on to deliver a heartfelt, on-camera endorsement of the plan to arm small children.

A couple of days later, the Walshes returned to Chicago and asked the Israeli consulate to take a look at Yerushalayim’s website. The consulate told them the website was fake, and the Walshes contacted a lawyer. The couple considered hiring a private investigator but decided it was too expensive and instead resigned themselves to waiting for the video’s release.

“We should have done more homework,” Helene Walsh said.

In addition to Walsh, GOP Reps. Joe Wilson of South Carolina and Dana Rohrabacher of California and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi all appeared to endorse the program in interviews with Cohen. So did Larry Pratt, executive director emeritus of Gun Owners of America.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sat for an interview but declined to endorse the arming of toddlers.

On Twitter, Walsh has clarified that he does not actually support arming kindergartners and has taken the episode in stride. “It’s on me,” he tweeted. “Sacha fooled me good.”

Others have been less gracious. Disgraced former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore threatened legal action after learning he had been duped.

And in a Facebook post last week, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote, “I join a long list of American public personalities who have fallen victim to the evil, exploitive, sick ‘humor’ of the British ‘comedian’ Sacha Baron Cohen, enabled and sponsored by CBS/Showtime.”

In Palin’s case, she wrote that she was contacted via her speakers bureau and told she would be participating in a historical documentary.

In her post, Palin accused Cohen of posing as a disabled veteran, a charge Showtime denies, and challenged the show’s creators to donate proceeds from the program to a veterans charity.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, Rohrabacher’s challenger, Democrat Harley Rouda, is making a campaign issue of Rohrabacher’s appearance on the show. After Sunday night’s premiere, Rouda released a statement condemning “Rohrabacher’s push to arm children.”

Rohrabacher’s office has released its own statement, saying the congressman does not support arming kids. “I spoke broadly of training young people at a responsible age in self-defense. At no time did I endorse training toddlers in handling guns,” Rohrabacher said. “I love good satire, but good satire must reveal some basis in truth. This was fraud, a sick fraud.”

Cohen also secured interviews with Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney under false pretenses. And according to a tweet by conservative internet publisher Matt Drudge, Cohen has hoodwinked former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, David Petraeus and Ted Koppel.

So successful has Cohen been in deceiving the nation’s political elites that viewers may find themselves pondering the decline of civilization.

Christy Cones, a California art expert who sat for a bogus interview with Cohen, certainly is. “We live in an age of debauchery and decadence that even the Roman Empire might look upon with wonder,” Cones, who also runs a charitable sports foundation, told POLITICO, adding, “Sacha is a total genius.”