Pro-Beto group leader posts video of shirtless Bernie Sanders ‘drunkenly’ singing in Soviet Union in 1988

Travis Justin, who is part of the “leadership team” and runs “Veteran Outreach” for “Draft Beto 2020,” an effort to get the Texas liberal to run for president in 2020, posted the 1988 video of Sanders, who is weighing whether to run for the White House. The website describes Justin as “a veterans advocate, social activist, family man, and well-known Twitter personality from Florida” who worked on the Obama 2012 re-election campaign and is a decorated Navy veteran.

He posted it on his Twitter account with the caption: “Recently discovered footage from 1988 reveals a shirtless Bernie Sanders with his wife, Jane, on their honeymoon in the USSR, drunkenly singing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ with a group of presumed Soviets.” The tweet was later deleted, but a screenshot was captured by Legal Insurrection.

The footage appears to have been first discovered by Mendoza Ferrer, a Sanders critic, and posted on Twitter. She wrote: “Bernie apparently loved being taped by VT community television. This one was like hitting the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – it was buried deep in an archived compilation.”

Sanders wrote about the trip, which was part of his official duties as mayor of Burlington, Vt., in his memoir, Outsider In the White House, jokingly referring to it as a “very strange honeymoon.” He had married his wife, Jane, the day before the 12-person delegation from Burlington traveled to its sister city Yaroslavl, 160 miles northeast of Moscow. Sanders wrote: “Burlington had a foreign policy, because, as progressives, we understood that we all live in one world.”

In a taped interview with the mayor of Yaroslavl, Sanders said that healthcare and housing appeared to be “significantly better” in the U.S. than in the Soviet Union but added: “However, the cost of both services is much, much higher in the United States.”

In 1988, the Soviet Union and communism were in crisis and President Ronald Reagan himself spoke in Moscow’s Red Square. The previous year, Reagan and USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and three years later the Soviet Union collapsed.

Republicans have mocked Sanders for the trip. In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said during a GOP presidential debate: “I’m tired of losing. Good God, look who we’re running against. The number two guy [running for the Democratic nomination] went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon, and I don’t think he ever came back,” Graham said before the audience exploded into applause.

Asked about this by Thomas Roberts of MSNBC, Sanders said: “I think that’s a little silly [and] absurd … totally nonsense.”

Roberts asked him: “Do you think that Sen. Graham is trying to imply that you are some type of communist sympathizer?”

Sanders replied: “Yes, that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. The fact is that I went to establish a sister city program with Yaroslavl, then in the Soviet Union, now an important city in Russia, which is still in existence today.” He added, “Did it take place after my marriage? It did.”

O’Rourke, a former U.S. representative from Texas, has not yet entered the race for the Democratic bid in 2020 but has recently been broadcasting much of his life a via Facebook live. Sanders ran in 2016 and lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. O’Rourke lost his bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz in November.