Gov. Scott Walker Gets Pranked

A 20 minute prank phone call was recorded with Governor Scott Walker from Wisconsin, which went viral on the internet on Wednesday.

Ian Murphy, a Buffalo writer for the BuffaloBeast.com was easily connected to the Governor office and led Walker into making some embarrassing comments.

Murphy contacted the Governor’s administrative assistant, who then connected him with another senior aide, who coordinated a time to meet on Tuesday afternoon for the conversation.

“I joked with [the aide] that my maid Maria threw my phone in the washing machine, and that I’d have her deported but she works for almost nothing,” Murphy stated. “So I told them it wasn’t really possible for them to call me back and I better call him.”

“I thought it was so ridiculous, and there was no way I would get through,” he said. But when the Governor called back on schedule, “I got right through to Governor Walker.”

Murphy posed as David Koch, a wealthy conservative activist and donor to the Tea Party. Murphy said that Governor Walker did not say anything in private that he had not stated in public. One thing that Murphy was able to get the governor to concede was the thought about planting decoy demonstrators among the union activists.

“We’ll back you any way we can,” Murphy relayed to Walker during the conversation. “But what we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.”

Walker responded: “We thought about that,” but continued to explain that violence or other disruptions might be counterproductive.

Murphy released the phone recording on BuffaloBeast.com. The site crashed throughout the day since the server couldn’t handle the volume of traffic.

Gov. Walker acknowledged the prank and released a statement on Wednesday, stating that, through the call, he “maintained his appreciation for and commitment to civil discourse. … The phone call shows that the governor says the same thing in private as he does in public and the lengths that others will go to disrupt the civil debate Wisconsin is having.”

Short URL: http://baysidenews.net/?p=3614

Posted by Stephen Unata on Feb 23 2011. Filed under Featured News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.