Well, This Is Very Embarrasing, To Say the Least

First, thank you Dr. John for bringing this story to my attention.

It appears, some well-known  'Russian Pranksters' organized a conference call with  Elliot Abrams, US special envoy for Venezuela, a man with a long history and experience with trying to topple foreign Governments, not always successful, one might add.

The following quotes were taken from https://sputniknews.com/latam/201903061073002069-abrams-full-interview-audio/

"Vovan and Lexus, Russian telephone pranksters known for their trolling of politicians from around the world, have struck again, targeting US special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams to find out more about the US-backed effort to unseat that country's legitimate government. Sputnik got ahold of the full audio from the talks."

"Posing as Swiss President Ueli Maurer, who also serves as the country's finance minister, the pranksters contacted Abrams on two occasions – in mid-February and early March, speaking to him for over 23 minutes about Swiss policy on the ongoing effort to freeze the Venezuelan government's assets as part of broader plans to replace President Nicolas Maduro with US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido."

When following the above link you will get a good deal of background information, enabling you to better understand the recorded telephone call; needless to say, there probably will be denial that this phone call ever happened.  Please follow the link, to the recording, below.

https://soundcloud.com/radiosputnik/russian-pranksters-call-us-special-representative-for-venezuela-elliot-abrams

The moral of the story is, being a country with super large oil deposits is not always a good thing.

It is perplexing that a major country, which professes to spread democracy around the world, is actually bent on destroying a Government that just recently was elected by its people?  One could infer that free elections are the sign of a democratic society, exercising their free will.  What else could it be?  The fact that Mr. Juan Guaido is still alive confirms that Nicolas Maduro is not a dictator, were it not so Guaido would be in prison, or in an unmarked grave.

What is not surprising is that highly paid and influential people are stupid enough to fall for pranks like this one, and others, again and again.  It just shows that we are governed by not necessarily intelligent people, just by people whose ego, greed and lust for power places them into high positions that normal intelligent, and honest individuals would not want to occupy, at any price.

Trump said it best during a 'hot mic.' incident: when you rich you get away with anything.