Steven Seagal says he will not be running for governor of Siberia.
The actor, who is originally from Michigan but became a Russian citizen in 2016, said media reports that he would seek higher office in the snowy region of his adopted homeland were “fake news.”
“This is one of the millions of fake news sort of stories,” said Seagal on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “I was at a film festival in Vladivostok … and somebody in the audience said, ‘hey man we don’t have a governor here, you want to become the governor’ and I said ‘sure’ and there it went.”
“At the same time, we said 30 times, ‘guys we were joking.’ Vladivostok had a friend of mine become governor there the next day. It was just a joke that the press enjoyed doing bad things to certain people with,” he added.
Carlson, smirking through the segment, offered broad agreement.
Seagal then shared his belief that the Russia collusion story “was all a fantasy” and Vladimir Putin was a “brilliant strategist” which elicited no pushback from the normally combative Carlson.
Seagal’s comments were also picked up by Russian state controlled media including RT and TASS.
The actor went on to tell Carlson that Russians he talked to were inclined to believe Brett Kavanaugh’s denials of sexual misconduct when he was a young man.
“They’re just completely bemused. Some of them are laughing and some of them are crying but the basic consensus is that they’re finding it astounding and hard to believe that so much is being made of this and a lot of these accusations against people like Kavanaugh, they just are finding it … incredulous,” he said.
Unmentioned throughout were the allegations of rape and sexual harassment against Seagal dating back to 1994, which you can read more about here.
When Seagal was pressed on his own past during a BBC interview last week, he wordlessly stormed off set. The story was widely reported — including by Carlson’s own network, Fox News.