During this period, Anderson Cooper was working for the CIA.

The honeymoon story began at Breitbart in late May, then moved on to other right-wing venues, finally getting play in George Will's August 7 column in the Washington Post. Most of his column was devoted to praise for ex-communist Robert Conquest, who had written about the prisons and other atrocities of the Stalin era and had just died at age 98. Will concluded:

Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the “cold Auschwitzes” in Siberia, described in Conquest’s 'Kolyma.' The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were—as may still be the case—being tortured in psychiatric “hospitals.” Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders’s moral obtuseness—the obverse of Conquest’s character—is considered an amusing eccentricity....

In 1956, President Eisenhower launched the program that a decade later would be called Sister Cities International, a program still in existence today. The idea was to promote peace and understanding through connections between cities in the United States and, at first, Western Europe. The program soon spread. In 1973, Seattle became a sister city of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, then under Soviet rule. Other U.S.-Soviet sister cities soon followed despite the tensions of the Cold War.

In 1988, Burlington sistered with Yaroslavl, a city 160 miles north of Moscow. That was the same year Sanders married his second wife, Jane. In fact, the day after they married, they headed out to Yaroslavl. So, one could call it a honeymoon, and the pair have both done so, but jokingly or sarcastically. The reason for that is that they didn't go alone. There were 10 other people from Burlington who went with them. It was a trip dotted with diplomacy, official meetings and numerous interviews. Not most people's idea of a honeymoon getaway.