Jacob Wohl

Wohl has created and promulgated other false or unfounded claims and conspiracy theories, mainly against Democratic Party politicians such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, and Elizabeth Warren.

In August 2020, Wohl and Burkman made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states, in a campaign that prosecutors have alleged intentionally targeted non-white communities to spread disinformation in an attempt to suppress voting in the 2020 presidential election.

The Riverside County District Attorney's Office alleged that Wohl and Johnson violated California law by selling unqualified securities through Montgomery Assets between July 27 and August 27, 2016.

[8][9][10] In July 2016, an investigator from the district attorney's office contacted Wohl and Johnson, who at the time were running the Montgomery Assets firm, and claimed to represent a client who was interested in investing with them.

[23][24] Merritt Corrigan, deputy White House liaison for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was fired from her position on August 3, 2020, shortly after unlocking her previously private Twitter account and sending several anti-LGBT tweets.

[32][31] The messages disseminated the false claims that information provided by those who use mail-in ballots would be used by police to find criminals, by credit card companies for debt collection purposes, and by the CDC to "track people for mandatory vaccines".

[31][34] Several lawsuits against Wohl and Burkman alleged that the robocalls were an attempt to suppress votes in the 2020 presidential election, and New York District Judge Victor Marrero wrote in his judgment against them that the men had intentionally targeted Black communities with the calls.

[38][39][40] On October 1, 2020, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed four felony charges each against Wohl and Burkman, including conspiring to intimidate voters in violation of election law.

[31] In a press release, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Nessel condemned the robocall campaign as "racist" and as "an unconscionable, indefensible, blatant attempt to lie to citizens about their right to vote".

[46] On October 28, New York District Court Judge Victor Marrero ordered the men to call back the targets of the robocall to tell them the information in their message was false and that the campaign was illegal.

In his opinion, he wrote that "the neighborhoods that Defendants targeted were not accidental or random," and that a reasonable jury would determine they had intended to "deny the right to vote specifically to Black voters.

NBC News reported in November 2018 that Wohl had "adopted and amplified nearly every prominent conspiracy theory to arise in the last year," and had used his blog to publish unfounded claims about Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Robert Mueller.

The articles reported that on October 17, 2018, several journalists received emails from a person claiming to be named Lorraine Parsons that asserted conservative lobbyist Jack Burkman had hired a man with Wohl's Surefire Intelligence firm, to offer her more than $20,000 to sign an affidavit falsely accusing Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment.

[70][71] The Gateway Pundit, which employed Wohl, published the Lorraine Parsons allegations on October 30, including claims that there were "exclusive documents" about a "very credible witness" to support the accusations against Mueller.

[79] The next day, The Daily Beast reported that Wohl and Jack Burkman had tried to convince several young Republican men to make false accusations of sexual assault against Buttigieg.

[83] The student who was being impersonated on Medium and Twitter told The Daily Beast that Wohl and Burkman flew him to Washington, D.C. under the guise of speaking about politics from the perspective of a gay Republican, and that he was unaware they were trying to involve him in their scheme.

[55] On October 3, 2019, Wohl and Burkman held a press conference alleging that Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator and then-2020 presidential candidate, had engaged in an extramarital affair with a 24-year-old former U.S. Marine.

They alleged that Warren hired the man from a website called "Cowboys4Angels", described as "a site for attractive young men who provide companionship escort services to well-heeled women", in August 2018 in Massachusetts.

[87][19][88] Posting on Twitter, NBC News reporter Ben Collins joked: "Congrats to Elizabeth Warren on rising so quickly in the polls she forced Jacob Wohl to write erotica about her".

[89] Warren herself joked about the baseless allegations indirectly, including "go Cougars" in a tweet about college debt—a reference both to the mascot of her alma mater, the University of Houston, and to the slang term for women who pursue younger men which Wohl and Burkman had used for her.

[93] In late April 2020, a press release was published in which a woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

There was a group of young Democrats murmuring to each other that they know the "Suspicious Packages" were an inside job to make Republicans look bad After Wohl made a popular tweet that he had "just left a hipster coffee shop" where he overheard "libs" praising President Donald Trump's interactions with Vladimir Putin at the 2018 Russia–United States summit in Helsinki, other tweets by Wohl were uncovered that repeated the same phrase, alongside claims that he had overheard groups of customers including liberals, Democrats, and Jewish people voicing support for Donald Trump or opposition to his political opponents.

[14] These repeated events in similar locations were viewed to be improbable, and the tweets were mocked in an online meme in which people followed the phrase "just left a hipster coffee shop" with unlikely fictional scenarios.

[109] In late February 2020, Wohl and Burkman alleged that the jury that convicted Roger Stone on seven felonies related to Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation had been biased against him.

The press conference was sparsely attended and described by The Washington Post as another in a series of events in which Wohl and Burkman "routinely announce they have discovered smoking-gun revelations against Trump's rivals, then humiliate themselves when they fail to produce any evidence".

[112] During the May 2019 press conference in which Wohl and Burkman falsely accused Buttigieg of sexual assault, the pair also shared an unsubstantiated rumor that Joe Biden might have Parkinson's disease.

In a February 26, 2019, interview with USA Today, Wohl said that he planned to create fake left-wing accounts to try to direct votes towards Democrats who would make weaker opponents for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Wohl also stated that he sought to solicit "damaging information" against left-leaning nonprofits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters for America, and Right Wing Watch by providing insiders money or "moral reconciliation".

[77] On the same day as the USA Today article was published, Twitter permanently banned Wohl after an investigation found that he had already broken the site's rules against creating fake accounts.

According to the latter platform, the ban was to enforce their rules that disallow "coordinated inauthentic behavior", which they alleged Wohl had violated by creating fake accounts in advance of the November 2020 election.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman address kidnapping allegations at a press conference on August 6, 2020. [ 25 ]