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Big Mazal Tov to dipshit political operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who pleaded guilty yesterday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland to telecommunications fraud in relation to a harebrained scheme to depress Black turnout by dint of robocalls dispensing misinformation about the 2020 election.
Wohl, 24, managed to get himself a lifetime ban by the National Futures Association for hinky trading while still in his teens, before teaming up with conservative lawyer Jack Burkman for a series of stunts accusing various political figures of sexual misconduct, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Most hilariously, the pair staged a press conference in 2019 to accuse Senator Eizabeth Warren of engaging in a torrid BDSM affair with a rentboy.
This script of a call from their group Project 1599, which went out to an estimated 85,000 numbers in predominantly Black neighborhoods across Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, is similarly hilarious in its hamfisted hackery:
Hi. This is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Mail-in voting sounds great. But did you know that if you vote by mail your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used for credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use record from mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to “the man.” Stay safe, and beware of vote by mail.
But it was also wildly illegal, and multiple state and federal law enforcement agencies launched investigations of the naked attempt to suppress minority votes. Burkman initially claimed that his number had been spoofed when the account responsible for paying for the calls was immediately traced to his cellphone.
“No one in their right mind would put their own cell on a robocall,” Burkman told The Daily Beast.
Attorneys General in Michigan and New York moved against Wohl and Burkman over the calls, the FEC assessed a $5.1 million fine, and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation sued them for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act.
But prosecutors in Ohio, where some 3,500 residents of Cleveland and East Cleveland received the deceptive robocalls, have secured the first guilty plea, knocking an original tally of 8 counts of telecommunications fraud and 7 bribery charges down to one charge of fraud and a $2,500 fine. It’s not clear what sentence the pair will receive, but Law & Crime reports that they may actually serve time.
Thus ends one of the more sordid chapters of MAGA world ratfuckery. Although for Burkman and Wohl, who face up to 24 years in prison if convicted in their upcoming face off with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the fun is just beginning.
Jacob Wohl, Jack Burkman plead guilty to felony for 2020 election robocalls targeting Cleveland voters [Cleveland.com]
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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