Mischievous Scamps Jacob Wohl And Jack Burkman Owe Voters One MILLION Dollars
Who would have guessed their claims wouldn't hold up in a court of law!
Before we start, let me just be clear that yr Wonkette, on location in a lime green hipster coffee shop, has about three jokes for this story, so we’re going to have to flog them like a red-headed (s)ex marine, as we believe the saying goes.
The story itself is the classic tale of boy meets man, boy and man concoct a patently illegal scheme to defend law-and-order conservative democratic republicanism from the corrupt aggression of members of the public voting, and then authorities promptly and repeatedly bring hammer down on boy and man too dumb to cover their tracks.
The boy in this case is Jacob Wohl, a “child prodigy who has eclipsed Mozart” who got his start as a heavily and repeatedly alleged securities fraudster during his teen years, operating a hedgefund that hired escorts to seduce investors (into investing, allegedly).
The man is Jack Burkman, the lobbyist who while working for the authoritarian christofascist Family Research Council literally gave his business card (!) to two women in DC for Pride 2006, offering to pay their hotel bill and give them an extra $1000 for a threesome.
The (presumably queer) women declined this generous offer, preferring to laugh at him on the internet. He followed that up with a guest appearance on the DC Madam’s customer list in 2007, because can you even be a little bit surprised after that first story?
The two had many other escapades over the years (this is the editrix’s favorite, guest-starring Liz Warren!), but the one relevant today is not the one involving a press conference where the pair denied that “forced coercion events [...] involve caramel frappucinos” while Burkman’s fly was hanging open.
This one involved definitely non-racist robocalls voiced by a Black actor. The audio recording was called by Burkman and Wohl “black robo,” to emphasize its non-racist nature so that the disproportionately Black recipients targeted by the calls would not suspect anything amiss with a call in which the two credited themselves using their own real life names before encouraging voters to avoid vote-by-mail to keep their information away from “the Man” who wanted to track people to force them to get vaccinated and pay back debt.
If all that seems so criminally clumsy that it is best described as Jacob Wohl tripping on his dick and eating it like a Fruit Roll-Up, allow yr Wonkette to quote from Evan at yr Wonkette:
No play involving Jacob Wohl is a good play unless it features Jacob Wohl tripping on his dick and eating it like a Fruit Roll-Up.
And yet Wohl and Burkman would have gotten away with it, too, except some people did find the calls suspicious. Perhaps this was because Wohl was overheard at a hipster coffee shop in February of 2019 announcing his plans to commit fraud to help reelect then-president Trump in 2020. He could, of course, hardly have expected that his (allegedly!) felonious plans would be splashed all over the internet by the USA Today reporter interviewing him in that coffee shop, probably drinking a caramel frap to disguise their evil intent.
In fact, despite his expectations, the whole interview was so damaging that Wohl had to give up on his original idea of using Facebook and Twitter to commit his fraud because Facebook and Twitter permabanned him for publicly planning to use their services to commit fraud.
Since the robocalls went out, Wohl and Burkman have had a wee spot of bother with a few trivial entities like the FCC and the states of Ohio, Michigan, and New York, which all took exception to their election frauding via wired and wireless communications. Ohio got to them first in October of 2022, securing a guilty plea for telecommunications fraud and sentencing each to two years probation and 500 hours of community service. The FCC, lime green with envy of Ohio, we are sure, was next. In June of 2023 the agency fined the pair $5.1 million.
The Michigan and New York cases have taken longer. In Michigan the court system appears to have taken Wohl and Burkman’s First Amendment claims of protection-to-fraud seriously — or seriously enough to hear the appeal before proceeding to trial anyway. The state supreme court heard arguments last fall and could render a decision at any time, clearing the way for criminal charges that carry up to 12 years in prison, though any sentence would likely be less than seven.
Meanwhile, Tish James, attorney general of New York of whom we believe we have previously heard for some reason, has been pursuing the pair for $2.7 million dollars through a civil action against them for fraud. (She is busy with the civil actions against fraud!) A year ago US District Court Judge Victor Marrero found the pair liable, presumably because their primary witness suddenly flew to Canada and definitely did not accuse them of forcing her/him to make false claims. Since then Wohl and Burkman have been attempting to negotiate a lesser judgment. And negotiate they have. The final settlement (pending approval by Marrero) requires them to pay one million dollars. (You already got this one up top. Don’t get greedy.)
While the pair could get extra credit for on time and early payments, potentially paying as little as $400 thousand total, late payments can increase the bill to as much as $1.25 million, and Wohl, at least, has a track record of making court mandated payments late, a thought which has yr Wonkette rolling in poppies and moonshine, or maybe it was puppies and sunshine, we are not sure after last night’s celebration which was a bit heavy on the pop rocks and absinthe.
In any case, yr Wonkette is quite happy about these developments and plans on following the Michigan criminal case until we dildo this story into exhaustion like a common bodybuilder-sexworker-ex-marine.
Good lord, you want more Wohl/Burkman stories? Fine, try these.
There are more, but you will have to Google because we have run out of room.
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Just want to make a couple things clear in the comments.
1. This is all Vagenda & Peeara's fault for forcibly coercing me with a caramel frappuccino into pitching the story to Rebecca.
2. Apparently I like NyanCat more than yr Editrix.
I missed these guys. Jacob Wohl's dad used to comment on various Dodgers twitter threads, and every time he did, he'd provoke an avalanche of comments and jokes about his kid. Then he'd get mad, threaten to sue everyone, everyone would make fun of him, and he'd flounce away. He probably threatened to sue me, personally, at least a dozen times. He caught more abuse than the occasional wayward Padres fan, and it was glorious.