Far-right tricksters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have agreed to pay $1,000,000 in damages for making robocalls in August 2020 with misleading and false messages designed to dissuade voters in Black neighborhoods from voting by mail. The robocalls were autodialed to 85,307 phone numbers across the country, including 5,494 phone numbers with New York area codes.
In a consent decree filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the calls were described as containing "racially coded language" and "numerous harmful racial stereotypes about the Black community."
Here's a transcript from one of the robocalls that Wohl and Burkman placed:
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 by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for 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.
Wohl and Burkman were found to have violated several significant laws aimed at protecting voters and the integrity of the electoral process, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and specific New York State laws.
Burkman and Wohl have a long history of botched smear campaigns, including organizing fake press conferences, fabricating sexual misconduct allegations against public figures, and spreading false information about various political and social issues. Despite their frequent appearances in the media, they are widely discredited and their operations usually have the opposite effect of what the bungling duo intends.
Wikipedia describes Burkman as an "American conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon and conservative lobbyist."
Wikipedia describes Wohl as an "American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, and convicted felon." In 2020 the Daily Mail reported that Ghislaine Maxwell paid Jacob Wohl $25,000 to "smear Epstein victims and to get [former New York US Attorney] Geoffrey Berman fired in attempt to stall sex trafficking investigation against her."
Previously: Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman plead guilty to felony telecommunications fraud
[via MTN]
[Update 4-9-2024: added missing word "paid" to "Ghislaine Maxwell paid Jacob Wohl $25,000"]
