Jacob Wohl’s efforts to fill the Monopoly-man shoes of Roger Stone have gotten him into legal trouble a lot faster than his ratfucking predecessor.
Over the past 13 months, in between selling a $500 fitness program to his Instagram followers, Wohl has faced felony charges in California over alleged violations of securities law. Together with his sidekick, Jack Burkman, he is under investigation by the FBI over a leak of juror questionnaires in Stone’s trial. And earlier this month, the pair was slapped with four felony counts each in Michigan for their alleged orchestration of a voter-suppression scheme. In the alleged plot, mainly focused on Detroit, the duo informed 12,000 largely minority voters via robocall that if they cast mail-in ballots, their personal information could be entered into a database used by the police to locate fugitives and by the Centers for Disease Control to “track people for mandatory vaccines.”
The alleged voter-suppression scheme has already dropped Wohl and Burkman into hotter water than any of their ill-advised scams combined; they face seven-year maximum sentences if convicted of all charges. But on Tuesday, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Michael C. O’Malley revealed that their robocalls have placed them in even further legal jeopardy:
This operation appears to be the same one for which they were charged in Michigan, in which “Wohl and Burkman tried to scare minority voters by tapping into deep and real fears of police brutality and poverty,” as New York’s Sarah Jones has explained. In the Ohio indictment, the prosecutor alleges that on August 26, Burkman and Wohl “utilized a voice broadcasting service provider to place over 67,000 calls across multiple states in the Midwest,” including over 8,100 made to telephone numbers in Cleveland and East Cleveland. In total in Ohio, the pair have been indicted on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery, for which they could face up to 18 and a half years in prison.
Prior to their alleged efforts to suppress the minority vote in midwestern swing states, Wohl and Burkman were known for their outlandish and easily foiled stunts, in which they falsely accused politicians and public figures of sexual misconduct. Most notably, there was the October 2019 smear of Elizabeth Warren, in which they faked evidence attesting that the senator had dommed a 24-year-old marine she met on a website called “COWBOYS4ANGELS.” Judging by the simple and limited metric of their not being charged for the act, such a move was ill advised but not illegal.
