If you’re not familiar with Jacob Wohl, he’s a 20-year-old pro-Trump Twitter troll whose hobbies include stroking the president’s ego in his mentions, inventing Trumptastic scenarios at a “hipster coffee shop in LA,” and cheating investment clients.
On Tuesday, the news broke that the shady youngster has been implicated in a not-so-elaborate plot to allegedly frame Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is currently investigating the president, for sexual harassment and assault.
“I’m sure the president will dig his teeth into this,” offered Jimmy Kimmel during his late-night monologue Tuesday.
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“The office of the FBI special counsel, the folks looking into Collusionpalooza, has reportedly asked the Bureau to investigate whether women are being offered money to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of sexual assault,” Kimmel explained. “Several journalists say they were approached by a woman who said she was offered $20,000 to make false assault and harassment claims against special counsel Mueller in order to discredit him—which is very clever. You witch-hunt the witch-hunter, that way people won’t know which witch-hunter to hunt.”
As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported, the man at the center of this wacky scheme is Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman, a man “who has repeatedly dabbled in internet conspiracy theories in the past, including promoting the idea that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was killed by deep-state government operatives.” Burkman, who’s thus far denied any involvement in a plot to frame Mueller, claims he’ll be introducing Mueller’s first accuser at a press conference Thursday at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn, Virginia. (Burkman has held several sham press conferences in the past.)
“If you’re making an announcement at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn, you know you’re onto something big,” joked Kimmel.
Wohl told The Daily Beast that Burkman had hired a man by the name of Matthew Cohen, a supposed managing partner at a firm called Surefire Intelligence, to help in his investigation of Mueller. But a simple search easily revealed Cohen to be Wohl. Furthermore, as Sommer reported, “Surefire’s website domain data lists an email address bearing Wohl’s name and that of a legally suspect financial firm he led, NeX Management. Surefire’s website also contains images uploaded to the same Google cloud account as images uploaded to the now-defunct websites of NeX Management and two other asset management firms that Wohl ran, Montgomery Assets and Beverly Hills Management.” And as NBC News reported, “Surefire’s official phone number redirects to [Wohl’s] mother's voicemail.”
“The other character in this story is a disgraced hedge-fund manager and Trump supporter named Jacob Wohl,” said Kimmel. “Now, he denies any involvement in this at all, but the company that is reportedly linked to the allegations, a company named Surefire Intelligence, has his mom’s phone number listed on their website. I like a scandal that involves a Verizon family plan!”
He added: “So, Jacob might be in trouble with the FBI—and grounded by his mother, too.”
