Twitter suspended prolific smear merchant Jack Burkman on Thursday afternoon, after the blundering conservative operative sent tweets that threatened to incite a panic about coronavirus-related food shortages. Burkman, an attention-hungry lawyer who has teamed up with fellow bumbling trickster Jacob Wohl in the past to promote comically false smears against Democrats, wrote a number of tweets this month downplaying the risks of the coronavirus. On Wednesday, he sent tweets claiming, without any evidence, that Target and Safeway stores around the country were about to close and that the Trump administration was bracing for nationwide food shortages. The tweets drew the attention of liberal activist group Sleeping Giants, which warned Twitter that they threatened to incite a panic. Burkman was suspended for repeatedly breaking Twitter rules, according to a Twitter spokesperson, including breaking a rule about false claims about COVID-19. “Twitter has dumped me apparently for no reason at all,” Burkman wrote in an email to The Daily Beast.
