Jack Burkman
John Macauley "Jack" Burkman Jr. is an American conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon and conservative lobbyist. Burkman and far-right conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl have allegedly been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults, including in October 2018 against US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in April 2019 against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and in April 2020 against White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci.
In August 2020, Burkman and Wohl made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states, in a campaign that prosecutors have alleged intentionally targeted communities of color to spread disinformation in an attempt to suppress voting in the 2020 presidential election. As a result of the campaign, Burkman and Wohl each pleaded guilty to one felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio, were found to have violated federal and state civil rights laws in a civil case in New York, and are facing criminal charges in Michigan. In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission imposed a fine of more than $5million against both Burkman and Wohl over the robocall scheme.
Burkman was also involved in spreading conspiracy theories about the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, and in 2017 Burkman was shot in the buttocks and thigh and hit with a car by a man he had hired to assist him in an independent attempt to solve Rich's murder. Burkman drew significant media attention in 2014 for organizing a protest against the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL after the team signed Michael Sam, an openly gay football player, to its practice squad.
Burkman is the president of the lobbying firm J.M. Burkman & Associates and the head of the conservative organization American Decency. He was the host of the Behind the Curtain podcast and radio talk show''.''
Life and education
Burkman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, and in 1992 graduated with a MS from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center. Burkman lives in Arlington, Virginia, in a home that doubles as the headquarters of his and Wohl's organization, Project 1599.Attempts to frame political figures
Robert Mueller
On October 22, 2018, Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub received an email from Surefire Intelligence, a company created by Jacob Wohl, asking her to tell them about her "past encounters" with US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and offering her money to discuss Mueller by phone. Taub stated she had never met Mueller and referred the matter to Mueller's office, which then referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.On October 30, NBC News and The Atlantic published articles detailing a scheme to falsely accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct in 1974. The articles reported that on October 17, 2018, several journalists received emails from a person claiming to be named "Lorraine Parsons" that asserted Burkman had hired a man with Wohl's Surefire Intelligence firm to offer her more than $20,000 to sign an affidavit falsely accusing Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment. Parsons told the reporters she had worked with Mueller at the law firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in 1974, and that the man from Surefire had asked her to falsely accuse Mueller of engaging in misconduct during that time. Mueller worked at Pillsbury in 1974, but the firm told reporters they had no record of any Lorraine Parsons ever working there. Parsons declined reporters' requests to speak on the phone, and none of the reporters published the story until the scheme became evident.
Also on October 30, Burkman tweeted that he and Wohl would hold a press conference two days later to "reveal the first of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sex assault victims". He told The Daily Beast they were going to "prove that is a drunk and a sexual abuser". The Gateway Pundit, which employed Wohl, published the "Lorraine Parsons" allegations that same day, including claims that there were "exclusive documents" about a "very credible witness" to support the accusations against Mueller. Each document had in its header the phrase "International Private Intelligence," the business slogan of Wohl's Surefire Intelligence firm. The article was removed later that day, with owner Jim Hoft stating that the matter and "serious allegations against Jacob Wohl" would be investigated.
The following day, Hoft retweeted a tweet by Wohl that suggested Mueller's office was actually behind the scheme. Also that day, Burkman tweeted and Wohl retweeted that Parsons did not exist, denying involvement in the matter, and calling it "a hoax designed to distract the nation from press conference" to be held the next day.
Burkman and Wohl convened a press conference outside Washington, D.C., on November 1, ostensibly to present a woman who they said signed the affidavit previously published by The Gateway Pundit, accusing Mueller of raping her in a New York hotel room in 2010on a date he was contemporaneously reported by The Washington Post to be serving jury duty in Washington. The men accused Mueller's office of "leaking" the eight-year-old Post story to discredit their allegations. The purported accuser, Carolyne Cass, did not appear at the press conference as they had initially stated she would, and the men asserted she had panicked in fear of her life and taken a flight to another location. Towards the end of the press conference, one reporter heckled, "Are you both prepared for federal prison?", to which Burkman replied "No we are not". Soon after the press conference, Hoft announced that The Gateway Pundit had "suspended relationship" with Wohl.
On February 26, 2019, USA Today published an article about Wohl in which they interviewed Cass. She had initially contacted Wohl, who was then posing as an investigator named Matthew Cohen on Craiglist, in hopes that he would help her recover some stolen money. Wohl did no work to recover the money, and instead offered Cass a position at his "intelligence" firm. Speaking of the document accusing Mueller produced by Wohl and his associates, she said that "they had made it up" with a fabricated signature of hers and that they "needed a credible female to put on the line".
The attempt to frame Mueller was included as a case study in After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, a television documentary directed by Andrew Rossi that aired on HBO on March 19, 2020. In an interview for the documentary, Burkman said, "I would use Fake News as a weapon, because it's out there. The Germans used chemical weapons, the British used chemical weapons. What are you going to do? It doesn't mean you like chemical weapons, it means you do what you have to do... Yeah, there are terrible negative potential consequences, but so what? That's what I say. So what?"
Pete Buttigieg
On April 22, 2019, Jack Burkman tweeted "2020 is shaping up to be more exciting than 2016. Looking like it will be Trump vs. Mayor Pete! Get the popcorn ready!"On April 28, a Medium post emerged under the name of a gay Republican college student, alleging that Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, had sexually assaulted him in February. A Twitter account created just a month prior under the student's name also emerged. The next day, The Daily Beast reported that Burkman and Jacob Wohl had tried to convince young Republican men to make false accusations of sexual assault against Buttigieg. One man attested that Burkman and Wohl had tried to convince him to falsely accuse Buttigieg of assaulting him when he was too drunk to consent. According to the source, Burkman and Wohl contacted him under the false identities "Matt Teller" and "Bill", but he recognized Wohl due to Wohl's internet notoriety and decided to record their conversation. He then provided the recording to The Daily Beast, which wrote that it corroborated the man's claims with the aid of an audio forensics analyst who determined that one man in the recording was "highly likely" to be Wohl.
The student who was being impersonated on Medium and Twitter told The Daily Beast that Burkman and Wohl flew him to Washington, D.C., under the guise of speaking about politics from the perspective of a gay Republican, and that he was unaware they were trying to involve him in their scheme. He said that he had to pretend that he was taking a nap in order to escape Burkman's residence, and that they had created the Medium profile and a Twitter profile claiming to be him without his permission.
Burkman and Wohl announced that they would be holding a press conference at Burkman's house on May 8 to continue their accusations against Buttigieg. On May 7, Burkman tweeted a link to an event called "Protest Against Homophobic Bigots" and wrote, "Hundreds of leftist protestors are set to descend on our Wednesday Press conference. We WILL NOT surrender to the mob. We've called in extra security to guard our safety and that of our partners in the media". The protest was discovered to be fake, organized by Wohl himself, when attendees received confirmation emails containing the email address Wohl had used in the past. Mediaite noted that events may be registered with false contact information, but that Eventbrite would have emailed the address used by the organizer allowing them to delete or edit the event. However, Wohl denied involvement in creating the event page. Eventbrite later took down the event page citing their rules against "inauthentic content".
At the May 8 press conference, Burkman and Wohl displayed footage of the student they had flown to Washington, D.C., drinking a coffee as proof that the student was not being coerced, with Wohl explaining that "Most forced coercion events… do not involve caramel frappuccino". During the press conference, the student released a statement describing Burkman and Wohl as "chronic liars" and stating that he would not be at the press conference as they had claimed. No protesters appeared at the fake protest of the press conference that Wohl himself had attempted to organize.