Jacob Wohl

Jacob Alexander Wohl (born December 12, 1997) is an American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon, and lobbyist. Wohl and fellow lobbyist Jack Burkman have been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults. The pair were allegedly behind plots 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.

Wohl has created and promulgated other false or unfounded claims and conspiracy theories, mainly against Democratic Party politicians such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, and Elizabeth Warren. To aid his schemes, Wohl has created multiple fake private intelligence agencies, and has fabricated death threats and protests against himself. Formerly highly active on Twitter, and known for his online trolling on social media, Wohl has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for creating fake accounts in violation of site policies.

In August 2020, Wohl and Burkman made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states, in a campaign that prosecutors alleged intentionally targeted non-white communities to spread disinformation in an attempt to suppress voting in the 2020 presidential election. As a result of the campaign, Wohl and Burkman each pleaded guilty to one felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio, pleaded no contest to four felony counts in Michigan, and were found to have violated federal and state civil rights laws in a civil case in New York. In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission imposed a fine of more than $5million against both Wohl and Burkman over the robocall scheme.

Wohl founded several investment funds as a teenager. The National Futures Association banned Wohl for life in 2017, after investigating multiple investor complaints against him and concluding that Wohl was guilty of refusing to cooperate with the NFA as required, misrepresenting investments, and misleading investors. The same year, the Arizona Corporation Commission charged Wohl with 14 counts of securities fraud and ordered him to pay approximately $35,000 in restitution and penalties. In August 2019, Wohl was arrested on felony charges in California for illicit securities sales that took place in July and August 2016. He pleaded guilty to four felony counts, and in 2024 was sentenced to two years of probation.

Early life Jacob Alexander Wohl was born on December 12, 1997. He was raised in Corona, California, where he attended Santiago High School. While in high school, he founded several investment funds, soliciting investments from classmates and teachers. Wohl appeared on Fox Business in 2015, when he was 17 years old, to discuss his hedge fund. He posted Craigslist ads for "Wohl Girls", models who were hired to help attract clients, and a number of risqué websites including "WohlGirls.com" were registered to his name. One model alleged that Wohl posted photographs of her online without her permission. The man later died by suicide. Wohl claimed that the difference was due to losses, but the NFA found that Wohl's trading accounts "appeared to have made, not lost, money overall".

A 2016 complaint by the same man resulted in the Riverside Superior Court in Riverside County, California, issuing felony arrest warrants on August 9, 2019, for Wohl and his former business partner, Matthew Johnson, on charges of unlawful sale of securities. The Riverside County District Attorney's Office alleged that Wohl and Johnson violated California law by selling unqualified securities through Montgomery Assets between July 27 and August 27, 2016. In July 2016, an investigator from the district attorney's office contacted Wohl and Johnson, who at the time were running the Montgomery Assets firm, and claimed to represent a client who was interested in investing with them. According to the 2019 arrest warrant, the investigation resulted in an apparent attempt by Wohl and his partner to sell an unregistered security.

Surefire Intelligence In 2018, Wohl created and registered the company Surefire Intelligence, LLC. Reporters who investigated Surefire Intelligence in October 2018, prompted by an alleged plot to frame Robert Mueller for sexual assault that same month, found that the company had been created by Wohl just a few weeks earlier and that its official phone number redirected to a voicemail inbox for a phone number belonging to Wohl's mother. They also reported that employee photographs on the website were actually photographs of people unrelated to Surefire, including actor Christoph Waltz. News agencies found profiles of supposed Surefire Intelligence employees on the LinkedIn professional networking site which used photographs of unrelated celebrities as profile images; a photograph of Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli was used on a profile claiming to be the company's Tel Aviv station chief, and a profile for a person named Matthew Cohen used an altered photo of Wohl. A journalist visited the address listed on Surefire Intelligence's website and found it to be the location of an unrelated company.

Minutes after Michael Avenatti was reported being arrested on suspicion of domestic violence on November 14, 2018, the Surefire Twitter account posted a news story about the arrest, adding, "Surefire Intelligence strikes again". The following day, Avenatti suggested that Wohl was behind the arrest, and tweeted, "First Mueller and now me. When we are fully exonerated I am coming for you Jacob Wohl aka Surefire." Avenatti was ultimately not charged in relation to the reported incident.

Kidnapping allegations

On the afternoon of August 4, Corrigan deleted her tweets from the previous day. Wohl claimed that Corrigan was being convinced by associates of President Donald Trump to go back on her claims against the USAID, and Burkman said that Corrigan had "buyer's remorse" for sending the tweets.

The events formed the basis for Maximum Truth, a 2023 mockumentary directed by David Stassen.

Voter suppression robocall In August 2020, Wohl and Burkman made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states, including Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and others, including New York and Illinois.

Several lawsuits against Wohl and Burkman alleged that the robocalls were an attempt to suppress votes in the 2020 presidential election, and New York District Judge Victor Marrero wrote in his judgment against them that the men had intentionally targeted Black communities with the calls. In March 2023, Judge Marrero ruled in the New York civil case that Wohl and Burkman had violated federal and state civil rights laws, and the two agreed to pay a $1million settlement. At the time it was proposed in August 2021, this was the largest fine ever sought by the commission under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Michigan On October 1, 2020, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed four felony charges each against Wohl and Burkman, including conspiring to intimidate voters in violation of election law. Nessel's investigation into the robocalls found that Wohl and Burkman had attempted to suppress people of color from voting in the 2020 presidential election via a robocall campaign that made 85,000 calls across the country, including 12,000 in Detroit. The week before the charges were filed, investigators searched Wohl's Los Angeles home.

Wohl and Burkman turned themselves in to Detroit police on October 8, 2020, and both pleaded not guilty at a later court appearance. On February 23, 2021, a Michigan circuit court judge denied Wohl and Burkman's motion to dismiss the charges. Wohl and Burkman appealed the decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals, which denied the appeal. After an appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Court of Appeals to determine whether the state law under which the two were charged violated the First Amendment. The Court of Appeals determined the case could proceed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear a subsequent appeal by Wohl and Burkman to dismiss the charges. On August 1, 2025, the Michigan Attorney General's Office announced that Wohl and Burkman both pleaded no contest to the charges. On December 1, 2025, a Michigan judge sentenced both Wohl and Burkman to one year of probation.

New York The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation filed a federal civil suit against Wohl and Burkman in New York on October 16, 2020, alleging that the two men violated the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 by making the robocalls. On October 28, New York District Court Judge Victor Marrero ordered the men to call back the targets of the robocall to tell them the information in their message was false and that the campaign was illegal. The judge also prohibited them from engaging in more robocalls or text message campaigns to attempt to disenfranchise voters. Wohl and Burkman tried multiple times to pause the civil suit while there were active criminal proceedings against them, but Judge Marrero denied the request on February 22, 2021. On May 19, 2021, the judge granted New York Attorney General Letitia James's motion to intervene in the lawsuit. On March 8, 2023, Judge Marrero found that Wohl and Burkman had violated several federal and state civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Ku Klux Klan Act. In his opinion, he wrote that "the neighborhoods that Defendants targeted were not accidental or random," and that a reasonable jury would determine they had intended to "deny the right to vote specifically to Black voters." On April 9, 2024, Letitia James announced that Wohl and Burkman agreed to pay $1,000,000 to settle the case.

As a part of the litigation against Wohl and Burkman, in August 2022, the New York Attorney General announced a settlement with Message Communications, Inc., the robocall company that the pair had used, in which the company will pay $50,000 restitution.

Ohio In October 2020, prosecutors in Cuyahoga County, Ohio indicted Wohl and Burkman on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery.

In February 2019, Wohl used a fake Twitter account that claimed to represent a group of women who supported Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's possible 2020 presidential campaign, in order to write that Kamala Harris "does not represent American Women" and that she "traded sexual favors for public office".

Representative Ilhan Omar and Minneapolis In February 2019, Wohl traveled to Minnesota with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, claiming to investigate rumors that Ilhan Omar, US Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district and a Somali American, had married her brother to grant him US citizenship. Their trip was organized and attended by Ali Alexander, also a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist. Wohl created an online fundraising campaign to try to raise $25,000 to fund the trip. In a subsequent series of tweets and livestreams, Wohl claimed that Minneapolis had "no-go zones" containing "Somali jihadists", that a local Somali man had threatened to kill him, that "Islamicist forces have taken over sections of [Minnesota's] police departments", and that he had to wear body armor and travel with hired security in armored cars to avoid hitmen. The security team, however, did not appear in any of their livestreams, and Wohl declined livestream watchers' requests to film the armored cars and security team which he claimed to have hired. Pat Garofalo, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, refuted Wohl's claim about "no-go zones" in a tweet, calling it "a lie" and "a farce".

Wohl appeared on the grounds of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with Jack Burkman, ostensibly to present evidence from their trip, but was ejected. Mother Jones wrote that Wohl's claims are "far into tinfoil-hat territory".

In mid-March 2019, Wohl, Loomer, and Alexander released a documentary about their investigation into Omar in which they claimed that they have secured proof that she had married her brother. In the video, Wohl is shown filing a police report in a Minneapolis police station about death threats he claimed to have received while they were in the city. However, the Twitter account shown sending threats via direct message in the video, supposedly belonging to a person working as a diversity coordinator in Minneapolis, was one of the fake Twitter accounts Wohl had been operating himself. After news reports about Wohl's faked death threats, Alexander attempted to distance himself from Wohl. The Daily Dot noted that Wohl might have filmed himself committing the crime of filing a false police report. On March 15, 2019, a Minnesota man sued Wohl for stealing his Instagram photo and using it as the profile picture for the fake account. The man hired Michael Avenatti for the case, who announced that he would "pursue all available criminal and civil claims against Jacob Wohl. It is time that he face the consequences for his outrageous conduct. And I intend on ensuring that he does".

Roger Stone jury In late February 2020, Wohl and Burkman alleged that the jury that convicted Roger Stone on seven felonies related to Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation had been biased against him. In a press conference held on February 27, 2020, Wohl and Burkman distributed copies of confidential juror questionnaires, and they later published some of the questionnaires on Twitter. In September 2020, The Daily Beast reported that the FBI was investigating Wohl and Burkman for potentially attempting to influence the jurors or tamper with witnesses, and was investigating how the two obtained the questionnaires.

Other false claims On February 6, 2019, Colin Campbell, an editor of The News & Observer, tweeted photos that showed two white students in Ku Klux Klan robes holding a noose around the neck of another white student wearing blackface. The photos were from the 1979 yearbook page for the Chi Phi fraternity of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Roy Cooper, the incumbent Governor of North Carolina, graduated that year from that university with membership to a different fraternity, Chi Psi. Later that day, The Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline "Blackface lynch pics from Roy Cooper North Carolina yearbook", although the article clarified that there was no evidence that Cooper was in any of the photos.

On October 1, 2019, Wohl and Jack Burkman held a press conference on the front steps of Burkman's home in which they claimed to know the identity of the whistleblower who revealed possible impropriety by President Trump involving Ukraine, though they said they could not release the whistleblower's name. The press conference was sparsely attended and described by The Washington Post as another in a series of events in which Wohl and Burkman "routinely announce they have discovered smoking-gun revelations against Trump's rivals, then humiliate themselves when they fail to produce any evidence".

During the May 2019 press conference in which Wohl and Burkman falsely accused Buttigieg of sexual assault, the pair also shared an unsubstantiated rumor that Joe Biden might have Parkinson's disease. In March 2020, Wohl published fake COVID-19 test results, claiming that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had COVID-19 and would die in 30 days. He was active on Twitter, which he used to spread lies and misleading information about Democratic politicians and post in support of Trump. In a February 26 interview with NBC News, he said, "In my entire adult life, I've had three Twitter accounts," indicating his @JacobAWohl account, his intelligence company's Twitter account, and his think tank account. Writing on Telegram about the ban, Wohl said, "Now that I've been banned by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, I no longer have any reservations about using their platforms to 'manipulate the conversation,' as they put it. Project 1599 will make Cambridge Analytica look like a middle school science fair project". Wohl is Jewish and a Zionist.