Send in the Trolls

Jacob Wohl, Project Veritas, Dutch Art, and the Trump Campaign

Jacob Wohl

For those of you not Online enough to have heard of Jacob Wohl, count yourselves lucky. Wohl is a young man who has spent the last few years trying to insert himself in Trump circles by staging a series of outrageous smear campaigns against Democrats and, for whatever reason, Ted Cruz. The Cut has compiled a summary of his schemes, and it’s a lot:

In April of 2019, Wohl and Burkman tried making false sexual-assault allegations against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

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In February 2019, Wohl and another far-right conspiracy theorist and fellow banned Twitter user Laura Loomer traveled to Minnesota to “prove” that Representative Ilhan Omar had married her brother in order to get him U.S. citizenship

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In January of 2019, shortly after California senator Kamala Harris announced her bid for president, Wohl began tweeting that she was not eligible to run because her parents were not born in the United States.

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In October 2018, in the midst of his investigation of Russian meddling into the 2016 election, Wohl and Burkman tried to accuse Special Counsel Robert Mueller of sexual misconduct.

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In October of 2019, Wohl purported to have evidence of a recent “long-term sexual relationship” (lasting several months?) between Elizabeth Warren and a 24-year-old bodybuilder Marine.

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In March, Wohl circulated a fake coronavirus lab test, saying that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had tested positive for the virus — and, dramatically, that he would die in 30 days.

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On April 21, Wohl and Burkman sent members of the press one of their “media alerts,” teasing an allegation against Dr. Fauci. It said that a woman named Diana Rodriguez was coming forward to say she’d been sexually assaulted by Fauci in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in 2014.

I mean…okay. Jacob Wohl is 23, and when you consider he’s spent the last 3 of those years as a vocal troll for the president, he’s packed a lot of living into a young life. Having a rich father who’s a regular guest on Fox News probably helps, but you can’t accuse Jacob of lack of imagination. At least two of his concoctions - that Ilhan Omar married her brother, and that Kamala Harris is not a US citizen - have gained significant traction on the right.

In addition to his role as right-wing provocateur, Jacob Wohl is a fraudster. In 2017 he was banned from selling securities by the state of Arizona. Again, who is investing $75,000 with an 18-year-old? Now, Wohl and his partner are facing criminal charges in California for their investment fraud.

Wohl’s attempt to smear Robert Mueller during the Russiagate investigation may have attracted the FBI’s attention, though a year later no action has been taken - unsurprising given who is running the Department of Justice.

Not content to use his comically fake “investigation” company Surefire Intelligence to take down Mueller, Wohl was also running online ads for a P.I. service and scamming homeless women:

“I was looking for a paralegal to help me with some court documents at the time on Craigslist, the legal services section, and I came across an ad that said ‘have you been scammed? Do you need a private investigator?’” she recalled. “So I’m like, well, yes I do!”

The ad was from Surefire Intelligence. Adams did some research on the company before reaching out. “If you initially looked, three weeks ago, [Wohl’s] agency looked crisp. He had LinkedIn. He had a beautiful website. He had Medium.com reviews. He had—the whole first few pages of Google was him. So anyone with a sound mind would think ‘hey this is a legitimate business.’”

Wohl created an alias, and pretended to be a private investigator, relieving his client of $1,200 and promising to get her $20,000 as payment for her stolen truck.

All of this stuff is super illegal! But, it seems to me, much of it falls just below the line of something a police detective or prosecutor wants to bother with. Is it because Wohl is a dumb white kid from a rich family with a lawyer dad? That likely has something to do with it. Is he dodging federal charges because the president sees stories of his hijinx on his favorite news channels? Maybe. The guy is an obvious clown, but as the right wing reinvents itself as the party of trolling and grievance, it’s good to remember there’s Jacob Wohl and there are smarter versions of him out there, involved in more insidious plots that are less likely to fall apart with a moment’s scrutiny.

Project Veritas

One of these characters is James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. You may remember him as the guy who took down ACORN, the 40-year-old community organizing non-profit, by posing as a pimp and heavily editing the video to paint the org in a bad light. Some in the US government took the bait, cut ACORN’s funding, and soon they had to close the doors.

Since then, O’Keefe has made a career out of doing “stings” on liberal politicians and groups. He and his companions aren’t - to put it mildly - the brightest bunch, and in 2010 O’Keefe and three accomplices were arrested and charged with trespassing when they posed as telephone repairmen to try to sabotage the phone system at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. O’Keefe plead guilty and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Since the ACORN sting, the videos and audio Project Veritas produces have been used by members of Congress and right-wing pundits to cynically attack people and causes they don’t like. O’Keefe has become a celebrity on the right, where deception and outright fabrication pass for investigative journalism. His organization has grown, receiving tens of millions of dollars in donations. This bumbling crew of young pranksters now finds themselves with a war chest and a mandate from wealthy GOP operatives.

So, it should come as no surprise that Project Veritas has gone all in on voter suppression in the lead-up to the election this November. The New Republic lays out O’Keefe’s battle plan:

For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained.

A look behind the scenes at how Veritas pitches their dirty business to wealthy donors is illuminating:

Last year, Project Veritas’s donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to a given patron’s pet ideological grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the group’s undercover operations for the 2020 campaign cycle.

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The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”

Unsurprisingly, the schemes Project Veritas claims it will uncover do not exist, and voter fraud is practically non-existent - unless you count the Republicans who’ve been caught doing it.

That doesn’t matter so much if powerful politicians think it’s real, and are willing to act on it. We haven’t yet seen what depths the Attorney General will sink to in support of his criminal boss, but the feds don’t have much to do with elections - that’s mostly left up to the states.

This is why some of the powerful allies O’Keefe has made should be worrying, especially Texas AG Ken Paxton:

In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, [Aaron] Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.

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Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis” cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four, Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship.

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Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of contracting Covid-19”

Paxton’s office could have some deniability, if not for the super spies at Veritas who make it explicit:

Project Veritas’s expanding pool of Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion that read: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as potential sites for their “ballot harvesting” investigation, a question is proposed: “Where does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”

Unless they are shut down by the authorities, James O’Keefe and his band of dunces will continue their antics - the group raised over $13 million dollars last year. The ACORN case proves that one heavily edited video can bring down a large, reputable organization if enough politicians choose partisan outrage over the facts. In the current political climate, it would be a mistake to underestimate what Project Veritas could do if they managed to piece together the right sort of fake scandal.

Dutch Art

Back in April I wrote about thieves who smashed a window in an art gallery outside Amsterdam and took a Van Gogh. Years before, thieves had stolen other works from the same gallery. I am beginning to wonder - how common is museum theft in Holland? What do the thieves do with the art? Does it end up in the hands of mobsters or the IRA? Is ISIS selling it on Facebook?

Anyhow, a painting in Leerdam, Netherlands was stolen for the third time in August:

The Golden Age work, painted in 1626-7, was snatched from a small museum in the town of Leerdam, near the city of Utrecht, early on Wednesday morning.

Thieves forced the back door of the Hofje van Aerden museum to steal the painting, setting off an alarm. But by the time officers arrived at 3.30am, there was no sign of the perpetrators or the Two Laughing Boys.

The painting has been stolen twice before, according to the Dutch police statement. In 1988 it was taken along with Jacob van Ruisdael’s work Forest View with Flowering Elderberry, and recovered after three years. In 2011 the same pair of paintings were stolen for six months.

Three times! How? I don’t get it.

Sjors Fröhlich, the mayor of the Vijfheerenlanden municipality that includes Leerdam, said it was sad news and he hoped the painting would soon be recovered.

Odds are, he’s right. Do people steal priceless works of art from small Dutch museums as a goof? I mean, there are worse things miscreants could be doing with their time, so it’s better than robbing convenience stores or banks, but sheesh, if you’re just going to get caught and give it back, why bother?

The Trump Campaign

After 2016, many news outlets rushed to write breathless pieces about the Trump campaign’s digital advertising success. They held up Brad Parscale - an unremarkable web designer - as an ad genius, though some of that was eventually debunked. As a person (un?)fortunate enough to work in advertising, I knew a charlatan when I saw one - Parscale is a dope, and nothing the Trump campaign did was spectacular. They used Facebook as it was intended - the company sent them a helper, who’s now working against Trump. The Clinton campaign were the ones who shunned Facebook’s advice, and their crew of consultants failed spectacularly.

Since 2017 - when Trump launched his 2020 campaign - Parscale has overseen a large scale fundraising operation, much of it online. Digital advertising operations that spend massive amounts of money over a period of years can run into the problem of diminishing returns. Facebook is a big place, but eventually most of the people who are inclined to give you money for a MAGA hat or a plastic straw are going stop giving you money. What happens then?

Well, for one, you get fired. Then, your campaign runs out of money:

Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election

Shocking! Where did all the money go?

Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well-paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous, well-appointed office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.

There was all the usual stuff you’d expect from a grifter’s campaign run by a bunch of grifters - private cars, big salaries for relatives, consultants making 6 figures. Meals, private jet flights, stays in Trump hotels. All the most predictable sleaze from a campaign that practically runs on it.

There’s also the shady LLCs:

Many of the specifics of Mr. Trump’s spending are opaque; since 2017, the campaign and the R.N.C. have routed $227 million through a single limited liability company linked to Trump campaign officials.

Gifts for donors:

At Mr. Trump’s direction, the party has taken a spare-no-expense approach to donor maintenance, with the R.N.C. spending more than $6 million in “donor mementos.”

Money for the ad genius himself:

Millions more followed to firms tied to R.N.C. and Trump-linked officials, including more than $39 million to two firms, Parscale Strategy LLC and Giles-Parscale, controlled by Mr. Parscale since the beginning of 2017.

Everyone has their hand in the till, especially the lawyers:

Mr. Trump’s tendency to turn to the courts — and the legal issues that have stemmed from norm-breaking characteristics of his presidency — helps explain how he and his affiliated political entities have spent at least $58.4 million in donations on legal and compliance work since 2015

Makes sense, with a president who’s involved in so many lawsuits news organizations had to make charts to keep track. That doesn’t even include Trump’s use of the DOJ to defend his personal interests in court.

As someone who’s been bothered by Brad Parscale’s unearned rise over the last four years it does feel good to read that his empire is crumbling, and he’s being exposed as the fraud he’s always been. The Trump campaign has never been anything other than a grift, and Republican donors don’t seem to care. At a certain point, however, the numbers just don’t add up.

Short Cons

Bank Info Security - “Twitter is investigating the hacking of an account associated with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an apparent cryptocurrency scam”

Florida Bulldog - “Florida’s top emergency management official personally signed off on a major, no-bid COVID-19 testing contract with an unqualified company run by a confessed thief — while the man who supposedly signed for the company says the signature on the contract isn’t his, and he has nothing to do with the firm.”

FTC - “Massachusetts-based NeuroMetrix, Inc. and its CEO, Shai Gozani, sold Quell—a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation device—to consumers, touting it as “clinically proven” and “FDA cleared” for widespread chronic pain relief.”

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