On Monday, Jacob Wohl, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and excessive tweeter, took to Twitter to announce that a “scandalous story” about Special Counsel Robert Mueller would be breaking the following day. This salacious rumor was short-lived: Within hours, numerous journalists were able to connect a false sexual-misconduct tip they’d received about Mueller to Wohl and his associates. The case has since been referred to the FBI — and Wohl stopped responding to media inquiries after reporters found that the number for an intelligence company associated with the fake allegations redirected to… his mom’s voicemail.
According to NBC News, in the past few weeks, multiple reporters were contacted by a woman who said she had been offered money to claim that Mueller harassed her while they were working together at a law firm in the 1970s. The reporters each independently verified that the harassment allegations were most likely a hoax and referred them to the special counsel’s office.
Around the same time, Jack Burkman, a Republican lobbyist and media personality, began talking about the allegations. Burkman tweeted on Tuesday that he will hold a press conference to “reveal the first victim” of Mueller on November 1.
And it appears that Burkman enlisted Wohl’s help in trying to dig up dirt: According to the Daily Beast, Burkman said he had enlisted the help of an intelligence agency called Surefire Intelligence, specifically a man named Matthew Cohen. Surefire Intelligence’s website doman is registered to Wohl’s email address — and, even more damningly, it appears that Cohen’s LinkedIn photo is actually a lightly-edited photo of Wohl.
When contacted by NBC News, Wohl denied all involvement. “I don’t have any involvement in any investigations of any kind. I’m not quite that cool,” he wrote to an NBC reporter via Twitter DM.
But on his Twitter page, he posted a story bearing the headline: “EXCLUSIVE DOCUMENTS: Special Counsel and Former FBI Director Robert Mueller Accused of Rape By ‘Very Credible Witness.” He also tweeted that the mainstream media was “scrambling” to discredit him.
The “exclusive” documents that Wohl was tweeting about had the words “International Private Intelligence” at the top of each page. That’s the slogan of Surefire Intelligence. And when NBC News called Surefire’s main phone number, they reported that it went straight to “a voicemail message which provided another phone number, listed in public records as belonging to Wohl’s mother.”
In addition to using his mother’s phone number, the company connected to Wohl also had a ton of fake employees. LinkedIn pages for people saying they worked at the company included profile photos of supermodel Bar Refaeli and actor Christoph Waltz.