The existential dread that typically dominates Twitter was briefly replaced Tuesday by a burst of Schadenfreude at the expense of Jacob Wohl, a 20-year-old MAGA troll whose renown largely derives from his hyperbolic replies to Donald Trump’s tweets (“Defund Latin America!”, for example, has received nearly 2,000 likes). Wohl’s origin story, like many right-wing media stars of the Trump era, is somewhat murky. He initially tried to make his name as a hedge-fund wunderkind, branding himself the “Wohl of Wall Street” in 2015, but his operation was derailed following national and state investigations into allegations of securities fraud. (He denied any wrongdoing.) Afterward, he relocated his grift to the more accommodating environs of the MAGA social-media ecosystem. There, he thrived, launching a conservative news site with plagiarized content and, eventually, landing a contributor position at the fringe site Gateway Pundit.
But the saga of Jacob Wohl took a turn this week, when he was unexpectedly implicated in a bizarre plot to smear Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a sexual predator. The exact nature of the scheme, and Wohl’s involvement, is somewhat unclear. On October 17, a number of journalists reportedly received an e-mail from “Lorraine Parsons,” alleging that she had been contacted by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence, on behalf of G.O.P. operative Jack Burkman, who had offered her substantial sums of money to make false accusations about Mueller. Yet no reporters were able to verify that Lorraine is a real person. Surefire Intelligence, too, appeared to be fake. When NBC News investigated, they found the Web site was registered to Wohl’s e-mail; a phone number on the site went to a voice mail that provided another number listed as belonging to Wohl’s mother. (Wohl stopped responding to NBC after they asked why his mother’s phone number was in that voice mail.) In perhaps the most amateurish element of the whole sordid episode, Internet sleuths quickly discovered that headshots of Surefire’s purported employees actually belonged to celebrities including Israeli model Bar Refaeli and Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. A photograph of “Matthew Cohen,” allegedly a managing partner at Surefire Intelligence, is simply a darkened image of Wohl himself.
On Tuesday, Mueller’s office asked the F.B.I. to investigate the scheme. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the special counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the F.B.I. for investigation,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, said in a rare statement. Burkman, a Republican lawyer who has promoted conspiracy theories about Seth Rich and peddled sexual harassment allegations against a sitting member of Congress, denied promising payments to “Lorraine,” but said that “Surefire is a real company” run by Jacob Wohl. He has promised to hold a press conference Thursday, at which he has said he will reveal accusations of misconduct against Mueller, despite media reports suggesting the story was a scam.
The Wohl affair, apart from being a diverting spectacle, illuminates several truisms about the far-right media landscape, the opportunists that populate it, and the ways in which MAGA fever dreams take on a life of their own. “The more I read about this Mueller Rape Case business, the more convinced I am that this is a Democrat dirty trick to pull a ‘reverse Kavanaugh,’ trying to impugn Republicans for ‘paying women to make up false rape claims against Mueller,’” theorized pro-Trump radio host Bill Mitchell on Tuesday night. “Just more BS from team DNC.” Forums trafficking in QAnon conspiracy theories were similarly convinced that Wohl was a Deep State mole. Wohl himself doubled down, denied having anything to do with Surefire, and defiantly tweeted a photo of himself smoking a tiny cigar. By Wednesday, he was claiming to be the victim of some sort of mainstream-media cabal, and suggested that Mueller’s office was planting false flags to discredit his work. (He also re-tweeted a Burkman statement calling the “Lorraine” story “a hoax designed to distract the nation from my press conference on Thursday, which is where all eyes need to be.”)
Donald Trump’s own allies, often prone to Mueller-inspired paranoia themselves, wanted nothing to do with these particular allegations. “Something like this would be totally inconsistent with what I know of [Mueller],” Rudy Giuliani, who is spearheading Trump’s legal defense, told the Daily Beast, adding that he had no reason to believe the rumors. Yet the Gateway Pundit—after first taking down the post referring to the claims regarding Mueller, and issuing an editor’s note promising to look into the allegations against Wohl—is now standing behind its writer. Editor Jim Hoft is now on board with Wohl’s hoax theory. On Wednesday, he shared Wohl’s post hyping the Thursday press conference, and ominously tweeted: “We have a hell of a story developing.” (He did not address the fact that the document provided by “Surefire Intelligence” was easily debunked.)
That anyone might take Wohl seriously—seriously enough for NBC News, The New York Times, and dozens of other media organizations to report on the supposed allegations against Mueller—is, in part, an indictment of our ravenous media culture. But it also speaks to the ways in which the MAGA-sphere—now a dominant force in the culture—routinely promotes hucksters and kooks. It’s a feature, not a bug, of the social-media community that has grown up alongside Trump. MAGA is, in its own way, a citizen-driven movement fueled by outright contempt for elites, the Establishment, and any of the credentials that might differentiate between institutions and the Trumpers set on destroying them. The right wing in the Trump age is littered with self-described journalists, thought leaders, truth-tellers, and social-media stars. The only barrier to entry is a mobile phone, a sense of shamelessness, and an endless desire to troll the libs.
Of course, if there is no such thing as an unacceptable fringe among Trumpists, then there is also no way to starve the worst frauds of oxygen. (The only figure with excommunicating power, it seems, is Trump himself—witness the aimless wanderings of Steve Bannon in the political wilderness.) Trump and his supporters, after all, were initially exiled from mainstream conservative politics for daring to spew the most unpopular, anti-conservative, fact-less vitriol, only to be vindicated when Trump won the election. Since then, Trump has established new maxims for how Republicans should define success and failure, with slavish devotion to the MAGA agenda, inconsistent as it might be, as the highest, and only, goal. (If MAGA celebrities Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos serve as any example, tangling with the F.B.I. can only boost one’s profile.)
Perhaps, then, Wohl and Burkman presume they will be vindicated if they can keep up the appearance of true believers. When the first wave of skeptical media reports came out, the two began spinning erratically, re-tweeting each others’ claims that “Lorraine” was a plant used by the media to discredit their upcoming revelations, while ignoring any evidence of a hoax. “The left is trying to defend Mueller against sex assault allegations so they attack me in desperation,” Burkman tweeted Tuesday. “The establishment media knows that Mueller may go down over this—they want to deflect attention.”
More Great Stories from Vanity Fair
— Why Fox doesn’t have much of a choice when it comes to Trump
— How long can Mark Zuckerberg keep convincing teens that Instagram is cool?
— Is the Trump administration ever going to hold Saudi Arabia to account?
— Why working at Netflix sounds terrifying
— Amazon’s flirtation with ICE appalls its workers
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.
