Internet Troll Jacob Wohl Reportedly Recruited Men To Make Fake Sexual Assault Claims Against Pete Buttigieg
Notorious right-wing troll Jacob Wohl reportedly tried to recruit young Republican men to level false sexual assault allegations against Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Illinois.
The allegations surfaced early this week after a man came forward to make a vague allegation of assault against Buttigieg. As The Daily Beast reported, the man retracted the claim within hours, but the attention prompted another Republican source to come forward to tell the news outlet that Wohl and Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman had secretly asked him to falsely accuse Buttigieg of sexually assaulting him.
As the report noted, Wohl and Burkman were seeking to blunt Buttigieg’s momentum in the presidential race. The person reportedly had some connection to Wohl and Burkman, as he asked to remain anonymous so he would not face professional retaliation from the pair.
To back up the account, the source provided secretly recorded audio of the meeting in which Wohl called Buttigieg a “terminal threat” to Trump’s re-election campaign.
Last week a person who went by the name Hunter Kelly posted an entry on Medium claiming that Buttigieg had assaulted him. Jacob Wohl’s father, David Wohl, quickly tweeted out the entry, which made the rounds on right-wing media outlets. The URL for story now says “suspended” and a message on the page says the story is unavailable. David Wohl deleted his tweet not long after it was embedded in The Daily Beast‘s account of the alleged scheme.
The Daily Beast was able to track down Kelly using a cell phone number he had listed online, and Kelly confirmed that Wohl and Burkman had concocted a scheme to falsely accuse Buttigieg. Kelly said he did not write the story that was published in his name.
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman had come under fire earlier this year after claiming they had been in contact with a woman accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of raping her. The two announced a press conference where they would detail the allegations, but the woman never showed up.
Jacob Wohl found himself in more trouble later when he claimed to be filming a documentary about allegations that freshman Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar had married her brother for immigration purposes. Wohl claimed that he received death threats from the Muslim community, but it was later revealed that the threat came from a Twitter account that Wohl himself operated. Wohl was later kicked off Twitter after bragging about operating a ring of fake accounts in order to sow political discord and attack Democrats.
