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Posted
1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

Let's check in on our boy and see how he's doing!!!!  Oh . . . oops.  Not so good apparently. 

Damn, ol' Letitia James is busting some balls.  

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Look up 2 posts, from 11 days ago sir…

  • 4 months later...
Posted

https://www.404media.co/big-tech-clients-of-jacob-wohls-secret-ai-lobbying-firm-lobbymatic-say-theyve-never-heard-of-it/

 

Quote

Monday, Politico revealed that convicted fraudsters and right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been secretly operating a company that purports to do AI-powered lobbying called LobbyMatic. 404 Media has learned that the company also, for months, advertised in screenshots that major companies were using its product; many of these companies told us that they have never been clients of LobbyMatic.

 

Quote

LobbyMatic purports to be “the AI automation platform for lobbyists,” and claims that it can help companies and lobbyists use AI to create a lobbying strategy, to create talking points, to analyze hearings and bills, and to track legislative progress of bills. 

Wohl and Burkman have been running the company under the pseudonyms “Jay Klein” and “Bill Sanders,” and had signed up Toyota, the lobbying firm Boundary Stone Partners, and the drug company Lantheus, according to Politico. 

 

Quote

Back in January, I became aware of LobbyMatic and began to do some cursory reporting on the company. At the time, the company was writing blog posts on Medium under the name “Pat Smith,” an AI-generated woman who doesn’t exist. 

On its website, LobbyMatic was also showing demo screenshots of its software that seemed to suggest that its software was being widely used by lobbyists for major companies. One screenshot, for example, showed a sidebar that listed “Clients” including Visa, Toyota, SalesForce, and Pfizer. Other demo screenshots suggested it was lobbying on behalf of Capital One, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Fidelity, the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, Home Depot, Palantir, and Microsoft. 

 

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Spoiler

I emailed all of these companies, and six of them (Pfizer, Microsoft, Palantir, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, and Holland & Knight) told me that they were not clients of LobbyMatic (the others, Meta, Fidelity, Visa, Capital One, SalesForce, and Toyota, did not respond). Several of the companies that responded told me that they had never heard of LobbyMatic and had no idea why their companies were being shown in product demos. 

A Microsoft spokesperson told me that it is not a client of LobbyMatic. Pfizer said “I can confirm they are not a vendor.” Palantir said “LobbyMatic is not and has never been a Palantir customer. Looks like they are using us as an example of a ‘client’ for a potential customer firm, which we are not, nor have we authorized the use of our name & logo.” Lockheed Martin told me it had never heard of the company. Home Depot said “we’re not a client of LobbyMatic.” And Holland & Knight said “checked on this and we are not a client of LobbyMatic.”

Sometime after my round of emails, these screenshots were removed from LobbyMatic’s website, or were cropped to remove the names of specific supposed clients. Some of these original screenshots are still available on the Internet Archive.

In a statement, a LobbyMatic spokesperson said "Any logos that were used on the landing page were simply for the purpose of displaying a mockup of how the client management system works within the platform. A lobbyist with multiple clients would see them listed on the sidebar of the application."

“With LobbyMatic’s groundbreaking AI technology, you can draft technically detailed, legally fluent regulatory comment letters 10x faster than ever before,” the company wrote in a Medium post. “LobbyMatic’s advanced natural language generation capabilities allow you to instantly produce insightful comment letters on complex regulatory issues. You can even use LobbyMatic to draft a regulatory comment letter from the perspective of your opponent — anticipating their likely talking points and arguments before they even make them.”

Boundary Stone Partners, one of the companies who actually did use the platform, however, told Politico that “we quickly determined the tool did not work and terminated our contract two months ago.” 

Wohl and Burkman were convicted in 2022 of felony telecom fraud because they ran a robocall campaign in which they told people living in majority Black neighborhoods not to vote by mail. 

The two right-wing activists were fined $5 million by the FCC and were ordered to spend 500 hours registering people to vote. According to Politico, they launched LobbyMatic under the pseudonyms “Jay Klein” and “Bill Sanders,” and operated the company under these pseudonyms for months. Eventually, one of their own employees grew suspicious of the company, and the fact that people kept referring to Wohl as “Jacob” and not “Jay.” That employee took a photo of Wohl in the office, ran a reverse image search, and determined that “Jay Klein” was actually Jacob Wohl.

 

Posted

Yet another couple of right wing fucksticks that should probably be  behind bars, but get away with a slap on the wrist instead . they clearly learned their lesson that fraud is bad. 

  • Hook 'Em 1
  • 11 months later...
Posted

Burkman and Wohl Plead to Intimidating Voters in Robocall Case

August 01, 2025

 

LANSING – Today, John Burkman, 59, of Arlington, Virginia, and Jacob Wohl, 27, of Fairfax, Virginia, pled no contest to orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote of predominantly black voters in Detroit in the 2020 general election, announced Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. They pled to:

  • One count of election law – bribing/intimidating voters, a 5-year felony;
  • One count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, a 5-year felony;
  • One count of using a computer to commit the crime of election law – intimidating voters, a 7-year felony; and
  • Using a computer to commit the crime of conspiracy, a 7-year felony.

“After five years, I’m glad this case has finally reached a resolution,” Nessel said. “Deceptive and racially targeted suppression schemes will not be tolerated in Michigan. My office will continue to pursue and prosecute voter intimidation, no matter how long it takes, to ensure that Michiganders can exercise their right to vote free from fear and deception.”

Burkman and Wohl attempted to discourage voters from participating in the general election by creating and funding a robocall targeting specific and multiple urban areas across the country, including Detroit. The calls were made in late August of 2020 and went out to nearly 12,000 residents with phone numbers registered to an address with a Detroit zip code. They promoted falsehoods that:

  1. voting by mail would place voters’ personal information in a public database that will be used by police departments to track down individuals with outstanding warrants;
  2. voting by mail would place voters’ personal information in a public database that will be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts; and
  3. the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were attempting to utilize vote by mail records to track individuals for mandatory vaccines. 

The robocall named Burkman and Wohl as responsible for the calls and claimed them to be the founders of a “civil rights organization” named “Project 1599.” It closed with a message urging the predominantly Black recipients to not be “finessed into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.” The Attorney General has called the robocall an egregious example of voter suppression.

Following the formal charges from the Attorney General in 2020, both men were bound over for trial. Burkman and Wohl filed a motion to quash the charges in the circuit court. The circuit court denied this motion, and the defendants appealed to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals declined to hear their appeal.

Burkman and Wohl then filed an application in the Michigan Supreme Court, which remanded the matter to the Court of Appeals and required it hear the appeal. The Court of Appeals heard the defendants’ arguments, ruling in a published opinion that the statute governed their conduct as alleged and that it was a constitutional application of the statute.

Defendants Burkman and Wohl then appealed that ruling to the Michigan Supreme Court, which upheld the validity of the statute, ruled that it governed the conduct as alleged, and remanded the matter to the Court of Appeals to apply a limiting construction of the law to ensure that it did not ensnare constitutionally protected speech. On remand, the Court of Appeals ruled that the alleged actions here would not be constitutionally protected speech. The Michigan Supreme Court then recently declined to hear an appeal of a lower court decision that upheld the criminal charges against Burkman and Wohl.

Burkman and Wohl will be sentenced before Judge Margaret VanHouten in the 3rd Circuit Court in Wayne County on December 1.

###

  • Fuck Around and Find Out 2


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