Conservative gadfly Jacob Wohl and his colleague Jack Burkman, famous for holding embarrassing press conferences from the front porch of Burkman’s Arlington, Virginia townhouse, were fined more than $5 million by the FCC for robocalling urban voters with false information during the 2020 election cycle.
In an effort to dissuade voters from going to the polls, the pair along with Burkman’s company, made more than 1,100 robocalls telling recipients that if they showed up to vote in the 2020 election, their “personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts.” None of that is true. The recorded call helpfully stated Wohl and Burkman were two of the entities that paid for the calls.
In November 2022, the pair were each sentenced to two years of probation, six months of monitoring with a GPS ankle bracelet, $2,500 each in fines and 500 hours of registering voters in Washington, DC by an Ohio court in a plea to criminal charges related to the scheme. Felony cases in Michigan and New York appear to still be outstanding.