Jay Klein and Bill Sanders founded a startup last year to meld artificial intelligence with Washington lobbying, quickly attracting big-name clients including Toyota. Along the way, several employees became suspicious of their bosses and discovered they're actually Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, a couple of convicted felons and far-right conspiracy theorists. Those LobbyMatic employees quit, Politico reports, after realizing whom they were working for. One discovered Klein was Wohl by taking a photo of him on the sly, then doing a Google image search.
Wohl and Burkman were convicted in 2022 of telecom fraud over a robocall campaign they ran in Black neighborhoods in several states telling people not to vote by mail. They were sentenced by a judge in Ohio to spend 500 hours registering voters, and the Federal Communications Commission fined the pair $5 million. They have a history of spreading conspiracy theories and trying to set up public figures involving:
- False sexual assaults: Wohl and Burkman tried to frame multiple officials for sexual assault, including former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. They hired a woman to claim Dr. Anthony Fauci had assaulted her.
- Conspiracy theories: Wohl has pushed false claims including that President Biden would die of COVID in 30 days, that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a relationship with a Marine veteran, and that Vice President Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for president in 2020.
Toyota and other companies no longer have deals with LobbyMatic. One was interested in the service to track legislation and summarize congressional hearings. "We quickly determined the tool did not work," the cofounder said. LobbyMatic missed payroll and appeared to lack an occupancy permit for its offices, per Politico. One employee who quit said if he'd known the background of Wohl and Burkman, he wouldn't have gone near the job. (More
fraud stories.)
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