Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, the bumbling duo facing legal trouble in multiple states for sending out robocalls that were allegedly intended to intimidate minority voters, informed a federal judge Friday that they have complied with his order to send out some remedial robocalls to correct the false information.
Judge Victor Marrero from the Southern District of New York gave them a script to follow: “At the direction of a United States district court, this call is intended to inform you that a federal court has found that the message you previously received regarding mail-in voting from Project 1599 contained false information that has had the effect of intimidating voters, and thus interfering with the upcoming presidential election, in violation of federal voting-rights laws.”
The pair initially tried to fight the order by saying that it forces them to incriminate themselves, and that, because of separate state charges over the misleading robocalls they’re facing in Michigan, they are currently banned from making any robocalls at all before the election.
Marrero was not swayed, saying that he is not “persuaded” that the Michigan ruling was intended to prohibit the corrective calls, and that federal court orders supersede state ones anyway.
Wohl and Burkman also tried to duck out of the remedial calls by making the wild claim that the content of their original robocalls — which warned people that if they voted by mail, their information would be used by debt collectors, police officers to serve warrants and the CDC for “mandatory” vaccinations — was true. Marrero swatted down all of those arguments as well.
And so Wohl and Burkman’s counsel informed the court Friday that the two had “retained the services of DialMyCalls” to correct the record, and that the service had completed all of the calls just before the judge’s deadline. According to the letter, the call went out to 29,117 unique numbers.
The two were indicted earlier this week for the calls in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County.
Read their lawyers’ letter here:
Two f***ing robocalls don’t make a right.
They should have to go door to door and hand out the apologies. And without spit guards.
We may think they are bumbling buffoons, but they seem to have deep pockets. They have been doing these calls in multiple states, have been arrested multiple time and charged with multiple crimes all of which must be costing them thousands of dollars and here they are. They have private legal counsel, no problem posting bond and apparently had no problem with paying for the corrective calls.
So who is paying for all this? Maybe they should be charged too.
Good points…
I think it was a good plan by the judge anyway. And they probably hated every second of having to do it- like a 7th grader having to write a full page apology letter to a teacher. It doesn’t mean they won’t try to pull that kind of crap again but they definitely had to squirm.
And I hope it cost them personally ($$) although dwward may be on to something in the earlier comment. Who is paying for their penance?
Any of the dark money PAC’s could be funding these guys. Really think that the judge should require them to reveal the source of funding since that makes the donor an accomplice in the crime. At least in my world.