Wohl, Burkman Ordered To Make Remedial Robocalls After Misinfo Spree
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: