American lobbyist
Jack Burkman (born 1965 or 1966) is an American conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon and conservative lobbyist. Burkman and far-right conspiracy theorist Jacob Wohl have allegedly been responsible for multiple unsuccessful plots to frame public figures for fictitious sexual assaults, including in October 2018 against U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in April 2019 against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and in April 2020 against White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci.
In August 2020, Burkman and Wohl made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states, in a campaign that prosecutors have alleged intentionally targeted communities of color to spread disinformation in an attempt to suppress voting in the 2020 presidential election. As a result of the campaign, Burkman and Wohl each pleaded guilty to one felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio, were found to have violated federal and state civil rights laws in a civil case in New York, and are facing a criminal suit in Michigan. In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission imposed a fine of more than $5 million against both Burkman and Wohl over the robocall scheme.
Burkman was also involved in spreading conspiracy theories about the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, and in 2017 Burkman was shot in the buttocks and thigh and hit with a car by a man he had hired to assist him in an independent attempt to solve Rich's murder. Burkman drew significant media attention in 2014 for organizing a protest against the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL after the team signed Michael Sam, an openly gay football player, to its practice squad.
Burkman is the president of the lobbying firm J.M. Burkman &amp; Associates and the head of the conservative organization American Decency. He was the host of the "Behind the Curtain" podcast and radio talk show"."
In September 2024, Burkman claimed on X that he had taken on the role of acting campaign manager for Mark Robinson's gubernatorial campaign. However, Robinson quickly denied this in his own post on X, stating that "Online rumors of new hires to our campaign are just that—rumors." 
Life and education.
Burkman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988, and in 1992 graduated with a M.S. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Burkman lives in Arlington, Virginia, in a home that doubles as the headquarters of his and Wohl's organization, Project 1599.
Attempts to frame political figures.
Robert Mueller.
On October 22, 2018, Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub received an email from Surefire Intelligence, a company created by Jacob Wohl, asking her to tell them about her "past encounters" with U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and offering her money to discuss Mueller by phone. Taub stated she had never met Mueller and referred the matter to Mueller's office, which then referred the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
On October 30, NBC News and "The Atlantic" published articles detailing a scheme to falsely accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct in 1974. The articles reported that on October 17, 2018, several journalists received emails from a person claiming to be named "Lorraine Parsons" that asserted Burkman had hired a man with Wohl's Surefire Intelligence firm to offer her more than $20,000 to sign an affidavit falsely accusing Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment. Parsons told the reporters she had worked with Mueller at the law firm Pillsbury, Madison &amp; Sutro in 1974, and that the man from Surefire had asked her to falsely accuse Mueller of engaging in misconduct during that time. Mueller worked at Pillsbury in 1974, but the firm told reporters they had no record of any Lorraine Parsons ever working there. Parsons declined reporters' requests to speak on the phone, and none of the reporters published the story until the scheme became evident.
Also on October 30, Burkman tweeted that he and Wohl would hold a press conference two days later to "reveal the first of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sex assault victims". He told "The Daily Beast" they were going to "prove that [Mueller] is a drunk and a sexual abuser". "The Gateway Pundit", which employed Wohl, published the "Lorraine Parsons" allegations that same day, including claims that there were "exclusive documents" about a "very credible witness" to support the accusations against Mueller. Each document had in its header the phrase "International Private Intelligence," the business slogan of Wohl's Surefire Intelligence firm. The article was removed later that day, with owner Jim Hoft stating that the matter and "serious allegations against Jacob Wohl" would be investigated.
The following day, Hoft retweeted a tweet by Wohl that suggested Mueller's office was actually behind the scheme. Also that day, Burkman tweeted and Wohl retweeted that Parsons did not exist, denying involvement in the matter, and calling it "a hoax designed to distract the nation from [Burkman's] press conference" to be held the next day.
Burkman and Wohl convened a press conference outside Washington, D.C., on November 1, ostensibly to present a woman who they said signed the affidavit previously published by "The Gateway Pundit", accusing Mueller of raping her in a New York hotel room in 2010 – on a date he was contemporaneously reported by "The Washington Post" to be serving jury duty in Washington. ;ref name="Roberts_Argetsinger_4/13/20102" ; ;/ref ; The men accused Mueller's office of "leaking" the eight-year-old "Post" story to discredit their allegations. The purported accuser, Carolyne Cass, did not appear at the press conference as they had initially stated she would, and the men asserted she had panicked in fear of her life and taken a flight to another location. Towards the end of the press conference, one reporter heckled, "Are you both prepared for federal prison?", to which Burkman replied "No we are not". Soon after the press conference, Hoft announced that "The Gateway Pundit" had "suspended [their] relationship" with Wohl.
On February 26, 2019, "USA Today" published an article about Wohl in which they interviewed Cass. She had initially contacted Wohl, who was then posing as an investigator named Matthew Cohen on Craiglist, in hopes that he would help her recover some stolen money. Wohl did no work to recover the money, and instead offered Cass a position at his "intelligence" firm. Speaking of the document accusing Mueller produced by Wohl and his associates, she said that "they had made it up" with a fabricated signature of hers and that they "needed a credible female to put on the line".
The attempt to frame Mueller was included as a case study in "", a television documentary directed by Andrew Rossi that aired on HBO on March 19, 2020. In an interview for the documentary, Burkman said, "I would use Fake News as a weapon, because it's out there. The Germans used chemical weapons, the British used chemical weapons. What are you going to do? It doesn't mean you like chemical weapons, it means you do what you have to do... Yeah, there are terrible negative potential consequences, but so what? That's what I say. So what?"
Pete Buttigieg.
On April 22, 2019, Jack Burkman tweeted "2020 is shaping up to be more exciting than 2016. Looking like it will be Trump vs. Mayor Pete! Get the popcorn ready!"
On April 28, a Medium post emerged under the name of a gay Republican college student, alleging that Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a Democratic presidential candidate for 2020, had sexually assaulted him in February. A Twitter account created just a month prior under the student's name also emerged. The next day, "The Daily Beast" reported that Burkman and Jacob Wohl had tried to convince young Republican men to make false accusations of sexual assault against Buttigieg. One man attested that Burkman and Wohl had tried to convince him to falsely accuse Buttigieg of assaulting him when he was too drunk to consent. According to the source, Burkman and Wohl contacted him under the false identities "Matt Teller" and "Bill", but he recognized Wohl due to Wohl's internet notoriety and decided to record their conversation. He then provided the recording to "The Daily Beast", which wrote that it corroborated the man's claims with the aid of an audio forensics analyst who determined that one man in the recording was "highly likely" to be Wohl.
The student who was being impersonated on Medium and Twitter told "The Daily Beast" that Burkman and Wohl flew him to Washington, D.C., under the guise of speaking about politics from the perspective of a gay Republican, and that he was unaware they were trying to involve him in their scheme. He said that he had to pretend that he was taking a nap in order to escape Burkman's residence, and that they had created the Medium profile and a Twitter profile claiming to be him without his permission.
Burkman and Wohl announced that they would be holding a press conference at Burkman's house on May 8 to continue their accusations against Buttigieg. On May 7, Burkman tweeted a link to an event called "Protest Against Homophobic Bigots" and wrote, "Hundreds of leftist protestors are set to descend on our Wednesday Press conference. We WILL NOT surrender to the mob. We've called in extra security to guard our safety and that of our partners in the media". The protest was discovered to be fake, organized by Wohl himself, when attendees received confirmation emails containing the email address Wohl had used in the past. "Mediaite" noted that events may be registered with false contact information, but that Eventbrite would have emailed the address used by the organizer allowing them to delete or edit the event. However, Wohl denied involvement in creating the event page. Eventbrite later took down the event page citing their rules against "inauthentic content".
At the May 8 press conference, Burkman and Wohl displayed footage of the student they had flown to Washington, D.C., drinking a coffee as proof that the student was not being coerced, with Wohl explaining that "Most forced coercion events… do not involve caramel frappuccino". During the press conference, the student released a statement describing Burkman and Wohl as "chronic liars" and stating that he would not be at the press conference as they had claimed. No protesters appeared at the fake protest of the press conference that Wohl himself had attempted to organize.
Anthony Fauci.
In a late April 2020 press release, a woman claimed to have been sexually assaulted in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Only "The Daily Dot" reported on the allegation, debunking it as a likely smear attempt. On May 2, 2020, the woman contacted "Reason Magazine" to confess that she and another woman had been paid by Burkman and Wohl to fabricate the allegations against Fauci. According to "Reason," the woman contacted Burkman and Wohl and recorded their phone conversation. In that call, Wohl told her, "You did a good job, you got paid. What's the problem?" Burkman suggested that Fauci deserved the smear: "This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that's the way life works, OK? That's the way it goes... Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often. How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it's real, it's a positive thing, for God's sake".
Others.
On October 1, 2019, Burkman and Jacob Wohl held a press conference on the front steps of Burkman's home in which they claimed to know the identity of the whistleblower who revealed possible impropriety by then-President Trump involving Ukraine, though they said they could not release it. The press conference was sparsely attended and described by "The Washington Post" as another in a series of events in which Burkman and Wohl "routinely announce they have discovered smoking-gun revelations against Trump's rivals, then humiliate themselves when they fail to produce any evidence".
On October 3, 2019, Burkman and Wohl announced a press conference in which they said a 24-year-old former United States Marine