Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl (Screengrab via NBC)
With a U.S. presidential election looming on Aug. 26, 2020, a pair of right-wing activists known for smear campaigns against perceived enemies of former President Donald Trump sent out a torrent of robocalls to more than 85,000 phone numbers across the country.
Targeting primarily Black voters in communities of color, the robocalls set off nationwide civil and criminal liabilities for Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. They received a sentence that included no jail time after pleading guilty to a felony count of telecommunications fraud. Another criminal case in Michigan remains pending, bogged down by appeals by their constitutional challenge.
This past March, a federal judge in New York found that Wohl and Burkman violated the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act. The scathing ruling left only one remaining issue to determine at trial — how much the duo must pay in damages for their conduct.
In a pretrial memorandum on Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and a group of the robocalls’ recipients argued that the penalty should match the “egregiousness of their racially motivated voter suppression effort.” They illustrated Wohl and Burkman’s “evil motive or intent” with their joyous reaction to the “chaos they had unleashed.”
“[I] love these robo calls… getting angry black call backs… win or lose… the black robo was a great jw idea,” Burkman told Wohl, apparently abbreviating Wohl’s initials.
For the robocalls, Burkman and Wohl hired a Black voiceover actress to play the part of a woman identifying herself as “Tamika Taylor,” who spread false information about the supposed risks of voting by mail.
She warned that “if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants, and [will] be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debt.”
None of the information was true, and in the judgment of multiple courts, patently illegal.
“Wohl’s social media posts will show contempt and hostility for the civil rights of Black Americans, particularly the right to vote,” the AG’s special counsel Rick Sawyer and plaintiffs’ attorney Marc Epstein wrote in a trial memorandum. “Punishing this sort of callousness toward the protected rights of their fellow citizens is precisely the aim of punitive damages.”
Days before the 2020 presidential election, Senior U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero denounced the “electoral terror” that Wohl and Burkman unleashed through their robocalls. Marrero’s ruling forced the pair to send out “curative” calls informing those who received the robocalls that a federal court found that the original messages were false and illegal.
The judge also drew a line between the type of voter intimidation that the KKK Act was designed to combat in the Reconstruction Era — and the modern equivalent it is sometimes used for today.
“In the current version of events, the means [Burkman and Wohl] use to intimidate voters, though born of fear and similarly powered by hate, are not guns, torches, burning crosses, and other dire methods perpetrated under the cover of white hoods,” Marrero wrote in October 2020. “Rather, [Burkman and Wohl] carry out electoral terror using telephones, computers, and modern technology adapted to serve the same deleterious ends.”
The trial memorandum doesn’t state how much money they want Wohl and Burkman to pay, but there are some clues about the “compensatory, punitive, and statutory” damages sought. The New York AG seeks a $500 fine per violation, which adds up to a hefty $2.5 million penalty when multiplied by the total number of recipients.
Judge Marrero instructed attorneys for both sides to agree upon a trial date for December, and on Friday, they replied that they would prefer the proceedings to begin on Dec. 4.
Read the trial memo here.
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