The Never-Ending Grift of DC Influence Peddling
Right-wing fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman got caught lying about their lobbying firm, but K Street has long been a breeding ground for bottom-feeding grifters.
Jack Burkman, the lobbyist who has put a sizable donation to solve the murder of Seth Rich, shakes hands with a resident after a short discussion of the case on January 10, 2017, in Washington, DC.
(Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The most surprising thing about the exposure of serial right-wing fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman atop a sketchy digital lobbying firm is that it took them so long to hit upon the grift. Wohl, the son of a conservative talk-show host, is the bullshit slinger from the MAGAverse who came to public renown via a series of breathless, and almost certainly bogus, tweets purporting to overhear expressions of furtive Donald Trump support at this or that Southern California “hipster coffee shop.” Wohl then branched out, launching rumors that Trump special prosecutor Robert Mueller was accused of sexual assault. After credulous MAGA outlets picked up the unfounded slander, they issued red-faced retractions. (Investigators later discovered that the made-up intelligence firm that Wohl used to launder the claims listed his mother’s phone number.) Undeterred, Wohl tried the same stunt against then-presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. He got booted off Twitter for fabricating accounts to boost the electoral profiles of left-wing primary candidates in the 2020 election cycle, since he viewed them as weaker prospects against Trump.
Wohl had a long apprenticeship as a fraudster. In high school, he organized a hedge-fund scam that landed him a $5 million fine and a tour on probation for securities fraud. Burkman, a longtime mouthpiece for right-wing conspiracy theories, came to prominence promoting the false claim that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered by a far-flung liberal cabal; he’s partnered with Wohl on most of his grifts. After the 2020 election, both men were convicted of voter fraud for targeting homes in Black neighborhoods with robocalls telling people they needn’t vote and that voting by mail would jeopardize their personal information and privacy.
If you’re thinking this is an unlikely ticket to a prestigious lobbying perch in Washington, well, then you haven’t been paying very close attention. K Street is not just a lavishly profitable waystation for disgraced or retired lawmakers; it’s also a breeding ground for the sort of bottom-feeding fraud that Wohl and Burkman have made their calling card. Two decades ago, the lurid Jack Abramoff scandal exposed the squalid character of DC influence peddling. Abramoff teamed with eager right-wing policy hustlers like Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist to run lavish shakedowns of their Indian gaming clients; Abramoff founded a fake think tank to help launder the proceeds. After serving five years on federal fraud charges, Abramoff promptly set up shop once more as a registered lobbyist—only to land back in prison a few years later, in his own version of the DC revolving door. Lobbying also furnished the means by which longtime GOP goons like Paul Manafort, Lee Atwater, and Roger Stone muscled their way into wealth and Beltway respectability. It was not for nothing that Karl Rove was determined to remake K Street into the ideological image of the GOP under his ambitious K Street Project—a brave new makeover that collapsed immediately into the rank corruption of the Abramoff scandal.
Still, even against this debauched background, Lobbymatic, the fledgling firm launched by Wohl and Burkman, was a trailblazer. As Politico reporter Daniel Lippman notes, the company promoted itself as the portal through which K Street would enter the burgeoning AI market. There’s something fitting in the revelation that the impresarios adopting a buggy software application that doesn’t know how to spell basic words could only do business by adopting pseudonyms; Wohl went by the name “Jay Klein,” and Burkman was known as “Bill Sanders” to the Lobbymatic workforce. Four of the firm’s former employees alerted Lippman to the true identities of Lobbymatic’s leaders—and explained how the whole project was a scam. “Jay/Jacob was out of touch with reality,” one of them explained. “Working for them you knew you were never getting the full story and were often left trying to find the truth. If I had to sum up my work experience for them, I would describe them as living with their head in the clouds and in a false reality.”
That air of total unreality appears to permeate Lobbymatic’s core product as well. The political consulting firm Boundary Stone Partners signed up for a three-month trial of the company’s chatbot-driven approach to lobbying, only to find that it was vaporware. “We quickly determined the tool did not work and terminated our contract two months ago,” Boundary Partners cofounder Jeff Navin told Politico. “At no point did BSP share any company information with LobbyMatic, nor did we know of Wohl or Burkman’s affiliation with LobbyMatic.”
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At least Boundary Stone Partners exists as a former Lobbymatic client, which is more than can be said for the company’s hotly touted roster of alleged blue-chip customers. A follow-up report by 404 Media writer Jason Koebler reached out to 13 firms depicted as Lobbymatic clients on the company’s web page. Six of them denied any such affiliation, while several told him “they had never heard of Lobbymatic and had no idea why their companies were being shown in product demos.” (The remaining seven companies did not respond to Koebler’s queries.) A senior company executive, sporting the name “Pat Smith” and the job title “VP of growth” is also distinctly existence-challenged. Even though she is graced with hundreds of LinkedIn connections and has composed Medium posts flacking the virtues of Lobbymatic and its suite of products, she is a digital sockpuppet for Wohl and Burkman. Wohl told three of his employees that “he created her because the best way to get introductions was to use an attractive blonde,” Lippman writes.
The dishonesty of the setup was so flagrant that it’s hard to picture how Wohl and Burkman thought they’d pull it off. But such quaintly empirical speculations again undersell the depth of K Street’s corruption. “There’s just no regulation at all of the industry,” said investigative journalist Ken Silverstein, who wrote a book about his own tour as a pretend-lobbyist for Turkmenistan and now publishes the Substack Washington Babylon. “You can get away with anything.”
Most lobbying firms are incorporated as limited liability corporations, which makes their financing and ownership extremely difficult to document and track. “There are companies that I find that are getting paid huge sums of money to lobby, and I have no idea who owns any of those companies.” Silverstein told me. “There’s always an LLC, and they obscure everything as much as possible. There’s nothing to prevent you from saying you’re lobbying for an LLC.” What’s more, Silverstein noted, characters like Wohl and Burkman are banking on Trump’s reelection in November, which would once more render K Street a carnival of MAGA-branded grift.
“Trump is, to put things mildly, an unconventional candidate—and a grifter and crook himself,” Silverstein said. “He’s also very informal in his decision-making, and only follows his gut, without bothering to talk with policy people or experts. So if you’re just hanging around in that orbit, you can get lucky by being in the right place at the right time. And the lobbying world just depends so much on connections and what you can promise. If you can convince your clients, or potential clients you’re recruiting, that you have the president’s attention, or the attention of senior decision-makers, that’s all that matters.”
That’s why it wouldn’t have mattered for Lobbymatic to be headed up by pseudonymous ex-cons—or to be marketing a broken product. The corporate stagecraft here was just an entry into the main event: selling clients on the allure of Trumpiness. “There’s a ton of grifters in the Trump orbit,” Silverstein said. “Sometimes they have real ties to Trump and sometimes they’re completely made up, but you can monetize it all, regardless.” This latest bout of public disgrace is a setback to Wohl and Burkman, but they will no doubt turn their scamming savvy to a fresh DC-branded undertaking soon—perhaps taking on a piece of Trump’s NFT trading-card franchise or his sneaker and Bible franchises. As their marketing and ideological mentor Trump well knows, criminal convictions come and go, but the grift goes on forever.
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