Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Felony Charges For Cultist Pair Behind Racist Robocalls In Multiple States

June 14, 2024 Crime, Trump cultists

Lansing’s CBS affiliate reports:

Two men charged with voter intimidation in a 2020 robocall scheme were properly criminally charged by the Office of the Michigan Attorney General, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Jack Burkman, 57, and Jacob Wohl, 25, were charged in October 2020 “for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote of predominantly black voters in Detroit in the 2020 general election by promoting falsehoods,” a news release from the Office of the Attorney General reports.

The cases were bound over to the Circuit Court and when the court refused to quash the charges, the defendants appealed their cases to through the Michigan court system.

The Detroit News reports:

The Supreme Court, in a 5-2 opinion written by Republican-nominated Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement and joined by the court’s four Democratic-nominated justices, said Burkman and Wohl’s actions fell within the definition of “other corrupt means or devices.”

“The prosecutor presented sufficient evidence to cause a person of ordinary prudence and caution to entertain a reasonable belief that defendants had attempted to deter Black metro-Detroiters from voting in the 2020 election by the immoral or depraved method of spreading misinformation regarding the consequences of voting and that defendants did so with racially based motives,” Clement wrote in the decision.

From Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel:

The calls were made in late August of 2020 and went out to nearly 12,000 residents with phone numbers from the 313 area code.

During its investigation, Nessel’s office communicated with attorney general offices in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, all of which reported similar robocalls being made to residents in their states who live in urban areas with significant minority populations.

It is believed around 85,000 calls were made nationally, though an exact breakdown of the numbers of calls to each city or state are not available.

The matter is now before the Court of Appeals to determine whether the conduct at issue here was intentionally false speech that was related to voting requirements or procedures and was made in an attempt to deter Black voters in Detroit.

In its majority opinion, the Court noted that “[g]iven the targeted nature of the robocall, defendants’ e-mails, and the content of the robocall, one could reasonably believe that the robocall was a depraved attempt to deter Black electors from voting in the 2020 election.”

Jack Burkman, 57, and Jacob Wohl, 25, are each charged with:

– One count of election law – bribing/intimidating voters, a five-year felony;

– One count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, a five-year felony;

– One count of using a computer to commit the crime of election law – intimidating voters, a seven-year felony; and

– Using a computer to commit the crime of conspiracy, a seven-year felony.

As you can see below, the Michigan case is just one of many than have gone against Wohl and Burkman in the last few years.



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