On Tuesday, conservative activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman made a deal to pay James’ office and others for running a campaign to keep people from voting in the 2020 election. James’ office won $1.25 million in the deal.
James sued Wohl and Burkman in March 2023, and the judge sided with him. James had accused them of trying to stop Black people from voting before the 2020 election. In May 2021, James sued Wohl and Burkman after the Office of the Attorney General found that Wohl and Burkman were behind a large-scale effort to stop people from voting. The campaign used robocalls to spread false information about the election to Black voters and others, with the goal of keeping them from going to the polls.
Two men were found guilty by a federal judge last year, who said that they “set into motion a full-scale voter suppression operation during the summer of 2020 to discourage eligible voters from voting by targeting mail-in voting in the 2020 Election.”
On Tuesday, Wohl and Burkman made a deal worth $1.25 million with James’ office, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and a number of individual plaintiffs. They agreed to pay the award to these groups.
“Everyone has the right to vote, which is an important part of our democracy.” No one will be able to breach that right. In order to get Black voters to vote for their chosen candidate, Wohl and Burkman ran a corrupt and false campaign to scare or turn off Black voters. After the deal, they will pay up to $1.25 million, James said in a statement.
James responded to the deal by going on X (formerly Twitter) to praise the decision and say that she would continue to defend the right to vote.
“Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two conspiracy theorists, must pay up to $1.25 million for their racist and dangerous campaign to scare Black voters away from voting.” “I’ll always fight to protect the right to vote, which is the most basic democratic right we have,” James wrote on X.
The deal still needs to be approved by a court, but James’ office said that if the two men “fail to pay at least $105,000 by December 31, 2024, and do not address the failure to pay within 30 days, the amount will increase to $1.25 million,” the amount will go up.
Wohl and Burkman’s lawyer, David Schwartz, said in a statement that his clients are happy with the settlement and are “pleased to put this case behind them, so they can focus on their families and careers.”
People named Wohl and Burkman had already been punished for running similar schemes during the 2020 election, which led to the deal.
After Ohio police charged the two men of running a campaign to keep people from voting in several states in 2022, an Ohio judge told them they had to spend 500 hours registering low- and middle-income voters in the Washington, D.C., area.
Also, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a $5 million robocalling fine against them in 2021, which was the largest fine ever. This was after an investigation found that they seemed to have broken U.S. robocalling rules. The FCC said that both Wohl and Burkman admitted under oath that they made and paid for the robocalls that called people in Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.