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Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, two out-of-state conservative activists who pleaded no contest to orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote of Black residents in Detroit, were sentenced to one year of probation on Monday by a Wayne County judge.
Burkman and Wohl were initially charged with actions aimed at suppressing the vote during the 2020 general election. The no contest pleas and the subsequent sentencing agreement were hashed out by the defendants’ attorneys and the Wayne County 3rd Circuit Court.
The Department of Attorney General was not involved in the agreement.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Monday, in a statement, said that Burkman and Wohl engaged in conduct that “used every racist dog whistle – fear of incarceration, fear of the government and fear of one’s benefits being taken away – to steal the most fundamental right that we often take for granted: the right to vote.”
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“While on probation, if they engage in these types of criminal behaviors, they will be held to account here in Michigan,” Nessel said. “We all are aware, and this court has made these defendants aware, that continuing to engage in criminal conduct while on probation is a violation, for which the department will be ever vigilant about bringing to the attention of their probation agents and this court. If they willingly choose to engage in the types of repulsive behaviors they have gained notoriety for, this court and my department will be watching.”
Burkman and Wohl, the department said, attempted to discourage voters from participating in the general election by creating and funding a robocall targeting specific and multiple urban areas across the country, including Detroit. A news release said the calls were made in late August 2020, sent to nearly 12,000 residents with phone numbers registered to an address with a Detroit ZIP code.
Among the falsehoods the pair promoted were: misinformation about voting by mail, saying the practice could place voters’ personal information in a public database that would be used by police departments to track down individuals with outstanding warrants; that a public database would be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts; and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would use vote by mail records to track individuals for mandatory vaccines.
In doing so, the calls also identified Burkman and Wohl as the source of the disinformation. The two activists, one of whom had close ties to the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of President Donald Trump, also claimed they were the founders of a civil rights organization called Project 1599. The robocall messages sent during the election included a call to predominantly Black residents to not be “finessed into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel walks out after oral arguments in the Michigan Supreme Court for the case against Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl on Nov. 9, 2023. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)
Nessel’s office filed charges against the pair in 2020, and both were bound over for trial. A motion to quash the charges was denied, and the case was appealed up to the Michigan Supreme Court.
The state’s high court eventually remanded the case to the Michigan Court of Appeals, which determined that the alleged conduct met the statutory and constitutional thresholds to keep the charges intact.
The Michigan Supreme Court kicked it once more back to the lower court following that decision, but declined to hear it a final time once the state Court of Appeals narrowly tailored the charges as to not ensnare constitutional free speech protections.
That chain of events led to the plea agreement and the probation sentence.
Burkman and Wohl agreed to plead no contest to single counts of intimidating voters, conspiracy to commit an election law violation, using a computer to intimidate voters, and using a computer to commit a conspiracy.
Michigan was not the only state where Burkman and Wohl faced charges.
In New York, Burkman and Wohl reached a settlement with the state’s attorney general’s office in 2024 to pay up to $1.25 million targeting thousands of Black voters in New York during the 2020 election.
In Ohio, Burkman and Wohl were ordered by a court in 2022 to spend 500 hours registering people to vote after prosecutors said the men organized more than 3,000 robocalls to Cleveland-area residents, the Associated Press reported.
