I regret to inform you that we must again speak of Jacob Wohl and the people he’s bamboozled into taking him seriously.
You might remember Wohl as a sort of professional grifter of comical proportions who attached himself like a leech onto right-wing causes and sucked all the money he possibly could out of them. Wohl, now 28, is already a twice–convicted felon aside from his attempts to frame various Democrats for sexual assault. He’s usually been aided in his schemes by Jack Burkman, 60-year-old self-styled lobbyist who also has a felony conviction for his shenanigans.
You’d think that when these two reunited for a lobbying firm that promised to deliver pardons to convicted criminals based on non-existent ties with the Trump 47 administration, a simple Google search would have told prospective clients all they need to know about Wohl and Burkman and saved their money. Apparently, however, a rapper who goes by the pseudonym “Boosie Badazz” either doesn’t know about this whole “Google” invention or was very desperate, because he paid hundreds of thousands to these obvious con artists and didn’t get a pardon. So he sued.
Now, in liberal publications, this is being called a “MAGA Mess” or a “MAGA Fiasco,” despite the fact that Wohl and Burkman are effectively just criminals with no real ties to President Donald Trump or the MAGA movement.
But, I mean, aside from that…
The saga of Mr. Badazz (driver’s license name: Torence Hatch) was first publicized by the anti-Trump political outlet NOTUS on Monday, in an article titled “How Boosie Badazz’s Pardon Push Turned Into a MAGA Mess.” (NOTUS is an establishment Washington institution. Its founder and publisher is Robert Albritton, the man behind the Beltway-centric publication Politico. Its roster includes former Washington Post staffers and stars.)
The short version of the NOTUS piece? Mr. Badazz is stupid and Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman took advantage of it, and this is as much of a “MAGA Mess” as the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is a “Trump Shuttle Disaster.”
Will Jacob Wohl go to jail?
Yes: 89% (8 Votes)
No: 11% (1 Votes)
NOTUS didn’t quite frame it that way.
On New Year’s Day, Rapper Boosie Badazz received a call from his lawyer that he’d been given a second chance. Two men, whom Boosie paid $600,000 about three months earlier, had said in a phone call with his lawyer that they secured for him a pardon signed by President Donald Trump.
The act of clemency would have wiped away his federal rap sheet and saved him from an imminent sentencing hearing for possessing a firearm as a felon.
But that pardon never materialized. Now, Boosie, whose legal name is Torence Hatch, is taking legal action against Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two far-right political operatives and lobbyists at JM Burkman & Associates, to recoup half of Boosie’s payment, as stipulated in a contract NOTUS reviewed.
So far, the pair have refused, citing an overrun of costs in conversations with Boosie’s lawyer handling the arbitration, Jill Craft. They also said they were effectively bankrupt, according to text messages reviewed by NOTUS.
The only part of that story I find slightly believable is that Wohl and Burkman are indeed bankrupt. They’re not dumb enough to keep any cash for the feds to recoup if there’s a need for them to do so, but don’t appear smart enough to be actually getting rich on ill-gotten gains.
Anyhow, NOTUS doesn’t seem to want to let readers who don’t know who Wohl or Burkman are in on it, instead going into a long digression about what it called the “high-stakes pardon economy” that has emerged under Trump.
However, that “pardon economy” apparently didn’t work since Badazz appealed to what NOTUS called Trump’s “pardon czar,” Alice Marie Johnson, and drew a blank. He was looking to clear up a past that includes convictions on drug and gun charges in 2009 and drug possession with intent to distribute, although he did manage to beat a first-degree murder rap.
“Without a clear path to clemency, Boosie sought another way. Boosie first heard about Burkman’s firm through good word of mouth — hearing that they’d secured nine pardons for their clients, according to Boosie’s criminal defense lawyer, Meghan Blanco,” NOTUS reported.
If NOTUS is reporting that right, Meghan Blanco is either a liar or also doesn’t know how to use the the internet to look someone’s name up. As NOTUS reported, only one individual who has signed up with their firm has actually received a pardon, and that was well after Mr. Badazz handed over a check.
Anyhow, Boosie seems to have fallen for it, since he signed a typo-ridden contract with the “lobbyists” (really, there aren’t air quotes big enough to put around that descripition) on Sept. 30 of 2020.
“They were real aggressive, they were talking like they had Trump on speed dial,” Boosie told NOTUS.
According to his lawyer, they claimed to have ties to Trump ally Laura Loomer that would guarantee a pardon by January of 2026. Unsurprisingly, this happens not to be the case.
“Wohl claimed that MAGA influencers like Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec and Erika Kirk had endorsed a pardon for Boosie, as had House Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Andy Biggs of Arizona,” NOTUS added. This, again, apparently happens to not be the case, with none of these people even acknowledging they knew who this guy was, after NOTUS looked into it.
Burkman, in a statement to NOTUS, said he “cannot think of a single client for whom our firm has done more work than Boosie.”
“This included a massive, highly tailored advocacy campaign across Congress, the executive branch and leading political influencers and media figures. We continue to believe that Boosie very much deserves a pardon,” he added.
This also actually might be true: If you don’t do much for anybody, you probably can’t think of a single client that you’ve done more for, especially one who’s been convicted of gun crimes and at least charged with first-degree murder. To be fair, Mr. Badazz decided to set aside the gats and try to settle it via arbitration. As for Wohl and Burkman’s antics, this isn’t handled until the 32nd paragraph of a 54-paragraph story, and then only for two paragraphs.
The fact that the rapper’s team hired known con men who apparently (at least to the untrained eye) are acting as con men again seems to be almost wholly unimportant in a surprisingly dry story about the recent activity of the Beltway’s two most inept Keystone Krooks. (The fact that they can win that title without ever having stumbled into elected office is really saying something.)
So where’s this “MAGA mess?” As political tropes go, I suppose that “MAGA civil war” has joined “Republicans pounce” and “Dems in disarray” in the pantheon of stories lazy reporters on a deadline will take seriously. Even then, this is stretching credibility to the max, given that these guys are “MAGA” the same way the pathologically lying braggart in your high school class “lost his virginity to his girlfriend in Canada on summer vacation”: Yeah, I’m sure they wish, but they’re still full of it.
Unbelievably, this isn’t the only outlet that went with this framing: Raw Story, an unabashedly leftist publication, went under this headline: “MAGA fiasco as star rapper fights for $600K he paid for a Trump pardon that never came.”
Raw Story also played down the aspect of Wohl and Burkman being total losers that nobody in politics wants anything to do with except as figures of fun, but the report did note that they’d committed crimes against wokeness, among their other schemes, both alleged and proved:
Wohl and Burkman are convicted felons who paid $1.25 million over a robocall scheme aimed at Black voters, and who secretly founded an AI lobbying firm that clients said didn’t work. In texts with Blanco, the two repeatedly invoked far-right activist Laura Loomer, whose influence over Trump has been tied to firings across the government.
That’s your takeaway from Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman? They’re part of a “MAGA fiasco” because their texts “invoked” Laura Loomer? OK, dude.
Meanwhile, music publication Billboard called them “a pair of MAGA lobbyists,” which is about as true as me calling Billboard “a music publication anyone under 60 cares about.”
I suppose this is the great thing about Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. To the right, they’re unvarying sources of comic relief who will continue to intermittently entertain us and expose ignorance and bias in the liberal media until they receive sentences long enough so that everyone forgets they exist.
(I understand I’m phrasing that as a when, not an if; there’s of course always a chance they keep their noses clean from here on in and avoid the pen, but I think Mr. Badazz has a better shot at that based on track record.)
For the left, meanwhile, they’re always to be treated seriously — as Trump-adjacent allies when they very obviously aren’t.
As for Boosie, caveat emptor. Sorry, man. If you give Wohl another few hundred grand, though, I bet you he’ll at least promise to teach you how to use a search engine.
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