Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Surefire Flop

Well, you’d kind of expect this sort of desperation from someone on the right wing, but the degree to where this all came together as a huge wet bloosh in the face of the perpetrator is almost Newtonian in its karmic comeuppance.

Earlier today news broke about a plot launched by a GOP operative, Jack Burkman, to manufacture and pay off at least one woman to lie and say that Robert Mueller sexually harassed her back in the 1970’s while she worked for him as a paralegal at a private law firm. As soon as the story hit the news, the Special Counsel’s representative confirmed that upon learning of this false story, they referred it to the FBI for investigation.

Jacob Wohl is another player in this story, a moron (or a “child” as Elle Magazine correctly describes him as) and failed hedge fund manager (who was reportedly banned for life from the National Futures Association early in his career).

Even though he denies it, Jacob associated with a company called “Surefire Intelligence”, a shady company that states it was “founded by two members of Israel’s elite intelligence community” and that they can be hired for “counter intelligence,” “private spies,” and “ethical hackers.”

Scroll through the pictures of the senior staff of Surefire and you come across stock shots of supermodels and actors’ headshots, plus resumes and bios that come right out of a cross between “Mission: Impossible” and “Get Smart.”  But the best part is this: Surefire’s official phone number redirects to a voicemail box registered to Jacob’s mom.

It’s all hilarity and ridiculous, but the FBI is not laughing.

A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,” the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.

The special-counsel office’s attention to this scheme and its decision to release a rare statement about it indicates the seriousness with which the team is taking the purported plot to discredit Mueller in the middle of an ongoing investigation. Carr confirmed that the allegations were brought to the office’s attention by several journalists, who were contacted by a woman who identified herself as Lorraine Parsons. Another woman, Jennifer Taub, contacted Mueller’s office earlier this month with similar information.

Oh, someone’s gonna get sent to bed without dessert.