"Black Robo" Vote Suppressor Call Blasters Sentenced To Irony

There's a scene early in the Spencer Tracy melodrama "Boys Town" -- a film derived loosely from the real Father Flanagan and his reform campus for wayward and forgotten children -- which has long framed my thoughts on crime and punishment. Some troublemakers are brought before the resident council, whose sentence is to attend an enticing movie playing that night at their community hall. In fact, the miscreants are given reserved places near the front row ... where they must stand all night with their backsides facing the screen, while they watch their neighbors enjoy the show.

A couple summers ago I felt revolted by news from Michigan of a canned call blitz, aimed at minority populace voters in five states, offering insane reasons to avoid voting by mail. By one account the campaign began in late August 2020 and ran about three weeks. A 2021 New York AG lawsuit says they contracted with a California call center in June that year. Anyway, don't sip any drinks before reading the transcript if you're prone to comical spit-takes:

    "Hi, this is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don't be finessed into giving your private information to The Man. Stay safe and beware of vote by mail."

Message audio file hosted on NoMoRobo - August 2020
  Link rejected here -- Append the following to the "lookup" URL:
  703-795-5364?recording=CAee7daeeadd7759e923ec881092e29d04
Amateur recording provided by Michigan's Secretary of State - August 2020

The two greaseballs named by the "Tamika" character are known crackpot conspiracy flacks, responsible for smear campaigns against political figures which were too Fruit-Loopy even for tabloid gossip rags. Their "Project" is a "civil rights" group the same way William Shatner is a Medicare Advantage insurance expert and a frozen waffle with Reddi-Wip is a healthy breakfast.

"Finessed", by the way? Is that even a verb? I've felt more finesse from a crumpled sheet of sandpaper. Adding to the grating hilarity, the phone number displayed to call recipients was apparently Burkman's own mobile account, including a "Jack Burkman" CNAM.

This little voter-spooking bot call stunt bought them six kinds of trouble from multiple Attorneys General and got the FCC thinking real hard about slapping them upside with a record five million dollar TCPA penalty.

Email exchanges between Burkman and Wohl and their call vendor prior to the first "Tamika" blast tell of their cynical view of the voting public:

    "We should send it to black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta and Cleveland"
    Check to you ... just went out in the 2 day pouch you will have in 2-3 days then we attack."

    "The next day," per Ars Technica and the AG complaint, "after the calls were sent and received by thousands of voters, Burkman emailed to congratulate Wohl, stating that 'I love these robo calls ... getting angry black call backs... win or lose... the black robo was a great idea.' "

Election officials taking complaints about the call blast held less charitable opinions:

    "This is an unconscionable, indefensible, blatant attempt to lie to citizens about their right to vote. The call preys on voters’ fear and mistrust of the criminal justice system — at a moment of historic reckoning and confrontation of systemic racism and the generational trauma that results — and twists it into a fabricated threat in order to discourage people from voting." -- Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson

While we wait for the FCC, state AGs, and some felony charges to catch up, the "Project" masterminds will soon accessorize their wardrobes with ankle bracelet monitors. Having extracted a guilty plea a few weeks ago, a judge in Ohio's Cuyahoga County this week imposed modest fines and two years of probation, and scolding for "a despicable thing that you guys have done". Eight counts of telecomm fraud and seven bribery counts somehow got shaved down to a single fraud charge.

Just when a sigh of depression primed in collective lungs over negotiated justice, the judge tossed in a creative punishment. The bad boys are obliged to five hundred community service hours in their District of Columbia stomping grounds .... wait for it .... helping to register the sort of voters whom they had targeted in DC's distressed and poor sections.

Hard to say if reform is possible for recidivist frauds who have made a career of slinging bunk. One thing they can't do from a prison cell is look directly upon the people they've harmed, like the kids standing backwards in a theater.

One might say some face-rubbing in the mess was necessary, for there are signs that the harm was "concrete" and not merely a potential -- a rather unfair hurdle stood up by case law in the path of everyone who takes their junk call problems to court. Wonkette reports that the Ohio prosecutor "described the calls as 'a political stunt that actually worked' and said they had the intended 'chilling effect' on voters, with turnout in the targeted areas down compared to the previous cycle".

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Many more facets remain of the story to fascinate and/or infuriate.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman Sentenced to Voter Registration Service Hours, Probation for Robocall Scheme - Cleveland Scene, 30 Nov 2022
Judge sentences men behind election robocall scam to register new voters - Washington Post, 01 Dec 2022
Filthy Vote Suppressors Jacob Wohl And Jack Burkman Sentenced To Register Voters - Wonkette, 30 Nov 2022 (includes a photo of the defendants in their natural habitat, and yes, there is a 32 year age difference)

FCC seeks $5M fine for robocalls telling Black people that voting helps “the man” - Ars Technica, 25 Aug 2021
FCC Proposes Largest Robocalling Fine Under TCPA - FCC release and notice, 24 Aug 2021

Robocall targets battleground states with falsehoods about mail-in voting - Washington Post, 27 Aug 2020

Not surprised at the school yard bullying tactics in the Political arena, especially after the whole Trump vs Hillary Presidential Campaign of 2016, creating mistrust in the Voting system's ability to be secure.

And the Orange AH's 'Big Lie' from 2020 on

Anyone trying to rationalize that this garbage is coming equally "from both sides", is delusional.

Both sides of the same fine person's mouth at times.

The hours of voter registration should have been on top of a $1000 fine PER robocall.  If there is no $$$$ paid then they got off easy.  Also any future use of robocalls should result in jail time.  A lifetime ban on using robocalls would have been nice too.

What the FCC (definitely) wants, the FCC (maybe) gets, sending a bill for $5,134,500 this week to voter intimidators Burkman & Associates. Their efforts to wriggle away from Forfeiture were slashed to ribbons in the Order.

It says more or less that they tried to toss their hired dialer under the bus, denying their control over the call blitz, and played the old "nobody here pushed any phone buttons" card. This kind of denial is a known failure and didn't float here either. TCPA violation by proxy doesn't change who wrote the scripts, uploaded the audio file, provided the target ZIP codes, "and selected the timing and number of calls". The dialing vendor was not at the steering wheel. Besides, nothing says "I did this" quite like the name "Jack Burkman" displaying in Caller ID.

They tried citing the wrong part of the TCPA, a section which handles sales calls, to exempt their tacky "political" calls. I can't tell if the defense lawyers read the Act cross-eyed or hoped the FCC would miss the meaning of its own rules. Burkman and Wohl, much as they protested the concept, did not need to sell anything to break the law. They had canned audio autodialed to mobile phones without consent or an emergency purpose, all four legs found under a long history of winning cases. Survey companies, without peddling heinous ghost stories like "Project 1599" did, have been flayed alive in recent years on the same grounds.

The Respondent rogues also whined that many call recipients either never answered or quickly disconnected, negating claims of harm to them. That old canard has never worked, and shame on them for its summer rerun. The harm begins the second a phone rings, the moment a call is completed. This is why "prior consent" is a fat hurdle to jump. Surely, people can choose to hang up early, but they can't choose how annoyed to feel by an ambushing fraud.

The Order also reminds everyone that placing illegal calls was enough to render the bad boys liable. Bypassing their irony circuits, they complain that their 1,141 detected calls to mobile phones amount to "only 1.3 percent of the total number of calls made", and therefore a five-mil penalty is pearl-clutching high. The FCC calmly restated a well established "base forfeiture" per violation and invited the call blasters to do the math. Maybe Burkman and Wohl would like another call audit and try for a higher percentage and/or a raise to the $20,731 maximum per violation.

FCC Issues $5 Million Penalty for Illegal Robocalling - order and press release, 06 Jun 2023

Continuing news on this story:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-operatives-pay-1-25-170511480.html

Reuters
Republican operatives to pay $1.25 million for robocalls threatening Black voters, NY prosecutor says
Doina Chiacu
Tue, April 9, 2024 at 1:05 PM EDT·2 min read

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Two conservative operatives who launched a robocall campaign designed to prevent Black New Yorkers from voting by mail in the 2020 U.S. election will pay $1.25 million in a settlement, New York state Attorney General Letitia James said on Tuesday.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were found liable by a federal judge in New York in March 2023 for targeting Black voters and sending false and threatening messages intended to discourage voting.

"Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate," James said in a statement.

During the summer of 2020, the automated calls claimed that mail-in voting would allow the voter to be tracked for outstanding warrants, credit card debt and mandatory vaccines, James said.

The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, was forced to redirect considerable resources to address the false claims made in the call, James said.

During the 2020 presidential campaign that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, Republican President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly made false claims that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. Trump, who is challenging Biden in the Nov. 5 presidential election, has continued to repeat the claims.

The 2020 robocall also was distributed in Cleveland, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Chicago, the Pennsylvania cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; Detroit; and Arlington, Virginia, according to filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A New York lawyer for Burkman and Wohl, David Schwartz, said his clients were pleased to have a settlement and put this case behind them so they can focus on their families and careers.

Burkman, a Washington lawyer and Republican operative, was stripped of his law license in March by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

He and Wohl pleaded guilty in October 2022 to telecommunications fraud in Ohio after using robocalls to intimidate people from voting by mail during the 2020 presidential election. They were sentenced to two years of probation, each fined $2,500 and ordered to do 500 hours of community service.

In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Burkman and Wohl $5.1 million for making more than 1,100 unlawful robocalls in August and September 2020.

Burkman is perhaps best known for keeping the 2016 killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in Washington in the news. Rich's murder became fodder for a conspiracy theory in conservative media, though Washington police have said the slaying was part of a robbery gone wrong.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington, additional reporting by Sara Merken in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Jonathan Oatis)