Republican fraudsters caught on audio targeting Dr. Fauci with fake sexual assault claims

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday May 07, 2020 · 11:34 AM PDT

2020/05/07 · 11:34

NOV 1, 2018 : Jacob Wohl waits to speak to the media about alleged allegations against Robbert Mueller at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn Va.(Credit Image: © John Middlebrook/CSM via ZUMA Wire) (Cal Sport Media via AP Images) — Jacob Wohl

Jacob Wohl is the possibly sociopathic right-wing wannabe operative who has attempted to concoct bogus sexual assault smear campaigns against everyone from Robert Mueller to Pete Buttigieg. The Trump supporter has been charged with fraud and continuously shown himself to be something of a true pathological liar, willing to do just about anything to support the bogus narrative the most conspiratorial in the country’s right wing want to believe.

His newest plan it seems, was to take down Dr. Anthony Fauci in order to get the country back to work. To do this, he reportedly enlisted a woman he may or may not have had a romantic relationship with, identified as Diana Andrade. Unfortunately for Wohl and his dangerous crew of wannabe Patrick Batemans, Andrade became disillusioned with Wohl and the whole plot, and decided to clear her conscience to a reporter.

Reason’s Nancy Rommelmann reports that she was contacted out of the blue by Diana Andrade, a woman she vaguely knew as “Diana Rodriguez.” Rodriguez was the alleged victim in a Jacob Wohl-sourced allegation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s lead infectious disease specialist overseeing the medical and scientific response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Rommelmann participated in a phone conference with Rodriguez to hear her “account” of an alleged sexual assault perpetrated by Dr. Fauci on her in 2014. After Wohl and his cohort Jack Burkman came on the phone and acted super crazy strange, most of the media involved decided to step away from the situation.

According to Rommelmann, the situation was clearly dubious, and the conference call turned into reporters laughing at the two men and asking when they were going to admit this was a “prank. The original allegations that were sent out to media types like Rommelmann did not jibe at all with the story this Rodriguez person told on the phone. Rommelmann and others considered writing about how ludicrous Wohl was, but also worried that reporting on him gave him far more publicity than he deserved. The hope was he would recede into the garbage fire bin of history that he has tried to help feed.

But Rommelmann was given photos by Diana Andrade showing her and Wohl’s clear relationship. She also passed on a reported audio recording between her and Wohl and Burkman where she worries about money she took for a job she did for them, while Wohl brags about his intimate connections to the Trump administration. Whether or not that is true is anyone’s guess. These days, just being any level of conman seems to put you in the running for this administration. But the most telling part of the audio, as reported in Reason, was this section:

"Let me tell you something, Diana," says Burkman. "This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that's the way life works, OK? That's the way it goes." [...]

"Mother Nature has to clean the barn every so often," Burkman counters. "How real is it? Who knows? So what if 1 percent of the population goes? So what if you lose 400,000 people? Two hundred thousand were elderly, the other 200,000 are the bottom of society. You got to clean out the barn. If it's real, it's a positive thing, for God's sake."

It sounds like true sociopathy to be sure. According to Andrade, Wohl wanted her to use a very real sexual assault experience she had when she was in high school and apply it to Dr. Fauci. The hope was that in reopening what was a very difficult wound for her, Andrade would perform believably enough. Wohl is still not in jail. Take that for what it is.

Comments are closed on this story.