Jacob Wohl, who was recently banned from Twitter for creating multiple fake accounts, allegedly used one of those accounts to send himself death threats.
Wohl and his colleagues, Laura Loomer and Ali Alexander, recently released a short “documentary” about their investigation into whether Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) married her younger brother to get him into the country, thereby violating immigration law. I watched the documentary (so you don’t have to) and the team offers no evidence to support their thesis.
But one scene in the documentary has drawn accusations, most notably from journalist Tony Webster, that Wohl and Alexander may have filed a false police report claiming to have received a death threat from an account created by Wohl himself.
About 12 minutes into the film, Alexander and Wohl exit a black SUV and enter a building. They’re shown talking to someone inside about alleged “threats” they received. As they’re talking, the first “threat” is displayed on the screen, from an account with a profile picture identical to that of @DrakeHomes612, an account reportedly created and managed by Wohl, according to the Daily Beast. The account allegedly belonged to “Drake Holmes,” a “Minneapolis born and raised… diversity coordinator,” according to NBC reporter Ben Collins.
The documentary shows several other threats, and it is not clear whether the one that appears to have been written by Wohl was actually included in the police report.
The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer obtained the police report and says that it mentions some tweets were provided to police but doesn’t list which ones. Loomer told Sommer she had nothing to do with the police report, but Alexander suggested that Wohl did share the questionable tweet, according to a video he posted Monday morning.
“Jacob [Wohl] may have actually violated the law, maybe,” Alexander said. “Jacob handed the paper over to the police that included a screenshot from this account – and that’s on him.”
Alexander went on to condemn Wohl for providing the wrong kind of “misinformation.”
“It confirms that he’s not operating at a level where there’s useful misinformation, but kind of stupid, vanity-filled, ego-fueled disinformation,” Alexander said in his video. “And that won’t look good for Jacob.”
The 25-minute film created by the trio consists of mostly Wohl, Loomer, and Alexander talking about Omar.
It shows Alexander eating and talking at a restaurant while Loomer stands outside Omar’s house in the snow. She rings the doorbell and knocks, trying to serve Omar with an affidavit for her to sign stating that she never married her brother.
“The lights are on,” Loomer says after a minute of footage showing her outside the door while intense music plays (the same music plays throughout the entire film, no matter how innocuous the scene). She eventually gives up.
The team also goes to what is presented as Omar’s local office, but no one answers the door or the phone. The group paints these two incidents as Omar avoiding questions or her constituents. They went to her office at 9:17 a.m., according to the film. The workers could have gotten word that they would have been coming and not answered the door. As for Omar, she could easily have been in Washington when Loomer knocked on her door.
Later, Wohl tells Alexander that they initially set out to disprove the claims against Omar, but ended up allegedly proving them.
“We brought in a camera crew, we brought in – I don’t know how many livestreams we did while we were in Minnesota,” Wohl offers as proof they took their investigation seriously.
A few minutes of the short film are dedicated to the Democrats’ refusal to specifically condemn Omar’s anti-Semitism, with clips from CSPAN.
Finally, in the last couple of minutes, the trio lays out a timeline of alleged evidence that Omar married her brother, yet none of this evidence is shown.
Snopes, certainly no friend to conservatives, rated the claim that Omar married her brother as “unproven,” and includes some pointed questions: Why would Omar need to marry her brother when siblings of U.S. residents could apply for permanent residency status? Why is there no record of the alleged brother applying for such status if that was the purpose of the fraud? Why did Omar claim Ahmed Hirsi was her husband during her 2016 campaign when she was still married to another man (her alleged brother) and not Hirsi?
There are other questions, but you get the gist.
Finally, some are asking why conservatives aren’t reacting to Wohl’s potential false report the same as they did to Jussie Smollett’s alleged fake hate crime? Two reasons:
1. The media didn’t immediately treat Wohl as a victim and spread his implausible story far and wide, and invite him on “Good Morning America” to cry about his ordeal. No one (outside of maybe a few) believed Wohl received death threats requiring the level of security he and his colleagues kept claiming while in Minnesota. Journalist Tony Webster has an excellent Twitter thread on all of this.
2. Wohl hasn’t been arrested and police haven’t provided evidence to the media that Wohl did, in fact, fake the death threats, as with the Smollett case.
Still, if it does turn out that Wohl faked even one of the threats he provided to police, it puts him on par with Smollett as one of the worst hate crime hoaxers in history.