JACOB WOHL — the deceptive, pro-Trump Internet hoaxer who was banned from Twitter in February after receiving national attention — has been charged with illegal sale of securities. Riverside, California Superior Court records show the felony charge was issued Aug. 19. The charge stems from an incident that allegedly occurred in July 2016, the records say. On Wednesday, an arraignment for Wohl was scheduled for Oct. 24, according to The Daily Beast and online court records. Wohl, 21, is a former teenage hedge fund trader who left the financial industry following allegations of fraud, although he has maintained that there was “nothing even remotely illegal” about his financial enterprise. Wohl, who gained notoriety on social media for peddling false information and regularly responding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweets, has not yet suffered any legal consequences for his actions despite his critics claiming that he has pushed the line on numerous instances. He was central to a scheme to disgrace then-special counsel Robert Mueller in the days before the 2018 midterm elections. Wohl also made national headlines in April for his role in a scheme that aimed to smear Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Wohl has created and promulgated other false or unfounded claims and conspiracy theories, mainly against Democratic Party politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and Ilhan Omar. Born on Dec. 12, 1997 in Greater Los Angeles, California, Wohl is Jewish, describing himself as a Zionist. He has co-hosted a podcast for Jewish Trump supporters with Laura Loomer. His father, David Wohl, is an attorney and conservative commentator who has been a guest on Fox News programs and who has also promoted conspiracy theories. Wohl first rose to prominence at 18 as a self-described “Wohl of Wall Street” and claimed to be the youngest hedge-fund manager in the world. He was featured in 2015 on local news channel KTLA as a high school jock-turned-hedge fund manager. At the time, he had been running Wohl Capital Management — which used a value investing stock picking approach — for about four months, according to the report. A website for NeX stated that Wohl had “10 years of trading experience,” meaning Wohl would have been 8 years old when he started investing. Then a junior at Santiago High School in Corona, California, Wohl told the news channel that he was running the money of his friends’ parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, as well as funds from some of his teachers. He said he had around 20 investors. Shortly after, he made an appearance on a biotech stock panel on Fox Business Network. In late 2015, he shifted trading strategies, taking a quantitative approach and applying for membership with the National Futures Association (NFA) in December for his new fund NeX Capital, the regulator’s website shows. During that time, he posted Craigs-list ads for “Wohl Girls,” models who were hired to help attract clients, and a number of “salacious” websites including “WohlGirls.com” were registered to his name. One model alleged that Wohl posted photographs of her online without her permission. Much like the real-life Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, Wohl quickly ran into regulatory troubles after the NFA regulation investigated him and subsequently banned him. In early 2016, the NFA investigated NeX Capital after receiving an investor complaint. The investor said that Wohl had said his US$75,000 investment had grown, but paid only US$44,000 when the investor demanded the money be returned. Wohl claimed that the difference was due to losses, but the NFA found that Wohl’s trading accounts “appeared to have made, not lost, money overall.” Some of the money, the NFA alleged, had been diverted into his mother’s brokerage accounts. In 2017, the NFA banned Wohl for life. Later that year, Arizona Corp. Commission (ACC) charged Wohl with 14 counts of securities fraud in the same year and forced him to pay US$32,919 in restitution. In the latest lawsuit he has faced, Wohl and his former business partner Matthew Johnson were accused of “offering for sale unqualified securities in violation of California Corporations Code 25110” between July 27 and Aug. 27, 2016. In 2018, Wohl created and registered the company Surefire Intelligence. In October, Wohl partnered with lobbyist Jack Burkman to use Surefire Intelligence to concoct false sexual assault allegations against Mueller, who headed the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Wohl later told USA Today that in his convoluted attempt to use allegations of sexual misconduct to discredit Mueller, he created a false identity and used it to email reporters at several news outlets. A woman Wohl identified to reporters as an alleged victim of Mueller told USA Today that Wohl had deceived her with a false identity, made up the allegations of her sexual assault, and attempted to coerce her to appear at a press conference. “He completely lied to me,” Carolyne Cass said. On Oct. 17, 2018, several journalists received emails from a person claiming to be named “Lorraine Parsons” that asserted Burkman had hired a man with Wohl’s firm, Surefire Intelligence, to offer her more than US$20,000 to sign an affidavit falsely accusing Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment. “Parsons” told the reporters she had worked with Mueller at the law firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in 1974, and that the man from Surefire had asked her to falsely accuse Mueller of engaging in misconduct during that time. Reporters who investigated Surefire Intelligence’s website and company in October 2018 found that the company had been created by Wohl just a few weeks earlier and that its official phone number redirected to a voicemail message which provided a phone number owned by Wohl’s mother. They also reported that photographs on the website depicting some of its purported employees were actually photographs of people unrelated to Surefire, including actor Christoph Waltz. A photograph of Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli was used on a profile claiming to be the company’s “Tel Aviv station chief,” and a profile of a “Matthew Cohen” used an altered photo of Wohl. Soon after creating the company, Wohl advertised it as a team of private investigators on classified ad site Craigslist. In the ad, Wohl falsely claimed that Surefire consisted of former Israeli intelligence agents and various other investigative experts. Far-right media outlet The Gateway Pundit, which employed Wohl in 2018 as an online blogger and columnist, published the “Lorraine Parsons” allegations Oct. 30, but later terminated his contract over his involvement in the failed fake smear campaign. In April, Wohl and Burkman attempted to fake a similar bogus sexual assault smear against 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, but their plans were foiled after media reports said the pair encouraged someone to make a false accusation against the South Bend mayor. In February, Wohl was permanently banned from Twitter for violating the social networking platform’s rules and regulations after he created and operated fake accounts. That same month, he also reported a faked death threat against himself to the Minneapolis police to support his schemes. In 2017, Wohl emerged as a fervent Trump supporter and conservative conspiracy theorist when he launched a new conservative news site called Offended America, which he later rebranded as The Washington Reporter. Listed as the editor, the site puts out content under headlines such as “Jacob Wohl: The Mueller Probe Will Go Down in History as God’s Gift to Republicans” and “Jacob Wohl: The Iraq War Was Moral, Just and Successful.” Until the alleged Mueller plot, Wohl was most famous for his Twitter activity. He frequently tweets to his 177,000 followers that he has “just left a hipster coffee shop” that was “packed with liberals whispering among each other” about how much they really like Trump. Trump himself has retweeted Jacob Wohl on at least three occasions, and Wohl claims he has met the president “several” times.(SD-Agencies) | 