This isn’t good at all:
AXIOS – Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have asked the FBI to investigate a scheme that was offering payouts to women who agreed to accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment, The Atlantic reports.
Journalists alerted the office of the Special Counsel of the scheme when a woman told them a GOP lobbyist named Jack Burkman had offered her about $20,000 and enough to payoff her credit card debt if she accused Mueller. Some of the woman’s story has gone uncorroborated, per The Atlantic. Burkman has gotten involved in conspiracy theories before — he previously began his own private investigation into the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer, Seth Rich.
Burkman posted a video on his Facebook page Tuesday claiming without evidence that Mueller has a history of harassing women. He tweeted a similar allegation and says he will reveal “Mueller’s sex assault victims” in an announcement this Thursday.
Here’s the video from Facebook of this Burkman guy making this claim:
The Atlantic calls Burkman a ‘conservative radio host’ but I’ve never even heard of him. I don’t know if he’s legit or a kook. But clearly he is putting these allegations out there so it makes this woman’s account seem, at the very least, plausible.
According to the Atlantic, the woman said this is how it happened:
The woman explained that she was contacted by a man “with a British accent” who wanted to ask her “a couple questions about Robert Mueller, whom I worked with when I was a paralegal for Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro in 1974. I asked him who he was working for, and he told me his boss was some sort of politics guy in Washington named Jack Burkman. I reluctantly told [him] that I had only worked with Mr. Mueller for a short period of time, before leaving that firm to have my first son.”
She continued: “In more of an effort to get him to go away than anything else, I asked him what in the hell he wanted me to do. He said that we could not talk about it on the phone, and he asked me to download an app on my phone called Signal, which he said was more secure. Reluctantly, I downloaded the app and he called me on that app a few minutes later. He said (and I will never forget exactly what it was) ‘I want you to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller, and I want you to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect.’” The man “offered to pay off all of my credit card debt, plus bring me a check for $20,000 if I would do” it, she wrote. “He knew exactly how much credit card debt I had, right down to the dollar, which sort of freaked me out.”
I don’t know where this ends up, but if it’s true that Burkman is trying to manufacture phoney allegations against Mueller, he needs to be held accountable.