Twitter on Tuesday banned Jacob Wohl, a conservative activist who has been retweeted several times by President Trump, hours after the publication of an interview where he bragged about creating bogus accounts.
A former columnist for The Gateway Pundit website, Mr. Wohl, 21, was permanently suspended from Twitter for repeatedly violating the social network’s terms of service, Twitter confirmed.
“The account was suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically creating and operating fake accounts,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.
“I knew this day would come,” Mr. Wohl told The Washington Times in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “I basically knew [this] was going to happen. The question was just when.”
Mr. Wohl told The Times that he operated a total of four Twitter accounts that all abruptly disappeared Thursday, including his verified, personal account, @JacobAWohl, as well as @women_4_shultz, a “goofy” account purported to be supportive of 2020 presidential hopeful and former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz.
“Howard Schultz Will Restore the American Dream for Women,” reads the bio on the since-suspended account.
“It was just an account to, like, experiment and play around with – if you could get lefty women to support Howard Shultz,” Mr. Wohl told The Times. “Not really a focus group, but a thumb-in-the-air sort of barometer for his candidacy. Which is important for me, because I’m a political professional, and I like to know where people are at and not just read reports and listen to mainstream media polls.”
Mr. Wohl told The Times that he operated a total of four Twitter accounts that all abruptly disappeared Thursday, including his verified, personal account, @JacobAWahl, as well as @women_4_shultz, an account purported to be supportive of 2020 presidential hopeful and former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz.
“Howard Schultz Will Restore the American Dream for Women,” reads the bio on the since-suspended account.
Among the tweets posted by the Schultz account and personally amplified by Mr. Wohl was a recent post attacking fellow presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
“Kamala Harris does not represent American Women,” the Schultz account tweeted Feb. 1. “Unlike Howard Schultz (who is 100% self-made) she traded sexual favors for public office!”
Mr. Wohl’s verified account, @JacobAWohl, had more roughly 186,000 followers on his Twitter as of earlier Tuesday, according to a profile published in USA Today.
In an interview, “Wohl disclosed a raft of schemes he says are in the works that he hopes will resonate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election,” the report said.
“He says he plans to create ’enormous left-wing online properties’ – such as deceptive Facebook and Twitter accounts – ’and use those to steer the left-wing votes in the primaries to what we feel are weaker candidates compared with Trump’,” USA Today reported.
Mr. Trump has retweeted Mr. Wohl at least three times, the report said. Mr. Wohl said he has spoken several times to Mr. Trump, while the White House did not respond a request for comment, the report said.
Other Twitter accounts belonging to Mr. Wohl suspended Tuesday included one belonging to his business, @SureFireIntel, and an unspecified account for his “up-and-coming think-tank.”Mr. Wohl gained notoriety last year when he hosted a press conference that was supposed to feature a woman scheduled to accuse special counsel Robert Mueller of sexual harassment. The woman never showed, and the special counsel’s office subsequently referred the matter to the FBI for investigation.
More recently, Mr. Wohl made waves for traveling to Minnesota last week to “investigate” allegations involving Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat elected in 2018. Speaking to The Times on Tuesday, Mr. Wohl said he determined that Ms. Omar, a Somali refugee, wed her brother in a “sham marriage,” and that he planned to publicly discuss his claims Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), to be held in National Harbor, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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