Mueller refers to FBI claims that women were offered money to discredit him
Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The special counsel’s office has referred to the FBI allegations that women were offered money to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of sexual harassment.
A spokesman said the office learned of the allegations last week and immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation, report the New York Times, the Atlantic, Fortune, NBC, the Daily Beast and the Hill Reporter.
A law professor and another person—whose identity has not been confirmed—have said the offer was made by a firm called Surefire Intelligence, which was incorporated less than three weeks ago in Delaware. Its domain records list an email for a Trump conspiracy theorist named Jacob Wohl, who began promising to reveal a “scandalous” Mueller story on Tuesday. A phone number on the Surefire website refers callers to a number for Wohl’s mother, according to NBC.
All the LinkedIn pictures of people who claim to work for Surefire are actually photos of other people, including an Israeli supermodel, Sigourney Weaver’s husband and an Austrian actor, according to the open source site Belllingcat.
Wohl told the Daily Beast that GOP lawyer and lobbyist Jack Burkman told him he had hired Surefire to help investigate Mueller’s past, but he didn’t know anything about a plot to manufacture allegations. Burkman, who has promoted conspiracy theories around the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and held a press conference last November that failed to deliver promised sexual-misconduct allegations against a sitting member of Congress, says he will reveal allegations against Mueller at a press conference on Thursday. On Twitter, Wohl denied any attempt to discredit Mueller and said a smear campaign had been launched against him.
Journalists notified the special counsel of the allegations after receiving an Oct. 17 email from a person who used the name Lorraine Parsons. The emails stated that Parsons was offered $20,000 plus payment of her credit card debt to accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment when she was a paralegal at his law firm in 1974. The law firm was Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro.
The email said a man claiming to work for Surefire Intelligence made the offer and said his company had been hired by Jack Burkman.
Journalists could not locate anyone named Lorraine Parsons, and the firm now known as Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman says it has no record of anyone by that name working there.
Burkman denied any involvement on Twitter. In a statement to the Atlantic, Burkman said the FBI referral was “a joke” and Mueller “wants to deflect attention from his sex assault troubles by attacking me.”
The second woman, Vermont Law School professor Jennifer Taub, also notified the FBI after she received an Oct. 22 email offering to pay for information about her encounters with Mueller. Taub told the Atlantic that said she never had any encounters with Mueller, though she sometimes comments on his probe on CNN.
Taub said the email was supposedly sent by a Surefire Intelligence researcher who said his organization was investigating Mueller’s past.
A journalist for the Hill Reporter, Ed Krassenstein, was one of the journalists contacted by the Lorraine Parsons persona. He told NBC that he believed that “this was all a setup from somebody trying to discredit the media.”
