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Welcome back to False Flag! No one better exemplifies the False Flag ethos than blundering right-wing operative Jacob Wohl and his running buddy and surrogate uncle, lobbyist Jack Burkman.
These bad boys made a name for themselves in the first Trump administration by concocting sexual smears against leading Trump foes. But they’ve been operating at a lower profile in the second term.
Until now! The pair have been offering their lobbying services for people seeking Trump pardons, including rapper Boosie Badazz, according to a new NOTUS report. When they failed to secure the pardon, Badazz demanded they return $300,000 to him—half what he paid them to help end prosecutions ultimately related to federal gun charges. In response, the duo told Badazz they couldn’t pay him because they were already “essentially bankrupt.”
In one intriguing part of the story, Wohl and Burkman told Badazz they’d use right-wing activist and onetime Wohl pal Laura Loomer to secure the pardon. But Loomer denies any involvement, and tells me she’ll soon send Burkman and Wohl a cease-and-desist letter to stop using her name.
I want to devote a whole newsletter to Wohl and Burkman one of these days, but for today’s issue, we’ve got a story on the new world of Lindsey Graham assassination conspiracy theories. To keep these stories coming, support my work by subscribing to Bulwark+:
–Will
The Lindsey Graham Conspiracy Theories Are Already Running Wild
Here’s why I don’t think they’ll stick.
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A PROMINENT 71-YEAR-OLD can’t just die of cardiovascular disease these days. Instead, judging by some people’s reactions to the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), there has to be a hidden hand at play.
“Was Lindsey Graham assassinated by Russia or Iran?” asked right-wing activist Laura Loomer, adding that Vladimir Putin–friendly American podcaster Tucker Carlson should be investigated by the FBI just to be sure.
“Lindsey Graham dying out of the blue like this doesn’t make any sense at all,” wrote conservative activist Matt Van Swol, in a message reposted by former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer.
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And on it went. Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen suggested that Graham, who recently visited Ukraine, might be just the latest Putin foe to fall victim to an assassination. (Graham apparently died of an aortic dissection, and Thiessen was commenting on a post noting that “Graham has dealt with blood pressure issues since his 40s. His father also died of cardiac arrest at age 69.”) Former CBS News reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist Lara Logan, meanwhile, is dabbling in numerology, scrutinizing the timing of Donald Trump’s posts about Graham’s death to see if they hold clues.
“This doesn’t look like a guy who would die hours later,” commented billionaire Bill Ackman on a video of a not-particularly-healthy-looking Graham. Ackman—who, like the other people quoted above, is not a physician—later deleted the tweet.
The rush to avoid the obvious explanation for Graham’s death—that Graham died of heart disease, as 71-year-old men with busy schedules sometimes do—offers a glimpse into the dynamics of the MAGA internet in 2026. It’s a place where nothing is as it seems, and even something as simple as an older man dying is grist for the conspiracy theory mill.
Studying conspiracy theorists, academic Michael Barkun noted that one core tenet is their belief that nothing that happens is a coincidence. So Graham can’t just die randomly in a way that more or less fits with his actuarial table—he had to have been killed by a secret team of Russian assassins waiting around in Kyiv for an American senator to show up, or by opponents of the SAVE Act, or because he once was vaccinated for COVID.
What’s different now is that ...