Threats to tarnish or steal Trump campaign signs, both real and fictional, have come to occupy a deep place in the right-wing imagination this election cycle.
For some, the go-to solution to protect the signs from thieves has been booby-traps. A city worker in Michigan, for example, cut his hand open after he tried to move an illegally placed Trump sign that had been secretly fitted with razor blades. This month, a bomb squad in Maryland was called out to check on wires attached to a Trump sign. The wires turned to be a kind of makeshift alarm meant to deter thieves.
But for a locally notorious group of Facebook livestreamers in Arizona, the solution to fighting thieves has been crouching for hours at a time in bushes, hoping to catch a sign bandit in action. The plan has worked perfectly—if they don’t end up in jail for their own separate offenses first.
On Oct. 16, pro-Trump social-media character Jennifer Harrison and a few of her friends crouched in the bushes somewhere in Arizona, waiting for someone to steal a couple of bait-signs they’d set up across the street. The plan, dubbed Operation Catch a Commie, hit an early snag when a would-be thief appeared to see them in the bushes and drove off without taking a sign.
Crouched in the bushes with her crew, Harrison imagined the lines they would deliver to sign thieves—“Citizens’ arrest, Trump committee!”—and plotted how to make police-style spike strips they could throw out to blow up a thief’s tires.
“With my barbed wire, we can totally make stop strips,” Harrison said. “Is that legal?”
Later in the video, an unnamed member of the group began pushing back on people in their chat who were saying that the plan was ridiculous.
“This may be stupid to some people,” he said. “But you know what, if nobody does something about it, it gets worse.”
Harrison and her crew have caught sign thieves in other videos. This time, though, they stayed in the bushes for another hour before eventually giving up.
Harrison didn’t respond to a request for comment. But the livestreaming her crew has done has been actually quite popular. Each of Harrison’s videos under the handle “AZ Patriots” racked up about 10,000 views.
The bait-signs are far from the first potentially dangerous social media stunt Harrison and the AZ Patriots have pulled. In 2019, Harrison and the AZ Patriots were sued by a Hispanic church that accused them of harassing immigrants on a livestream.
The Arizona Republic has described her as becoming a political figure in the state through “sheer will.” Harrison and her group are probably most famous for a viral video of a local council meeting, where she was laughed out of the event after complaining about immigration.
The bait-sign effort has started to pay off. According to AZ Patriots videos, they’ve caught several would-be sign thieves, who are shown on the livestreams being arrested by police.
Alas, Harrison could soon be joining her targets in the clink. Last week, she was charged with felony identity theft over a dispute with her former in-laws. Harrison allegedly used their hotel perks, accessed their email account, and faked a press pass, according to a criminal complaint reported by the Arizona Republic.
Harrison’s arrest appears to mark the end of the bush-based campaign via Facebook livestream. Until Harrison’s legal case is resolved, it seems, the marauding MAGA sign thieves of Arizona will go undeterred.
Emails show Wohl plotting racist robocall
Maybe it’s fitting that, with the end of the Trump era potentially in sight, Trump superfan Jacob Wohl’s is looking at a possible prison term for his own pro-Trump antics.
Wohl and co-schemer Jack Burkman have been charged with felonies in both Michigan and Ohio over a racist robocall aimed at convincing Black voters not to use mail-in ballots. It’s hard to see how the pair can get out of the charges with a fine—their cases have been embraced by attorneys general in both states, and face 18 charges each in Ohio alone, for a potential 18½ years in prison each if convicted of every charge.
Now, newly public emails introduced at a hearing in Michigan on Thursday reveal exactly how the duo created the robocall and specifically targeted it.
In an Aug. 19 email sent right as they were cooking up the robocall, Wohl boasted to Burkman that only they could stop the election from becoming dull, citing low online viewer counts for Bill Clinton’s Democratic National Convention speech.
“Our press conferences literally get 50-100x more views which is why we must HIJACK this boring election,” Wohl wrote to Burkman.
“America needs w b,” Burkman wrote back, using apparent shorthand for “Wohl Burkman.”
That same day, Burkman wrote to the robocall provider to ask if he could launch the robocalls.
“then we attack,” Burkman wrote to Wohl and the head of the robocall company.
Wohl’s attempt to “hijack” the election apparently included plans to target black voters with a robocall warning that “the man” would use mail-in ballot information to pursue credit card debts and enforce mandatory vaccinations.
“We should send it to black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta and Cleveland,” Wohl wrote to Burkman on Aug. 26, attaching the audio for the robocall.
Burkman paid for the robocalls with a $1,000 check from his own company. Within hours, he was relishing getting angry calls from Black voters who had received the robocall, since Burkman had inexplicably chosen to use his own phone number as the call-back number for the robocall. Burkman told Wohl he was enjoying the “angry black call backs.”
“i love these robo calls getting angry black call backs,” Burkman wrote. “Win or lose the black robo was a great [Jacob Wohl] idea.”
A few days later, though, things had started to go south for the notorious pair. After Michigan’s attorney general announced an investigation into the robocall, Wohl emailed Burkman and told him to lie to The Daily Beast and other reporters about their role in the call.
“I d bet on a soros group trying to embarrass us,” Burkman wrote to one reporter.
Thursday’s hearing suggested that Wohl and Burkman, who have already acknowledged ordering the robocall, are facing a difficult legal road ahead.
The prosecution’s star witness, a Black retired firefighter, spoke about how hurt he was at the robocall’s attempt to pressure him out of voting. The judge in the case called the robocall “reprehensible.” Wohl and Burkman opted to appear for the Zoom hearing in front of a green-screen background of the Capitol, again inexplicably, as their attempt to “hijack” the 2020 race looks set instead to send them to prison.
