A plan by a Republican lobbyist to publicize a rape accusation against special counsel Robert Mueller fizzled out on Thursday, when the lobbyist said the woman was “fearful for her life” and did not show up to a much-hyped press conference in a hotel outside Washington, D.C.
Earlier in the week, the lobbyist, Jack Burkman, scheduled a Thursday press conference in Northern Virginia to introduce the woman accusing Mueller. He was set to be joined by Jacob Wohl, a conservative Twitter personality, who had helped him dig up the dirt on Mueller.
Burkman and Wohl remained steadfast that they would hold the event, even after Mueller’s office said it asked the FBI to investigate whether the women were being offered money to make false claims against Mueller.
On Thursday, they held the event, but without the woman, who they said “panicked and boarded a flight to another location.”
The woman was identified as Carolyne Cass at the press conference. Her no-show was because she “is fearful for her life and requests to remain anonymous,” according to a Thursday post by Burkman and Wohl on the Gateway Pundit.
At the press conference, the two men said they are going to file a police report against Mueller by the end of next week. However, immediately after making the claim, they said it is “up to” their client if they should.
Burkman and Wohl said Cass met Mueller at New York City hotel where he forced himself on her. She said it happened on a day when Mueller was on jury duty in Washington.
On Twitter Wednesday night, Burkman dismissed “fake news” reports that identified two of the women as Lorraine Parsons and Jennifer Taub.
The Atlantic had first reported that Parsons told journalists in an email she was offered $20,000 by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence, which had been hired Burkman, “to make accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace harassment against Robert Mueller.”
Surefire Intelligence’s domain records list an email belonging to Wohl, who denied in an interview with the Daily Beast about knowing the firm was involved in the scheme against Mueller.
Taub, a law school professor, said she was also contacted by someone using a Surefire Intelligence email address, and forwarded the interactions to the special counsel.
In an interview with the Gateway Pundit, Burkman shot back against reports that they paid women to accuse Mueller.
“I am the biggest skeptic in the world of the #MeToo movement. My default position is not to believe the women – you’ve seen that over and over again as one story after another has come out. And that indeed was my default position in this case. I don’t care who’s getting accused or who’s accusing – my default position is I don’t believe it until its proven, until its corroborated,” Wohl said in the interview on Wednesday night. “I went through the story with the accuser, the gal who had hired our firm, and I asked her many, many questions– where did it happen? When did it happen? Do you have any corroborating witnesses? And over and over again I determined her credibility to be very high, very high.”
