STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Twenty-two-year-old Jacob Wohl has grown to be pretty famous on social media, although infamous is likely a better description. Wohl and allies have contacted journalists for a few years, claiming evidence of improprieties by people like Robert Mueller and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Wohl's ties to Arizona have to do with finance-related allegations against him. The Corporation Commission determined that Wohl hadn't been honest in efforts to get tens of thousands of dollars from people for his investment firm. And recently, Arizona's Attorney General's Office decided it would pursue Wohl. Reporter Roger Sollenberger wrote about Wohl for Salon and is with me to talk about the story. Roger, what was the securities complaint against Wohl specifically about, and has this been part of a pattern for him?

ROGER SOLLENBERGER: This was when he was first getting started. So back in 2016 — I mean, Jacob is 22 years old now — and he was pushing a hedge fund investment. He was selling himself as a sort of wunderkind, right? And he and a business partner named Matt Johnson, who's a little bit older than Jacob, they started pitching out their deck and saying, "oh, you can invest with us." They were portraying their company to be much larger and much more capable than it was. It was really just the two of them. But they made up fake employees, just like they did with Surefire Intelligence and Robert Mueller. They said that there would not be much risk with their investments. They were basically scamming people on securities. What happened was, an Arizona man got bilked out of $75,000 investment, and he called the Riverside Court, the superior court there, and tipped them off to Jacob. And then this man, according to the warrant on Jacob Wohl, this man killed himself shortly thereafter.

GOLDSTEIN: The Arizona Attorney General's Office getting involved, where is the connection in all of this? Is this, and as I sort of said, is this a pattern with Wohl? Because if a man kills himself based on this involvement with Wohl, what are the possibilities going forward for authorities to pursue charges against him?

SOLLENBERGER: The suicide — it's not very clear what drove the man to it. But you can look at Wohl as a master manipulator who, definitely following a pattern and has not changed his M.O. He's a con man. He sells people on himself. He sells people into believing in him and attaching their identity to him. And that pattern has carried him for years. Now, with the Arizona AG's office, that's actually in coordination with the Arizona Corporation Commission. And the ACC ruled against Jacob Wohl for inflating the value and the size of his company and as well as promoting fake marketing materials and selling people on investment that was much higher risk than what he had promised. And so the ACC awarded the plaintiffs against Wohl about $38,000 in restitution and fines. Now Jacob, through his attorney, argued that he couldn't pay that money and they told the court that it wasn't that much money. And so Jacob could start paying it for weeks. You know, they got a continuance from the judge. The judge granted them the continuance. And Jacob was ordered to pay a little over $1,000 a month in installments to restore the people that he had wronged. Jacob, I found out just recently, has not paid any of that money. In response to my article, I think they got in touch with the Arizona attorney general. And the Arizona attorney general is working now with lawyers, apparently prosecutors in California, to try to collect on the money that Wohl owes them.

GOLDSTEIN: What stood out for you in the sense of either what kind of guy Jacob Wohl is or what he and his partners have tried to do? Is there anything that stands out to you as indicative of a certain direction or a certain style or what some of the past may have labeled political dirty tricks? Is it in that category, or is it much worse than that?

SOLLENBERGER: To me, it's a complicated case, see? I can't tell if Jacob is — how do you say this — if he's serious about some of these pursuits, or if he just thinks that they're funny and he's trying to appeal to a certain base to try to get the young right wing sort of amped up to just generate a lot of excitement or generate a lot of anger and make a spectacle of himself. Now, I do think that Jacob is driven primarily by ego, and that's a conclusion that is not just mine but is shared by numerous journalists who have covered these sort of hapless events that he's tried to put on.

GOLDSTEIN: That is reporter Roger Sollenberger of Salon. We've been talking about his recent piece about Jacob Wohl.

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