the two men who invented a rape allegation about pete buttigieg are selling pardons now

via CBS News and 60 Minutes, with NBC News and NPR on the history.

The meeting was at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, in mid-August, which may be the most Washington sentence anyone writes this week. On one side, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. On the other, Ammon Covino, an aquarium operator who served a year for illegally trafficking marine life and eleven more for violating his release. The quoted price for a presidential pardon was $300,000, covering $10,000-a-plate fundraisers and influencers paid to demand it publicly.

Covino was wearing 60 Minutes' hidden cameras. CBS had asked him to go.

"With this particular White House," Burkman explained on tape, "you have to put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way to force his hand." On method: "We put him in a pincer movement."

The segment aired Sunday night, and what traveled fastest was the rapper Boosie BadAzz, Torence Hatch, saying he handed the pair $600,000 up front on the understanding half came back if no pardon arrived. None did. Burkman's answer: "the final agreement was never signed, so all you're left with legally speaking is oral contract." Both men told CBS: "We don't owe him anything. ... We encourage him to drop the suit. It's without merit."

Why it is our business. In 2019, with Pete Buttigieg running the first serious presidential campaign by an out gay man, these two produced a sexual assault allegation against him. It came apart in about a day. Hunter Kelly, then 21, said: "I was never raped by Peter Buttigieg, nor was I in Washington DC in February 2019." He said the pair flew him to Washington and that Wohl wrote a post in his name and put it on Medium without permission. Wohl disputed that, saying Kelly had come to him. The following year they ran some 85,000 robocalls into Black neighborhoods before the election, pleaded guilty in Ohio to felony telecommunications fraud, and got probation and ankle monitors.

Seven years and two criminal cases later, nobody has managed to stop them, and the rate is $300,000. The only real innovation is that now there is an invoice.