Steven Wessel is a convicted con man with a Big Apple flair, feigning connections to Ronald Reagan and pretending to be an Oxford man while bilking rich Manhattanites of $750,000. But his last scam before heading to prison this spring targeted a very different kind of mark: Republican operatives opposed to Donald Trump.
And now those operatives are wondering who put Wessel up to it.
Assuming a variety of fake online identities, including that of a female solicitor in England, Wessel gushed in emails, phone calls and Twitter messages about (made-up) extramarital affairs with the likes of the late Lee Atwater, showered marks with gift cards to the swanky Mandarin Oriental, and invited them to go pheasant-hunting in Scotland — all in an apparent attempt to glean more about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump. That was until federal prosecutors learned of the activity and a judge revoked Wessel’s bail in April, sending him to prison to begin serving a 55-month sentence ahead of schedule.
In a campaign season marked by the mind-bending, the — until now unreported —caper of Wessel’s months-long “catfishing” of operatives Rick Wilson, Liz Mair and Cheri Jacobus ranks among more bizarre episodes. It could get more bizarre still. The targets of the scheme do not believe that Wessel, described by his own lawyer as mentally ill, was acting alone. This month Jacobus, who said she believes Wessel was working in concert with allies of Trump, renewed her efforts to get the FBI to investigate the scheme.
Wilson, one of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics and the head of a super PAC that opposed the New York billionaire during the primaries, said that only a political professional would think to pump him for the information Wessel sought about his PAC. “The questions were of such a degree of granularity and specificity and political acumen that unless [Wessel] had political experience it would be hard for him to come up with them,” he said.
Wessel, who is currently in federal prison in North Carolina, did not respond to letters seeking comment.
Meanwhile, the operatives claim that Trump backers were behind the scam, which sought no money, only information about the operatives’ plans for targeting the billionaire presidential candidate. Wessel’s motives remain murky, and the identities of his accomplices, if any, remain unknown. Targets of the scheme have floated a number of figures whom they suspect of participating. Citing emails traced to servers in Colorado and the use of a Colorado phone number in the scheme, Wilson suggested the possible involvement of Make America Great Again PAC, a now defunct pro-Trump super PAC that shut its doors after reports surfaced of possible improper coordination with the campaign.
In text messages, Colorado political operative Mike Ciletti, who ran Make America Great Again and is an ally of former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, said there was “nothing to comment on” and that he was not familiar with the targets of the scheme. “Who is Cheri Jacobus and Rick Wilson? I don’t know either of them and have no context as [to] who or what they do,” he said. “If I am coming for you, you will know.”
Online catfishing is an emerging tactic in the world of political dirty tricks. When Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign earlier this year, to the chagrin of Lewandowski, conservative operatives who objected to the move emailed Manafort under false pretenses in an attempt to obtain damaging information about his personal life, according to one of the operatives involved in that effort.
“I don't know that [catfishing] is becoming more common, but in a crazy election cycle like this, where you have no idea where people's allegiances are, you can see how it might be useful,” said the operative.
Late last week — after POLITICO began informing people about the impending publication of this article — Jacobus said thousands of emails disappeared from her personal account and that her Internet provider, AOL, told her the account had been hacked. Jacobus said the hack targeted only emails she has received, not those she has sent, and she believes it was an attempt to prevent her from tracing the origins of more emails sent to her as part of the scheme. Over the weekend, a friend of Jacobus’ reported the hack to the FBI’s Cyber Division on her behalf.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/anti-trump-operatives-targeted-in-online-catfishing-scheme-227288#ixzz4IB9Kf4Il 
