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.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the campaign had no knowledge of the scheme. A spokeswoman at the FBI’s New York field office — where Jacobus first filed a complaint about the scheme this spring — declined to comment, citing the bureau’s policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of investigations.

Richard Baum, the public defender who represented Wessel in his most recent fraud cause, declined to comment on the record.

The scheme began last year on October 18, the day The Washington Post published an article about ties between Make America Great Again, the super PAC run by Ciletti, and the Trump campaign. The Post reported that the campaign was using WizBang Solutions, a printing firm that lists Ciletti as a director, as a vendor, an arrangement that would only be legal if WizBang had instituted a firewall to prevent coordination between the PAC and the campaign. Lewandowski, who was campaign manager at the time, initially told the Post that he did not know Ciletti — a longtime associate of his — before conceding that the two knew each other. At the time, the campaign was denying that it had blessed any super PACs, and Lewandowski threatened to sue the Post over the story.

In response to the Post article, Jacobus took to Twitter, where she revealed that Lewandowski had told her about plans for a pro-Trump super PAC during preliminary job discussions she had with Trump’s campaign. Soon after she posted the tweets, Wessel apparently contacted Jacobus through a Twitter account with the handle @JustBeingMeagan, which purported to belong to an American expatriate lawyer living in England named “Meagan Lancaster.”

Lancaster told Jacobus that she served as the representative of wealthy donors, including some who had given to a pro-Carly Fiorina super PAC. She talked of getting Jacobus work with the Fiorina campaign.

Lancaster also inserted herself into the political conversation on Twitter, lambasting Trump and exchanging tweets with the likes of Republican strategist Matthew Dowd and Fox News host Greta Van Susteren. She told Jacobus that her clients included the British billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben, who could donate to political causes in the U.S. through an American wife.

Lancaster dished to Jacobus about a concocted personal life, claiming to have had an extramarital affair with Atwater and talking of made-up plans to meet with CNN host Chris Cuomo in Paris. Jacobus now believes this was designed to induce her to confide personal information to Lancaster that could be used to blackmail her.

Lancaster lavished Jacobus with two $250 gift certificates to the Mandarin Oriental hotel, which Jacobus now cites as additional evidence that Wessel, left broke by his legal troubles, was not acting alone. And Lancaster wrote breezily in emails of a glamorous lifestyle, telling Jacobus at one point that she was jetting off for a ski weekend at St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps.

As months of back-and-forth went on, talk of work with the Fiorina campaign faded and new fake personas entered into the scheme. There was a phone call and emails from someone calling himself “Allen Wayne,” an Aspen-based adviser to her donors who died suddenly and was replaced by the persona of Annapolis-based adviser “Will Elliot,” who had worked previously in Wichita.

In December, Lancaster said her clients were looking to plow millions of dollars into anti-Trump efforts, and Jacobus offered to put her in touch with Rick Wilson and Liz Mair, who were running an anti-Trump super PAC called Make America Awesome. But Jacobus was also growing suspicious, and she warned the operatives to handle Lancaster with care.

Lancaster told the pair that her clients needed to know what the group had on Trump before deciding to make an investment, and asked detailed questions about the group’s strategy, according to Wilson and Jacobus. Mair and Wilson stopped playing ball, and Wilson came away convinced that he was being targeted by a political opponent.

“Con artists want money,” said Wilson. “They were asking us for information.”

Mair, a British national who practiced law in London, said she found the scammer’s attempt to pass as an English solicitor laughable. “Using the ‘Lancaster’ name was also particularly moronic when dealing with someone who, as a hobby, extensively studies British medieval history, but hey, that’s all right in line with the people who I believe put Wessel up to this,” she said

In an appearance on CNN on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Jacobus criticized Trump as coming off like a “third-grader” in interviews and debates. Lewandowski responded the next day on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” by dismissing Jacobus as a spurned job-seeker. A few days later, Jacobus criticized Trump again and the businessman responded by tweeting, “@cherijacobus begged us for a job. We said no and she went hostile. A real dummy!”

According to Jacobus, Trump and Lewandowski were defaming her: the Trump campaign reached out to her first about possible work and she decided she had no interest, she said. Lancaster offered to help Jacobus find a lawyer, and connected her with Bruce Barket, a New York attorney who was actively tweeting about politics and had also struck up an online conversation with Lancaster. Barket spoke on the phone with a man claiming to be Elliott, who offered to cover Jacobus’ legal fees.

On Feb 3, Barket and Jacobus grew increasingly suspicious and demanded that Lancaster contact them through a work email address. When Lancaster emailed them from “SullivanLancasterLLP.com,” a private investigator working for Barket discovered that the domain has been registered earlier that same day.

Barket and Jacobus also compared notes and found that “Will Elliott” was using the same Colorado phone number as the deceased “Allen Wayne.” Barket’s investigator traced some of the emails used in the scheme to servers in Colorado, including one in Englewood, the home of New West Public Affairs, a firm that lists Ciletti as a partner. That connection bolstered suspicions that Make America Great Again PAC was involved in the scheme, although it is easy for hackers to mask the origins of their emails using basic online tools. Ciletti responded that he “can guarantee 100 percent” that the IP addresses for the servers that the emails passed through do not belong to him or anyone he knows.

Meanwhile, that day, Barket sent Trump and Lewandowski cease-and-desist letters on Jacobus’ behalf. Two days later, on February 5, Trump repeated the claim that Jacobus “begged” his campaign for a job and became disgruntled after being turned down.

Later in February, Jacobus had a friend provide her with more information on the SullivanLancasterLLP.Com registration, and discovered it been registered to a person named “Wes Wessels.” The registration also listed a Washington, D.C. telephone number and the address of a woman named Peg Butler, on New York’s Upper West Side.

An Internet search quickly revealed that Wes Wessels was the alias Wessel used while perpetrating a Ponzi scheme for which he had recently been convicted. As part of that scheme -- which was catalogued in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and New York Daily News – Wessel had successfully posed as a graduate of Oxford and chaired the 2014 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race Dinner. Wessel was also prone to claim he had high-level government contacts from intelligence work and work in the Reagan Administration. Wessel had also once been caught posing online as an English lawyer in an attempt to obtain his estranged son’s Social Security number.

Jacobus went to Butler’s home to warn her that her address was being used in the scam and was greeted there by a man who explained that his wife did website registration work. Then @JustBeingMeagan’s account disappeared from Twitter. Jacobus later established through news accounts that Butler is Wessel’s wife, and that the man she had spoken to at Butler’s address had been Wessel, who was then out on bail awaiting incarceration. Butler did not respond to repeated requests for comment over several months.

Jacobus brought information about the scheme to the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York who had just convicted Wessel of fraud. As a condition of Wessel’s bail, he was forbidden from using the Internet, and in April, a judge revoked his bail for violating that condition, sending him directly to prison to begin serving his sentence, according to a transcript of the bail hearing.

Days later, and represented by a new lawyer, Jacobus sued Trump and Lewandowski for defamation, litigation that is still ongoing.

Former friends of Wessel and a family member, all speaking on the condition of anonymity, described him as lacking in real political connections and prone to perpetrating slow-moving, elaborate schemes. “This guy is obviously delusional and it wouldn’t surprise me that he would come up with this on his own,” said a person who associated with Wessel in New York. “He always said he was connected. As far as I could tell he wasn’t.”

But Jacobus said she has no doubt that Wessel was working at the behest of others, pointing to the recent hacking of her email, which occurred while Wessel sat in a jail cell.

Barket, the lawyer whom Wessel connected to Jacobus while posing as Meagan Lancaster, said he shares Jacobus’ and Wilson’s suspicion of political dirty tricks, and said that a criminal investigation is in order. Barket never received the promised legal fees but for him the scheme came with a silver lining. Lancaster sent him a $250 gift certificate good for the restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental as a thank you for helping Jacobus.

"I always wondered whether or not it was real,” he said. “So I went there one night and had a big dinner and it was real."

Ken Vogel contributed to this report.