The existential dread that typically dominates Twitter was briefly replaced Tuesday by a burst of Schadenfreude at the expense of Jacob Wohl, a 20-year-old MAGA troll whose renown largely derives from his hyperbolic replies to Donald Trump’s tweets (“Defund Latin America!”, for example, has received nearly 2,000 likes). Wohl’s origin story, like many right-wing media stars of the Trump era, is somewhat murky. He initially tried to make his name as a hedge-fund wunderkind, branding himself the “Wohl of Wall Street” in 2015, but his operation was derailed following national and state investigations into allegations of securities fraud. (He denied any wrongdoing.) Afterward, he relocated his grift to the more accommodating environs of the MAGA social-media ecosystem. There, he thrived, launching a conservative news site with plagiarized content and, eventually, landing a contributor position at the fringe site Gateway Pundit.

But the saga of Jacob Wohl took a turn this week, when he was unexpectedly implicated in a bizarre plot to smear special counsel Robert Mueller as a sexual predator. The exact nature of the scheme, and Wohl’s involvement, is somewhat unclear. On October 17, a number of journalists reportedly received an e-mail from “Lorraine Parsons,” alleging that she had been contacted by a man claiming to work for a firm called Surefire Intelligence, on behalf of G.O.P. operative Jack Burkman, who had offered her substantial sums of money to make false accusations about Mueller. Yet no reporters were able to verify that Lorraine is a real person. Surefire Intelligence, too, appeared to be fake. When NBC News investigated, they found the Web site was registered to Wohl’s e-mail; a phone number on the site went to a voice mail that provided another number listed as belonging to Wohl’s mother. (Wohl stopped responding to NBC after they asked why his mother’s phone number was in that voice mail.) In perhaps the most amateurish element of the whole sordid episode, Internet sleuths quickly discovered that headshots of Surefire’s purported employees actually belonged to celebrities including Israeli model Bar Refaeli and Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. A photograph of “Matthew Cohen,” allegedly a managing partner at Surefire Intelligence, is simply a darkened image of Wohl himself.

On Tuesday, Mueller’s office asked the F.B.I. to investigate the scheme. “When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the special counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the F.B.I. for investigation,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, said in a rare statement. Burkman, a Republican lawyer who has promoted conspiracy theories about Seth Rich and peddled sexual harassment allegations against a sitting member of Congress, denied promising payments to “Lorraine,” but said that “Surefire is a real company” run by Jacob Wohl. (Update: In a YouTube video published Thursday, Wohl admitted that he runs Surefire.)

The Wohl affair, apart from being a diverting spectacle, illuminates several truisms about the far-right media landscape, the opportunists that populate it, and the ways in which MAGA fever dreams take on a life of their own. “The more I read about this Mueller Rape Case business, the more convinced I am that this is a Democrat dirty trick to pull a ‘reverse Kavanaugh,’ trying to impugn Republicans for ‘paying women to make up false rape claims against Mueller,’” theorized pro-Trump radio host Bill Mitchell on Tuesday night. “Just more BS from team DNC.” Forums trafficking in QAnon conspiracy theories were similarly convinced that Wohl was a Deep State mole. Wohl himself doubled down, denied having anything to do with Surefire, and defiantly tweeted a photo of himself smoking a tiny cigar. By Wednesday, he was claiming to be the victim of some sort of mainstream-media cabal, and suggested that Mueller’s office was planting false flags to discredit his work. (He also re-tweeted a Burkman statement calling the “Lorraine” story “a hoax designed to distract the nation from my press conference on Thursday, which is where all eyes need to be.”)