A staffer for Congressman Dean Phillips, who was running against President Joe Biden, has admitted to commissioning a fake robocall using an AI-generated version of Biden’s voice. The admission came in the form of a non-apology statement made to NBC News correspondent Alex Seitz-Wald.
The call was created by a magician named Paul Carpenter, who claimed he was paid $150 by Steve Kramer, a consultant for Phillips. The robocall was designed to discourage New Hampshire voters from participating in their state’s primary. Phillips has denied knowledge of Kramer’s actions and threatened legal action if the claim is proven true.
Over the weekend, Kramer admitted he did the deed — but in an interview with Seitz-Wald, stunningly painted himself as a hero:
Kramer claimed he planned the fake robocall from the start as an act of civil disobedience to call attention to the dangers of AI in politics. He compared himself to American Revolutionary heroes Paul Revere and Thomas Paine. He said more enforcement is necessary to stop people like him from doing what he did.
“This is a way for me to make a difference, and I have,” he said in the interview. “For $500, I got about $5 million worth of action, whether that be media attention or regulatory action.”
Kramer said he came up with the idea for the hoax entirely on his own and that it had nothing to do with his client, Biden’s long-shot primary challenger, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. Phillips had paid Kramer over $250,000 around the time the robocall went out in January, according to his campaign finance reports.
Biden won New Hampshire overwhelmingly. Despite not being on the ballot due to the state’s defiance of the Democratic National Committee’s decision to move South Carolina up to be the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary, Biden got nearly two-thirds of the vote thanks to a write-in campaign. Phillips almost cracked twenty percent, while Marianne Williamson garnered four percent.
