Mike Roman: Placing Obscure Co-Defendants

Donald Trump has 18 co-defendants in Georgia. While some of them are familiar names, others may only register dimly or be complete unknowns. But they’ll take on more importance in the next few weeks. Some of them, like David Shaker, Shawn Still, and Cathy Latham, who were among Georgia’s fake electors, show up in roles where it’s unlikely they had much, if any, direct contact with the former president. Then, there’s Mike Roman.

Roman has had an interest in propagating false claims of voter fraud for a long time. He was doing it as far back as the early 1990s, when he was involved in a Pennsylvania race that was overturned based on allegations of voter fraud. Before becoming an advisor to Trump, he ran a secretive in-house intelligence unit for the conservative Koch brothers organization, making upwards of $250,000.00 a year for his voter suppression work. He worked on the 2016 election, took on a White House role doing special projects that was never well defined, and was back on the campaign staff by 2018. He became Trump’s director of Election Day Operations for 2020. Traditionally that’s the type of position that involves efforts to get out the vote, but in Roman’s case, many people familiar with his work believed he would focus again on undercutting the legitimacy of the election results by pushing fake claims of fraud.

Evidence that surfaced during the January 6 committee hearings placed Roman in a central role in the organization of the seven slates of fake Trump electors in battleground states including his home state, Pennsylvania. One of the allegations in the Georgia indictment is that in late November 2020, Roman was encouraging other campaign officials to contact state legislators in Georgia to urge them to unlawfully appoint Trump electors. Roman even kept a spread sheet with names and contact information for fake electors in it.

Roman told the January 6 committee that his role with the Trump campaign was maintaining contacts with state officials and tracking voting-related legislation before the election. In his deposition he said that “It was a lot of drilling down into the mechanics of the electoral process and what the campaign was doing to ensure that every voter that was coming out was able to cast a ballot and that illegal ballots, if there were any, would be identified.” The committee’s report reveals that it was Roman who dispatched a staffer to the Capitol to deliver the fake elector certificate to Congress. Roman took the 5th when he was asked about it.

The wasn’t the only thing Roman declined to testify about, out of concern his own testimony would incriminate him. He refused to answer questions about any conversations he might have had with Trump about calls Trump had with state legislators to encourage them to appoint fake slates of electors. He declined to reveal “other options for changing or affecting the results of the 2020 Presidential election” that he and Trump might have discussed. And he refused to tell Congressional investigators whether he discussed the alternate elector plans with Trump before or after the fake slates voted on December 4.

Roman was charged in Georgia with the RICO count all 19 defendants are named in. In addition, Roman was charged with 2 counts of conspiracy to commit forgery, 2 counts of making false statements, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and a conspiracy to file false documents. That’s a lot of luggage. Roman could be looking at as much as five to 20 years in custody if convicted on the RICO charge alone, which makes you wonder whether the veteran political operative might not be a candidate to cooperated against Trump.

All of those unanswered questions make him sound like the kind of guy prosecutors would have a lot of interest in speaking to—especially the potential for learning about direct conversations he had with Trump about the fake electors plot and other activity that is now charged as criminal. Although Roman clammed up in front of the January 6 committee, there was speculation before Special Counsel Jack Smith brought his election fraud indictment that Roman was considering cooperating. Some reporting suggested Roman was actually cooperating.

Like everyone other than Trump, Roman avoided indictment at the hands of Jack Smith. That makes it hard to know for certain whether he was cooperating. But it seems likely that if he was, he would have cooperated with Fani Willis, in Georgia, too. That means her decision to charge him, rather than including him in the group of unindicted co-conspirators, casts doubt on the issue of whether he is in fact cooperating. But now that he’s named in the Fulton County indictment, the clock is ticking for Roman to decide what role he wants to play, witness or defendant. If he’s not cooperating, this may be the motivation he needs to finally answer some of those questions about conversations he had with Trump and what the then president knew and what he was willing to do to hold onto power.

We’re in this together,

Joyce