#J6Files: Michael Roman
The little-known Trump campaign operative delivered false electors to the Capitol
I should probably buy Roman a tie or something for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876, and it was only three States that did it.
— Michael Brown text to Angela McCallum and Madison Crawley
Michael Brown flew to Washington D.C. clutching is bag because he “didn’t want to let the docs out of his sight.” Brown told Angela McCallum once he landed in D.C. to deliver the fraudulent electors, understanding that those electors would provide Vice President Mike Pence an opportunity to decline to certify Joe Biden’s legal electors at the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
Michael “Mike” Roman’s transcript, despite the majority of his answers invoking his fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination, is an important piece of the story to overturn the 2020 election.
Mike Roman began working in the White House in 2017 officially as “Special Assistant to the President", but additionally described himself as “Director of Special Projects and Research”. This role was not housed in the typical Personnel Office but held within the White House Counsel’s Office. There, Roman was apparently tasked with clearance and vetting of non-Senate confirmed employees for the administration.
Background — Mike Roman
As Politico in 2018 put it, “few people in or close to the White House have any idea what Michael Roman does all day,” Roman wasn’t a familiar name or face to the general public. Reporting to White House counsel, Don McGahn, Roman quietly joined the White House soon after Trump’s inauguration.
Mike Roman is no stranger to ginning up fear and chaos for the conservative base related to elections. In fact, Mike Roman ran Donald Trump’s ‘election protection’ efforts during the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. According to The Guardian in October 2016, Roman was assigned to oversee poll-watching efforts for Trump, who at the time, was calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161017123416/
Which means Mike Roman would have been instrumental in pushing ideas like this to Trump in 2016 anticipating a defeat to Hilary Clinton, a sentiment widely felt across the country at the time. Unfortunately, that sentiment was wrong.
Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers standing outside a Philadelphia polling place. An investigation into the incident became a favorite talking point of conservatives claiming that Democrats were the ones interfering the election processes.
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “It was one of the most retold stories on Fox News and the right for years and took on almost mythical status as evidence of thuggery by Democrats to harm the voting process.”
Hasen said Roman was “somebody who has been more willing to put forth more outrageous statements about voter fraud and election process”. Hasen added: “I don’t consider him a very responsible voice among Republicans on this question and I’m not surprised that Trump would be using him for polling related efforts.”
That controversial video of two men yelling racial slurs led to infighting and political recriminations inside the Justice Department and became a flash point for conservative media.
A former Justice Department lawyer alleged that the department scaled down a voter-intimidation case against because his former colleagues “do not want to protect white people’s civil rights”.
Adams argued that the New Black Panther Party case was solid. He also portrayed the civil rights division as a place where many officials are hostile to the idea of using civil rights laws to go after black perpetrators with white victims.
6 July 2010 by Charlie Savage, The New York Times | Racial Motive Alleged in Justice Dept Decision
(Back in Feb 2021 I tried to draw attention to the fact that Trump had appointed J. Christian Adams in Aug 2020 to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as a Commissioner, who’s appointment doesn’t expire until 2025. He’s still in that position.)
J. Christian Adams, partner of coup-conspirator attorney, Cleta Mitchell.
Mike Roman was also a contributor to the propaganda outlet Breitbart during the rise of the Tea Party in 2009-2011. https://www.breitbart.com/author/mike-roman/
5 May 2017 by Rick Hasen for the Election Law Blog | Mike Roman Now Working for Trump Administration
“They told people that’s the way they liked it,” the official recalled. “They act all cloak and dagger – like the CIA. There was a joke about how hardly anyone ever met Mike Roman. It was like, if you wanted to find him, he’d be in a trench coat on the National Mall,” said the former official.
Former network official’s comments on the Freedom Partners — run by Mike Roman, is managed through a limited liability company called American Strategies Group LLC, or ASG for short.
18 Nov 2015 by Kenneth Vogel for Politico | The Koch Intelligence Agency
The political network helmed by Charles and David Koch has quietly built a secretive operation that conducts surveillance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents, viewing it as a key strategic tool in its efforts to reshape American public life.
The operation, which is little-known even within the Koch network, gathers what Koch insiders refer to as “competitive intelligence” that is used to try to thwart liberal groups and activists, and to identify potential threats to the expansive network.
The competitive intelligence team has a staff of 25, including one former CIA analyst, and operates from one of the non-descript Koch network offices clustered near the Courthouse metro stop in suburban Arlington, Va. It has provided network officials with documents detailing confidential voter-mobilization plans by major Democrat-aligned groups. It also sends regular “intelligence briefing” emails tracking the canvassing, phone-banking and voter-registration efforts of labor unions, environmental groups and their allies.
The competitive intelligence team has gathered on-the-ground intelligence from liberal groups’ canvassing events in an effort to assess the technology and techniques of field efforts to boost Democrats, according to the sources. And they say the team utilizes high-tech tactics to track the movements of liberal organizers, including culling geo-data embedded in their social media posts.
Such stealth activities are the kind that campaigns, and party operatives often fantasize about but mostly shy away from ― both because of cost and potential political backlash if exposed.
“We were caught off guard by what the left was doing in 2012, and we’d be foolish to be caught in that position again,” Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the network’s central group, declined to discuss its efforts to track the left, generally, or to comment on the competitive intelligence team, which operates as a unit within his group. But he did not dispute that the effort is a focus for the Koch network as it tries to rebound from the disappointment of the 2012 elections.
Alternate Electors — Orchestrated by Mike Roman
Mike Roman was subpoenaed by the Select Committee in February 2022. A short paragraph described the purpose for requesting his appearance. They stated they had credible evidence that Roman participated in efforts to promote the unsupported allegations of fraud and had encouraged state legislators to alter the outcome of the election by appointing fraudulent electors to send as competing electoral votes to the US Congress.
The Select Committee only included two citations.
An article published by Politico in November 2020, Trump camp stokes fear over unfounded claims of mass voter fraud in Philly, and a tweet from Mike Roman’s account that referenced #StopTheSteal.
PDF: 15 Feb 2022 | Letter to Mike Roman from the January 6 Select Committee
The transcript shows however, that investigators with the Select Committee had much more information than the subpoena suggested.
Roman’s previous stint at the ‘Koch Intel’ firm seems to have been the perfect precursor to take on the role of orchestrating the pressure campaign of State officials and subsequent delivery of fraudulent electors. And the questions presented to him in the interview confirm that the Committee knows how involved he was.
During the interview, Mike Roman couldn’t recall much on multiple occasions leading up to the November 3rd election day, and for everything after the 3rd, he consistently invoked his fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
Originally, upon receipt of the subpoena, Mike Roman looks to have provided approximately 74 documents to the Select Committee. Apparently Roman realized his error and ceased any further production of documents, instead relying on his fifth amendment to decline any additional submissions to the Select Committee.
Other interesting notes from the transcripts
In an email the Committee had obtained, they asked him about the specific choice of words he used:
And, then, in that email, you say “Not sure that satisfies the narrative.” What was the narrative you’re referring to here in response to Alex Cannon’s email?
Mike Roman in response, plead the fifth.
They asked him about emails sent from Donald J. Trump for President which referenced election fraud. Claims like “Election Fraud is Real”, and “Their goal is to steal this election from the American people. They want to steal from YOU.” They wanted to know if he wrote or approved this constant disinformation spread by the official Trump campaign since Roman was listed as the National EDO Director.
Roman plead the fifth.
He was asked if he had any proof of widespread intentional vote flipping used in voting machines, including Dominion Voting Systems. Or whether he had any proof that any of the alleged irregularities actually changed the outcome in any of the states. And reminiscent of Trump’s 2016 claims, Roman was asked if he had proof that enough dead people voted to change the outcome of any result in any of the states.
Roman plead the fifth.
As the committee continued on down the timeline of events Mike Roman was involved in, they made their way to correspondence on and around December 18th.
December 18th, the day of the insane meeting we’ve covered at length in our series here:
** Breaking here for now. I’ll return and provide additional comments on the other findings from this transcript. In the meantime, here’s the highlights I noted.