Ex-Trump ’20 campaigner said talking to Smith staff
Michael Roman, a top official in former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, is in discussions with the office of the special counsel Jack Smith that could soon lead to Roman voluntarily answering questions about a plan to create slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Joe Biden, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Roman’s interview with prosecutors working for Smith would be the first known instance of cooperation by someone with direct knowledge of the fake elector plan. The scheme has long been at the center of Smith’s investigation into Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The talks with Roman, who served as Trump’s director of Election Day operations, were the latest indication that Smith is actively pressing forward with his election interference investigation even as attention has been focused on the other case in his portfolio: the recent indictment of Trump in Florida on charges of illegally keeping hold of classified documents and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.
In the past few weeks, several witnesses with connections to the fake elector plan have appeared in front of a grand jury in U.S. District Court in Washington that is investigating the ways in which Trump and his allies sought to reverse his defeat to Biden. Among them was Gary Michael Brown, Roman’s onetime deputy, who was questioned in front of the grand jury Thursday.
Roman did much of the legwork in putting together the fake elector plan and in finding ways to challenge Trump’s losses in several key battleground states, according to emails reviewed last summer by The New York Times.
Among those with whom Roman worked closely, the emails showed, were Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer and political adviser on the campaign who has since served as something like Trump’s in-house counsel, and Jenna Ellis, another lawyer who advised Trump on how to challenge the election results.
In March, as part of a disciplinary proceeding by bar officials in her home state of Colorado, Ellis admitted that she had knowingly misrepresented facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud had led to Trump’s defeat.