Trump ally emerges to deal blow to Ga. case
As Mike Roman spoke to a gathering of fellow conservative activists in March 2022, he offered a glimpse of the intelligence-gathering skills he had honed over the previous decade working as an opposition researcher for Donald Trump and Republican megadonors.
“I show my wife this all the time when we go to a hotel,” Roman told the crowd in Harrisburg, Pa., according to an audio recording reviewed by The Washington Post. “She logs on to the Hilton WiFi, and I go on and I ‘tap, tap, tap,’ and I show her everybody else that’s on there and how we could get into their computer.”
After spending years digging in the shadows, Roman is now in the spotlight, having landed a damaging blow to the racketeering case that Georgia prosecutors are pursuing against Trump and more than a dozen others — including Roman — for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Roman has pleaded not guilty.
In a bombshell legal filing on Jan. 8, Roman’s attorney alleged that Fulton County District
Attorney Fani T. Willis (D), who is heading the prosecution, is in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer she hired for the case. While Wade’s firm was receiving more than $650,000 in public funds, Wade — who has been embroiled in a messy divorce — was paying for vacations with Willis in the Caribbean and elsewhere, according to Roman, who alleges that Willis improperly benefited.
In a court filing Friday, Willis acknowledged a “personal relationship” with Wade. The filing, including an affidavit by Wade, said the relationship began after she hired him and has not tainted the prosecution or provided her with any financial benefit.
Roman has asked a judge to toss out his indictment and disqualify both prosecutors from the case, a request that will be the subject of a hearing scheduled for Feb. 15. Whatever its outcome, the salacious allegations have already given Trump ammunition for attacks aimed at discrediting the prosecution. “When is Fani going to drop the case,” he asked on social media, “or should it be dropped for her?”
Roman’s defense attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, told The Post in a brief exchange that she, rather than her client, unearthed the information that underpins the claims against Willis and Wade. Roman has embraced the move: When fellow conservative operatives wrote on X that Roman was “the guy who busted Fani Willis” and that his 127-page court filing was “an object lesson in why you don’t indict the oppo guy,” he clicked like on the posts.
Over a career as a political operative and investigator, including for the conservative Koch brothers’ network, he has been described as intensely private and driven in his work. He has hired former CIA analysts to train his staff, arranged for drones to surveil campaign rallies and used military terminology, according to former colleagues. While working for Trump in 2020, he recruited poll-watchers for what the campaign called the “Army for Trump,” oversaw election-day operations and played a key role in organizing the “alternate elector plan” that is central to the charges in Fulton County, records show.
Merchant declined to answer detailed questions for this article. Roman did not respond.
Roman, 52, climbed to the upper echelons of Republican politics from hardscrabble beginnings in North Philadelphia, in a strongly Catholic blue-collar neighborhood within the city’s so-called “Badlands.”
“Mike’s got street smarts,” Philadelphia lawyer Bruce S. Marks, a friend of Roman’s for more than 30 years, told The Post in 2020. “He’s not some Ivy League guy with a bow-tie.”
In 2008, Roman launched an independent website dedicated to exposing election “fraud, cheating and dirty tricks.” A video he published showing members of the New Black Panther party outside a Philadelphia polling place, one holding a billy club, was picked up by Fox News and sparked a years-long controversy.
During the 2008 campaign, Roman worked for the presidential campaigns of former
New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). The campaigns paid him and a small consulting firm he had formed a total of more than $142,000 in pay and expenses, according to campaign finance reports.
In Fulton County, Roman is charged with seven counts, including conspiring to impersonate a public officer, to commit first-degree forgery and to file false documents. Following his indictment in August, he organized an online fundraising campaign to pay for his defense against what he described as the “highly partisan, media hungry District Attorney.” So far he has raised $59,000 toward a goal of $300,000.
Going on the offense against the prosecutor was a trademark Roman tactic, according to a former senior official on Trump’s 2020 campaign, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly for the campaign. “This is a classic Mike Roman move. When I saw the filing, I said, ‘That’s Mike.’ It’s a good one.”