A Philly political strategist played a ‘major operational role’ in Trump’s fake elector scheme

The plan by Donald Trump and his allies to organize slates of so-called fake electors in battleground states to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election played a central role in the four-count indictment Tuesday charging the former president with conspiracy to defraud the United States.

A key figure in that effort — one who got his start in the world of Philadelphia GOP politics — may have helped provide prosecutors with a road map.

Mike Roman, a relatively obscure Republican campaign strategist who once served as an elected ward leader in the city, was not named in the indictment, but he helped implement a plan to discredit legitimate Joe Biden electors and replace them with bogus Trump electors, according to congressional investigators. He had been in talks with special counsel Jack Smith’s office and agreed to sit for an interview with prosecutors, the New York Times and CNN reported last month.

It remains unclear how much Roman may have shared with the investigators building the case against Trump. Neither Roman, 51, nor his attorneys returned requests for comment Wednesday. But as the case against the former president moves forward in court, the veteran strategist, Kensington native, and Republican provocateur is likely to come under renewed scrutiny.

» READ MORE: What to know about the Pennsylvania fake electors mentioned in Trump’s third indictment

Roman served as director of Election Day operations for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. According to communications that surfaced last year during the investigation by the congressional committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he handled much of the legwork around organizing the seven slates of fake Trump electors purporting to represent the electoral votes from battleground states, including Pennsylvania.

His Philly roots run deep. Raised in Kensington, he briefly left the city to attend the University of Miami. But he quickly returned after dropping out and found a career in politics, playing a key role in Bruce Marks’ 1993 special election campaign for the Pennsylvania Senate — a race that would prove formative for tactics he’d later deploy while working with other candidates.

Marks, a Republican and the seeming loser of that race, sued, contending that the election had been riddled with fraud and that dozens of ballots from heavily Latino blocks of Kensington were forgeries or contained other irregularities. In what was believed at the time to be a first in American history, a federal judge agreed to overturn the election result and named Marks the victor instead.

Roman went on to land a lucrative consulting contract with Freedom Partners, the primary fundraising arm for the right-wing Koch brothers, after stints working as a GOP ward leader in Rhawnhurst and on presidential campaigns, including those of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Rudolph Giuliani.

He joined the 2016 Trump campaign and later the White House staff as a special assistant to the president before he was appointed to his role in Trump’s reelection effort.

In Republican circles, Roman is best known as a “fraud hunter” and online provocateur.

It was Roman who, in 2008, first publicized on his blog, Election Journal, the presence of two members of the New Black Panther Party, one carrying a billy club, outside a Philadelphia polling site. The story became a frequent talking point in conservative media — prompting several stories on Fox News — amid GOP accusations of voter intimidation by Democrats in the city. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has since referred to the incident as “a tempest in a teapot.”)

And in the run-up to the 2020 vote, he repeatedly cast doubt on social media on the integrity of the election results — including in a blog post he coauthored with Marks, now a Republican election lawyer, that accused Democrats of organizing pandemic-era expansions to mail voting to commit ballot harvesting.

» READ MORE: Trump indictment: Charges feature former president’s effort to subvert Pennsylvania election results

As the Trump campaign’s director of Election Day operations, Roman described his role as maintaining contacts with state officials and tracking voting-related legislation before the election.

“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,” he told the House Jan. 6 committee in a 2022 deposition.

Roman took on more responsibility in the aftermath of the November election. Giuliani, serving as a lawyer for Trump at the time, tapped him as “the lead” for organizing the slates of fake Trump electors from key battleground states, according to emails obtained by Congress.

Roman led an “Electors Whip Operation,” playing what the House Jan. 6 Committee report described as a “major operational role” in the fake elector effort.

That included coordinating with lawyers and aides to Trump to identify potential substitute electors and organizing signing ceremonies designed to mimic the actual convening of the Electoral College among legitimate electors for Joe Biden.

The committee report also describes Roman as playing a role in the delivery of a fake elector certificate from Wisconsin to Congress.

On Jan. 5, Roman’s deputy on the Trump campaign, G. Michael Brown, texted other campaign staff a photo of his face with the Capitol in the background. “This has got to be the cover a book I write one day,” Brown wrote. “I should probably buy [Roman] a tie or something for sending me on this one.”

Asked by congressional investigators whether he’d instructed Brown to deliver the document, Roman asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The New York Times reported last month that Roman was in talks to sit for an interview with special counsel Smith’s team, raising the prospect that he could become the first Trump campaign insider with firsthand knowledge of the fake electors scheme to cooperate with the probe.

It remains unclear whether that interview — known as a proffer session — ever took place and, if so, to what extent Roman may have shared incriminating information that was later used to build the indictment against Trump.

However, other members of the team he led in organizing the scheme — including his deputy, Gary Michael Brown — eventually testified before the grand jury.