roman, mike Kch

===

tratr tag ginni? pilf fake electors pence

KOCH OPPOS RES

CLETA fraudit cyberninja money launder trump save am pac pullen ref to roman?

RON JOHNSON FAKE ELECTORS

NAVARRO

RUDY

merri ok

INDICT GA

SEE WISC KAUL AG

SEE ACORN

in several j6 depo

pow dirty tricks eg fani BS 6 24 ENDED UP STOPPING THE TRIAL?!

(lori alec?]

trifecta: breitbart CoC,  trump, koch}:

oppo res: Prior to working for Trump, Roman ran an in-house intelligence unit for the Koch brothers

When right-wing activist James O’Keefe tried to pull together one of his undercover video operations in the Boston area in 2010, at the behest of right-wing button-pushers Foster Friess and John Fund, Roman was one of the people the disgraced smear merchant reached out to for tactical advice. 

In southern Pennsylvania in 2004, Republican poll-watcherschallenged every voter they thought looked like a Democrat. A voting line at the University of Pittsburgh stalled out for hours as GOP operatives tried to force provisional ballots on student-aged voters they believed were not properly registered, and stubborn election officials called the central office to confirm registrations one by one. With Trump urging supporters to go police polling places around the country next month, the confrontational tenor of that day in 2004 may end up looking downright quaint.

Roman was in charge of Election Day operations in Pennsylvania that year for the Republican National Committee. Two years later, he ran voting day nationwide for the party.

His work at the helm of the GOP’s Election Day machine must have been good, judging by the jobs that came afterward. He was a regional political director for Rudy Giuliani’s failed bid for the 2008 nomination. He helped Scott Brown win a special Senate election in Massachusetts the next year, and then guided Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) to a win in 2010.

made bones on mail in ballots and new blk panther BS

J. Christian Adams' accusations that President Obama's Justice Department engaged in racially charged "corruption" in the New Black Panther Party case do not stand up to the evidence.

===

And just last week, one leader of Trump’s Pennsylvania Election Day effort had to be escorted out of a satellite election office in Philadelphia's City Hall. Elections officials there accused James Fitzpatrick of causing a "disturbance," a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Sheriff's office told ABC News.

Philly Election Official says City Hall is NOT a public building!! TRUMP observer thrown out of City Hall! what are they doing?? pic.twitter.com/QufmAfdSIA

— Mike Roman (@mikeroman) September 30, 2020

===

AN 6 26

As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme prepare to be arraigned this week in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.

*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.

That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.

Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await arraignment on 11 felony forgery charges on June 16, Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.

Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.

Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.

Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.

The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”

Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.

“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”

‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.

The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — are scheduled to be arraigned on June 16.

Each faces 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.

Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.

Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.

Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.

“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”

Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.

Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.

“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.

“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”

*Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander atashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

---

---

AN 6 26

Three alleged planners of Donald Trump’s 2020 fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to eleven forgery-related criminal charges in a Wisconsin’s County court — but they might be walking into a toothy maw of legal pain.

The Milwaukee Journal Constitution reports “Jim Troupis, a former Wisconsin campaign attorney for President Donald Trump, Michael Roman, a former Trump aide, and Kenneth Chesebro, a Wisconsin-born former Trump attorney, appeared in Dane County Circuit Court for arraignment on 11 counts of felony charges related to the so-called fake elector scheme.”

Most federal criminal cases against Trump henchmen for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election have collapsed or been dismissed after voters returned Trump to the White House in 2024. Votebeat Wisconsin reports Georgia’s election interference case got dismissed just as the prosecution nabbed guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case also got dismissed, and Arizona’s own investigation is stalling after a major setback for the prosecution. Nevada prosecutors resumed their own investigation after the state Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court threw out, reports Votebeat.

But the Wisconsin case is laced with pratfalls for Trump’s people. Firstly, 10 false electors from 2020 settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election. But Chesebro and Troupis not only reached a settlement in that case but also turned over a trove of damning documents outlining their role in trying to overturn a legitimate U.S. election.

The office of Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul claims Troupis, Chesebro and Roman “lied to the Wisconsin Republicans who signed paperwork falsely claiming to be electors for Trump in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, joint session of Congress to certify the 2020 election for Biden,” the Sentinel reports.

“The 10 Republicans who signed paperwork claiming to be electors have not been charged criminally related to the fake documents,” reports the Sentinel, but other state Republicans, like former Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Andrew Hitt, who was one of the 10 Republicans who participated in Wisconsin, said in 2024 he felt "tricked" by the Trump campaign to sign the paperwork.

And while other state prosecutions have been sidelines by Trump’s return to the White House or Republican judges and legislatures, the state of Wisconsin has a court system which has been streaking toward the left since Trump’s election, with the GOP not even bothering to run candidates in some court races.

Additionally, public opinion polls in this state that supported Trump’s reelection have collapsed as voters turn on Trump and his beholden Republican Party.

Worse for Trump’s henchmen, however, is the fact that if a state jury does find the three guilty, Trump will be unable to rescue them with a pardon because the charges are coming down in state, rather than federal courts. In fact, Trump already pardoned Troupis on the federal level last November, not that it helped.

The Sentinel reports Dane County Circuit Court Judge Mario White is overseeing the case.

===

===

AN 6 26

As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme prepare to be arraigned this week in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.

*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.

That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.

Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await arraignment on 11 felony forgery charges on June 16, Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.

Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.

Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.

Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.

The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”

Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.

“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”

‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.

The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — are scheduled to be arraigned on June 16.

Each faces 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.

Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.

Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.

Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.

“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”

Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.

Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.

“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.

“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”

*Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander atashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

---

===

FANNI ga DEAD, AND TRUMP IS GOING AFTER RECORDS FOR bs REVIS? CONTEXT

AN 12 25

When Donald Trump won the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he was facing four criminal indictments — two of them pertaining to his efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. One was a federal case prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); the other was a Georgia case prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Smith cited DOJ's policy against prosecuting a sitting president. And in late November, Fulton Superior Judge Scott McAfee ruled that the Georgia case was officially "dismissed in its entirety."

But that doesn't necessarily mean that allies of Trump cannot face election interference-related charges.

In a decision on Monday, December 15, Dane County, Wisconsin Circuit Judge John Hyland ruled that there was probable cause to move forward with 11 felony charges against two Trump allies in that state: Jim Troupis (Trump's 2020 campaign attorney for Wisconsin) and Mike Roman (director of Trump's 2020 Election Day operations). Troupis and Roman are facing charges for their role in the fake elector scheme of 2020.

According to Associated Press reporter Scott Bauer, "The charges relate to attempts by the former aides to present a slate of Republican electors to Congress falsely claiming that Trump had won Wisconsin that year even though he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The Wisconsin case is moving forward even as others in the battleground states of Michigan and Georgia have faltered. A special prosecutor last year dropped a federal case claiming Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election. Another case in Nevada is still alive."

Hyland, Bauer notes, "said communication from the defendants showed their intent to present as legitimate a certificate awarding Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes to Trump, not a document to be accepted only if a court ruled that Trump won the state."

"The preliminary hearing of a third person charged, former Trump attorney Ken Chesebro, was postponed amid questions about what statements the man made to prosecutors that could be admitted in court," Bauer reports. "The judge said he wanted to hold a separate hearing on whether comments Chesebro made in an agreement with Wisconsin investigators were allowed to be admitted at trial."

*Read the full Associated Press article at this link.

---

AN 12 24

Two of President-elect Donald Trump's former attorneys and one of his former aides have been criminally charged in Wisconsin as part of the "fake electors" plot from 2020.

According to the Guardian, attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis, along with Republican operative Michael Roman, have all been charged by Wisconsin's Justice Department with conspiracy to commit a crime and several additional counts of fraud. While Wisconsin has previously pursued civil action as part of the fake electors scheme, this marks the first time the Badger State has filed criminal charges in response to the plot to overturn the 2020 election in the critical battleground state.

The criminal complaint mentioned Chesebro as the brains of the operation, having authored a memo entitled: "The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes." That memo laid out the plan for Republicans to falsely submit their names to seven different swing states as the duly appointed presidential electors, even though President Joe Biden actually won the election in those states.

READ MORE: Trump, Giuliano and Meadows revealed as 'unindicted co-conspirators' in MI investigation

Chesebro's new charges are particularly noteworthy, as CNN reported in 2023 that Chesebro was cooperating with the fake elector investigations in both Michigan and Wisconsin. He also cooperated with law enforcement in both Arizona and Nevada, and pleaded guilty after Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis indicted him and more than a dozen others in her RICO case. His plea of conspiracy to commit to filing false documents guaranteed no prison time provided he cooperated with Willis' office and testified against his co-defendants.

Andrew Hitt, who was the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party in 2020, told 60 Minutes earlier this year that he felt pressured to go along with the fake elector plot out of fear of Trump's supporters. And in a 2022 deposition, Hitt said he regularly got threatening calls and emails from both sides of the political aisle, with some demanding to know his exact location.

"If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death," Hitt told journalist Anderson Cooper. "It was not a safe time."

Attorney Scott Grubmann, who represents Chesebro, insistes that his client "never believed" that Trump won the 2020 election despite his role in hatching the fake elector plot.

READ MORE:[Former Trump lawyer and Ga co-defendant now cooperating in 2 new 'fake elector' investigations

Click here to read the Guardian's report in fulL.

---

---

JUNE 6 2024

Dem AG Josh Kaul this morning filed felony charges against attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as former Donald Trump campaign aide Michael Roman, stemming from the false electors scheme in Wisconsin.

Kaul filed a class H felony against each of the three this morning in Dane County Circuit Court, according to online records. Each has an initial appearance scheduled for Sept. 19.

Kaul, who has faced criticism for the pace of his investigation into the scheme, scheduled a noon news conference today to discuss the development.

Troupis, of Cross Plains, and Chesebro, who lists a San Juan address in court records, were part of the legal team that advised Wisconsin’s 10 GOP electors to meet and cast their votes for Trump even though Joe Biden won the state in 2020. Republicans have argued that move was to preserve Trump’s legal options as he challenged the results.

Roman was indicted alongside Trump in the Georgia election interference case and has been connected to probes into other states where similar schemes were carried out.

See more in today’s PM Update.

---

ajc $

For months, Mike Roman seemed forgotten among the 19 people charged in Fulton County with interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

Some defendants were household names. Others drew attention to themselves. Roman was almost an afterthought – a special grand jury that investigated events surrounding the election didn’t even recommend him for prosecution.

But last month Roman rocketed to prominence when his lawyer accused District Attorney Fani Willis of having an improper romantic relationship with a subordinate and benefiting financially from the case. Willis has denied she did anything inappropriate. But Roman’s effort to disqualify has upended what is one of the most important and closely watched cases in the country.

......

===:

CDA: NO LNX

Among the names of 18 people indicted in Georgia along with Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to steal the U.S. election is one few Canadians know: Mike Roman.

And why should we? He’s never grabbed headlines like some of the others charged — big shots like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani or former presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows.

But Canadians had better get acquainted with Roman — an American whose resume includes preaching to Conservative party insiders and working alongside former prime minister Stephen Harper at a multinational body built to deliver elections for right-wingers.

Roman matters because in Canada, as well as the U.S. and many other countries today, third-party groups, often homegrown and emphatically authoritarian, pose a real threat to democracy. They are helping to elect governments that are subverting basic freedoms in the West.

Roman’s exposed role in the Georgia election scandal should act as a wake-up call to everyone who worries about what can only be called fascist-creep in democracies around the world.

In service of the Big Lie

Roman’s indictment alleges that in late November 2020, he urged other campaign officials to contact state legislators in Georgia to encourage them to appoint Trump electors — after Trump had clearly lost the election.

Roman also organized speakers for a Dec. 10, 2020 hearing before a Georgia house committee to spread false information, namely that the state’s vote was riddled with fraud. Giuliani, also indicted under the same racketeering statute as Roman, was the star of that shit show.

But Roman’s role was even bigger. According to testimony before the select congressional committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Roman handled most of the organizing of the fake electors scheme in seven battleground states.

During his own testimony before the select committee on Aug. 10, 2022, Roman asserted his Fifth Amendment rights at least 130 times. Remember what Trump said? Only guilty people plead the fifth.

Roman’s backstory is a tangled tale, but one worth telling. That’s because in today’s politics, borders mean nothing. What happens in the U.S., and elsewhere, doesn’t stay in the U.S. All politics, like commerce, is globally linked.

After dropping out of the University of Miami, Roman found a career in politics, first as a fixer, later as a dirty-trickster.

One of his earliest claims to fame was his role in overturning the results of a special election for the Pennsylvania state senate in 1993, the same year Stephen Harper won a seat in Parliament in this country.

On behalf of the loser of that election, Republican Bruce Marks, Roman came up with the strategy of taking the case to court, alleging that the election was rife with voter fraud.

And that’s how the ostensible loser in the election became state senator via the courts. This was believed to be a first in American politics, and the GOP establishment took notice of a promising new way to turn losing into winning. Sometimes the courts could give you what the electorate did not — a tactic later tried on steroids by Trump. The key was never to concede defeat.

Roman became something of a backroom boy wonder. He went on to work on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and Giuliani.

Despite his claims of being a political researcher and consultant, he was actually a sultan of scaremongering. In the 2008 presidential election, he promoted a video of two alleged members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia. One of the alleged intimidators was holding a nightstick.

The video was played on a loop on Fox News. Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California and an expert on election law, made this comment:

“The video was certainly used by political operatives to create this false impression of voter intimidation and fraud being a major problem.”

The racially charged video raised Roman’s profile even higher, both within the Republican party, and with its wealthy supporters. He landed a job with the network bankrolled by the oil magnate Koch brothers, tasked with investigating Democrats, environmental activists and others on the left. He had a staff of 25 like-minded, partisan dirt-diggers, according to Politico.

A 2014 tax return for Freedom Partners, the Koch-supported organization where he worked, showed Roman as vice-president of research, at an annual salary and benefits worth over $285,000.

After working on Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign, Roman joined the White House staff as a special assistant to the president’s director of special projects and research. His office was inside the impressive Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and his salary was $115,000 a year.

Roman left that post in 2018 to begin work on Trump’s re-election campaign. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Roman used social media to repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the vote — part of a carefully laid plan to claim voter fraud in advance to allow Trump to remain in office should he lose the election.

And Roman provided another service. Trump had advocated for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voting in Democratic areas during the presidential election. Under Roman’s direction, the campaign hired full-time staff to organize the “Army for Trump” in 11 battleground states.

Professor Hasen again took note:

“Mike Roman has made many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and rigging, he has a history and general reputation as someone who stirs things up, so his presence in any election day issues gives me pause.”

Roman’s Canada file

As busy as Roman was with his Republican machinations, he found time to help out the Conservative Party of Canada. On April 11, 2019, Andrew Scheer, then-Conservative leader and leader of the official Opposition, was the keynote speaker at a closed-door event held at a luxury resort in the foothills of Alberta.

At that meeting, the leader and Conservative party strategists talked to oil company executives about political campaigns. Not energy policy, but campaigns.

Then-Conservative party campaign manager Hamish Marshall spoke about what he called “the new third-party campaign model.” In other words, making use of people not directly affiliated with the party who might be able to help the Conservatives win. People flying under the radar of Elections Canada.

(Harper has been obsessed with the effort to allow third-party actors to spend unlimited amounts of money during elections since his days as head of the National Citizens Coalition. He took that fight all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost in 2004.)

Discussions at the Alberta meeting included topics like “network campaigns” and “campaign techniques.”

Conservative party lawyer Arthur Hamilton spoke about using litigation to “get tough” on environmental groups — in other words, intimidate them.

At the same meeting, Roman had some ideas of his own about how to deal with opponents like environmentalists. He talked about “countering such groups with opposition research.” It was a euphemism for something he was very familiar with — digging up dirt on your opponents. What the Russians would call “kompromat.”

This meeting, that included the leader of the Conservatives, members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and an American Trump operative, would be concerning under any circumstances. What strange bedfellows for a meeting on campaign strategy. And why bar the public from looking in?

The confab was all the more worrying because it took place just six months before the federal election of Oct. 21, 2019. Why would Scheer be discussing U.S.-style campaign tactics with the oil executives unless, like Harper, he carried a brief for their industry?

And what was Roman, a notorious Republican political operative who had served on the Republican National Committee, doing there? Who invited him?

Roman, Harper and the International Democrat Union

At the time of Roman’s participation in that closed-door meeting in Alberta, the Republican operative was closely associated with an organization named the International Democrat Union. Roman first shows up as the organization’s treasurer, later as assistant chairman. The chairman of the IDU was then, and is now, Stephen Harper.

Harper shares top Republican connections with Roman. On April 7, 2016, Harper travelled to Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas mansion. Adelson, now deceased, was at that time one of the wealthiest donors to the Republican party. He had not yet donated to the 2016 presidential campaign.

After Donald Trump promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a change that flew in the face of international consensus that East Jerusalem belonged to the Palestinians, Adelson endorsed the maverick populist who would soon be president.

During his Las Vegas visit, Harper delivered a speech to the Republican Jewish Congress. His subject was how to unite fractured political parties. It was Harper’s first public appearance since losing the 2015 federal election to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Harper was still a sitting member of the House of Commons at the time.

According to a hacked email from Colin Powell to Peter McKay, Harper was also invited to the mysterious, highly secretive and ultra-exclusive Bohemian Grove gathering in July 2016. It is the private club of the most powerful conservatives in the United States. Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger were there the year that Harper attended.

Eighteen months after resigning his seat in Parliament, on Feb. 21, 2018, Harper became chairman of the International Democrat Union. Founded in 1983, the IDU is dedicated to getting right-wing governments elected around the world. Influence or interference? It is a very fine line.

The IDU has its main office in the headquarters of the Christian Social Union in Munich, Germany. The CSU, a founding member of the International Democrat Union, is a socially conservative party created in 1946.

Very little is known about exactly what the IDU does, or who funds it. But a surfaced CIA memo originally produced on July 23, 1985, indicated that at that time, the IDU received half its funding from the 17 European founding member parties of the organization.

Of that group, two West German, right-wing parties and the U.K. Conservative party reportedly “carried the heaviest financial burden.”

The other half of the IDU’s funding came from the U.S. Republican party and the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. Canada’s former Progressive Conservative party also was a founding member of the IDU.

Since its start 40 years ago, the IDU has expanded dramatically. It now has 84 member political parties, some dedicated to increasingly harsh versions of right-wing politics. India’s ruling right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, joined the IDU in 2016, and Israel’s Likud followed suit in 2018.

Both India’s PM Narendra Modi and Israel’s indicted PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, have made hard turns to the nationalist right. In Netanyahu’s case, his government is pursuing legislation that would give the party the power to overturn rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court by a simple majority vote in the Knesset.

One of the IDU’s members, Victor Orbán’s governing party in Hungary, has been criticized by the European Union for the steady erosion of democratic institutions. The EU has even openly questioned if Hungary is still a democracy.

Human Rights Watch has accused Orbán of sustained “attacks on rule of law and public institutions” by undermining judicial independence and putting journalists under surveillance.

Yet Stephen Harper publicly congratulated Hungary’s right-wing nationalist leader after his most recent electoral victory in April 2022. And on July 6, Harper had a warm and fuzzy face-to-face meeting with Orbán in Budapest.

Harper tweeted that the two men discussed “the importance of centre-right parties strengthening their collaboration.”

Orbán’s tweet left out the word “centre.” “Had a great meeting IDU Alliance Chairman @Stephen Harper. International cooperation between right-wing, conservative parties is more important than ever. Chairman Harper is a great ally in this respect. Thanks for your support, Mr. Chairman.”

Signs of US-style fascism

In the United States, the anti-democratic strain of conservatism that currently dominates the Republican party may already have morphed into fascism. The evidence for that proposition is powerful. The authoritarian playbook is to relentlessly seek to undermine government institutions, educators and the news media, paving the way for cult-like acceptance of the strong-man’s narrative. Namely, that any who dare thwart his will are nefarious nemeses.

As well as trying to overturn an election, Trump has called for the suspension of the constitution and gutting the department of justice and the FBI. He has repeatedly told Americans that journalists are “enemies of the people.”

MugShotsMikeRoman.jpg

One of 19. Mike Roman’s mug shot is second from right in the bottom row. He was charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis with seven criminal counts related to Trump’s attempt to unlawfully overturn the US presidential election. Photo via Twitter.

Apparently taking his cue from Trump, Republican Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has fired elected state prosecutors for disagreeing with his interpretation of how the law should be applied. He presided over a selective whitewash of how Black history is taught, including the absurd notion that slavery provided useful skills to the enslaved, and the banning of certain books in schools, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Endlessly identifying “enemies within” and dividing the citizenry against itself is a hallmark tactic by would-be fascist leaders. There has been a spate of legislation in GOP-controlled states undermining the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

State Republican governments have criminalized abortion, with Nebraska sending a teenage girl to prison for three months after she induced an abortion by taking a morning after pill. Her mother faces a possible five years in jail for assisting her daughter.

And some state Republicans in Georgia have threatened to remove District Attorney Fani Willis from office to stop her case against Trump and the 18 co-defendants, who include Mike Roman. Never mind that Willis too was elected by voters.

The legislators gave themselves the power to do that last spring, and their new authority kicks in this October. It is not accidental that several members of the state Republican party have also been indicted by Willis, a huge embarrassment for the state GOP. So far, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is publicly supporting Willis.

Questions for Harper

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Stephen Harper Heads a Global Org That Helps Get Right-Wing Parties Elected. What Will It Do for Andrew Scheer?

READ MORE

In all, Willis charged Mike Roman with seven criminal counts, including violation of the Georgia RICO act, two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiracy to impersonate a public officer.

As part of his effort to organize the seven slates that came up with fake “Trump electors,” it is alleged Roman even prepared a spreadsheet of their names and addresses.

While Roman was allegedly playing a key role in a giant Batman plot to steal a presidential election, surely the ultimate crime in any democracy, he was a senior official of the IDU. Which raises questions for Stephen Harper.

Did IDU chairman Harper know what his assistant chairman was doing?

Did Harper have any knowledge of Roman’s participation in the meeting with Andrew Scheer and others prior to the 2019 federal election in Canada?

Harper has so far not commented on Mike Roman’s wide-ranging indictment.

That is strange, since Roman was promoted from treasurer to assistant chairman of the IDU while he was allegedly helping Trump to subvert the 2020 election.

Harper might well claim that he didn’t know anything about what Roman was up to in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden.

There is precedent for such a claim. When Harper advisor Bruce Carson left public service in disgrace, the then-prime minister claimed that he did not know before he hired Carson that his senior advisor had done jail time and been disbarred for defrauding his clients. Perhaps that was true, though it strains credulity given how carefully senior PMO hirings are vetted.

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As Scheer Falsehoods Pile up, Postmedia Gives Its Blessing

READ MORE

PM Harper also exhibited something less than respect for due process in other circumstances. When Conservative Party of Canada campaign director Doug Finley was under investigation by Elections Canada during the “in-and-out” election spending scandal, Harper appointed Finley to the Senate. Sen. Doug Finley was assistant chairman of the IDU until his death on May 11, 2013.

And if Harper, as head of the IDU, has a commitment to garden variety democracy, you would never know it from his political record.

Three major scandals, involving election cheating, occurred during his time in office. Harper had a surly relationship with the Supreme Court and the press, and legislation like the Fair Elections Act fronted by Pierre Poilievre made it easier to cheat and harder to vote in Canada.

The new legislation was a strange reaction to the voter-suppression robocalls scandal, given that the phone numbers used to mislead thousands of voters came from the party’s own computer system.

And then there is the light that Harper’s business dealings shine on his notion of democracy. Harper has been a major player in AWZ Ventures Inc., a group that finances Israeli surveillance technology systems.

Harper is not only a partner, but president of an advisory board that manages over $350 million in funds. The investment firm also includes former members of Mossad, and various U.S. intelligence agencies.

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Why Is Stephen Harper So Tight with the ‘Moonie’ Church?

READ MORE

Why does that matter?

According to CBC reports, AWZ is selling its facial recognition technology to countries not known for their respect for human rights or democracy.

Countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it is a crime to make the slightest complaint against the government. The UAE has been accused of spying on journalists and activists. AWZ’s hollow disclaimer? “AWZ Ventures invests solely in commercial and defensive applications of security and intelligence technologies.”

The absurdity of that claim? Once you sell such potentially anti-democratic, invasive and repressive technology, you don’t get to say how its owners use it. Look what happened with misuse of the Pegasus spyware technology.

This final point about the IDU, Mike Roman and Stephen Harper. On a website where he was once featured as a major player, Roman has disappeared down the memory hole. When you search for him now, you don’t get the former treasurer and assistant chairman. You get a 404 error.

So who is Mike Roman and why should Canadians who care about preserving their democracy know his name?

Consider Roman’s own words, which date back to 2008 but resonate darkly today. “If an election is worth winning,” he wrote in his blog, “then there is someone willing to steal it.” [Tyee]

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EMPTYWHL

MIKE ROMAN, DONALD TRUMP’S SPY AND VOTE FRAUD FRAUDSTER

February 2, 2024/89 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection /by emptywheel

WaPo has an overdue profile of Mike Roman, the guy who threatens blow up the Fani Willis prosecution by exposing a romantic relationship between her and prosecutor Nate Wade.

It describes how the guy who recruited a bunch of the most prominent Republicans in swing states across the country to sign onto fraudulent certificates claiming Trump won had previously served as — basically — a spy, first for the Kochs and then for Trump.

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.”

But it fails to make a few key points clear. Consider what it means, for example, that this is the guy that the Koch brothers would use to pick Republican candidates to back.

Roman’s unit compiled a “Weekly Intelligence Briefing,” with information about political races and recommendations about where the network’s donors should contribute, according to a person who worked there with Roman and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the organization’s internal operations.

Or consider the real implications that Roman served in Trump’s White House in the guise of “vetting” candidates.

Roman was made a special assistant to the president and White House director of special projects and research, reporting to then-White House counsel Donald McGahn and earning $115,000 per year. Roman was a private investigator of sorts for McGahn’s office, responsible for vetting potentially controversial nominations, according to a former senior administration official.

“It would be like, ‘We’ve heard an appointee might have a shady business deal,’ or ‘Counsel is hearing something about a presidential nominee that could cause a huge problem for us. Can you figure it out?’” the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive White House work.

Trump in no way eschewed “appointees [with] a shady business deal.” His Secretaries of Treasury and Commerce had fairly astounding shady business deals, as did Trump’s son-in-law (though he was never going to be subject to vetting). The culmination of Don McGahn’s tenure as White House Counsel was installing Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and the rape allegations against Kavanaugh obscured further problematic allegations still further.

If Mike Roman was in charge of vetting, he let a lot of epically corrupt people through his “vetting” process.

So yeah, as I noted the moment the Fani Willis scandal broke and this story confirms, it was no surprise that any vulnerabilities Fani Willis had were discovered by Mike Roman.

Going on the offense against the prosecutor was a trademark Roman tactic, according to the former senior official on Trump’s 2020 campaign. “This is a classic Mike Roman move,” the former official said. “When I saw the filing, I said, ‘That’s Mike.’ It’s a good one.”

But once you understand that Roman’s focus has traditionally been trained on Republicans at least as much as Democrats, a lot else begins to make sense.

Update: As someone noted to me on Twitter, Roman had actually gone to RNC by the time Kavanaugh was nominated.

Update: Here’s Fani Willis’ response to Roman’s allegations. She doesn’t deny a personal relationship but says it post-dates when she hired Nate Wade. I’m not going to wade [sic] through it, but will link credible analysis when I see it.

Tags: Don McGahn, Fani Willis, Mike Roman

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4 24

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and several others were indicted in an election interference case in Arizona. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Danny HakimMaggie Haberman

By Danny Hakim and Maggie Haberman

Published April 24, 2024

Updated April 25, 2024, 9:33 a.m. ET

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election were indicted in Arizona on Wednesday, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf there to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state.

Boris Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s top legal strategists, was also among those indicted, a complication for Mr. Trump’s defense in the criminal trial that began this week in Manhattan over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

The indictment includes conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to alleged attempts by the defendants to change the 2020 election results. Arizona is the fourth swing state to bring an elections case involving the activities of the Trump campaign in 2020, but only the second after Georgia to go beyond the fake electors whom the campaign deployed in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.

The former president, who is seeking another term, was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona case.

“I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a recorded statement. “But as I have stated before and will say here again today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined. It’s too important.”

Thumbnail of page 1

Read the Arizona Election Indictment

Arizona on Wednesday indicted Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, as well as the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state. Here is the indictment.

READ DOCUMENT 58 PAGES

Mr. Giuliani is Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Mr. Meadows was the White House chief of staff at the time of the 2020 election. They were among a number of defendants whose names were redacted from the indictment, though it was clear from the context and the descriptions who they were. For example, the passage referencing Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said among other things that he was known as “the mayor.”

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker: Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

Some parts of the indictment did not refer to Mr. Trump by name, instead referring to the “defendants’ attempts to declare Unindicted Coconspirator 1 and Pence the winners of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Also indicted were Mike Roman, a Trump campaign operative in 2020, John Eastman, an architect of the fake electors plan, and two other lawyers who advised Mr. Trump and his 2020 campaign: Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb.

The indictment lays out a series of alleged efforts by the defendants to overturn Arizona’s election results. They are accused of pressuring “officials responsible for certifying election results to encourage them to change the election results,” including the governor, the legislature and the Maricopa Board of Supervisors.

In all, 35 people who acted as fake electors in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and now Arizona face criminal charges for signing certificates in 2020 falsely stating that Mr. Trump had won their state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Roman and Mr. Eastman now face charges in two states, Georgia and Arizona. Ms. Ellis has already pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia.

Among those charged in Arizona are some who served as top Republican Party officials there during the 2020 election, including Kelli Ward, a former state party chairwoman, and Greg Safsten, who at the time was executive director of the state party. Two state senators, Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman, now also face charges.

Some of the people who held themselves out to be Trump electors in states that he lost in 2020 have adamantly insisted that they were acting legally. After Dr. Ward and other fake electors gathered in Phoenix that December, she wrote in a social media post that “we are the electors who represent the legal voters of Arizona!” As recently as late last year, Mr. Kern said that “there’s no such thing as fake electors.”

Late Wednesday, Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said: “The phenomenon of partisan lawfare grows more troubling by the day. Professor Eastman is innocent of criminal conduct in Arizona or any other place and will fight these charges as he has all the other unjust accusations leveled against him.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said: “The continued weaponization of our justice system should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”

Mr. Hoffman said in a social media post that he was “innocent of any crime,” adding that “I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution.”

Mr. Epshteyn was a constant presence during Mr. Trump’s civil trial in January on charges that he had defamed the New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He joined Mr. Trump at the defense table when Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case went to the bench for sidebars.

But Mr. Epshteyn has not been in New York for the current criminal case. He has described himself as an “in-house counsel” to Mr. Trump and has been something of a quarterback for the various legal teams working on the former president’s defenses in four criminal cases. He usually speaks with Mr. Trump several times a day.

Mr. Epshteyn has been arrested twice in Arizona over the last 10 years, once in 2014 for assault after a bar fight, in which he pleaded guilty and the conviction was set aside, and again in 2021, after he was accused of inappropriately touching two women. In that case, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, received probation and a fine, and the conviction again was set aside.

Mr. Epshteyn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Election deniers have not fared well at the polls in Arizona, but they maintain a grip on the state’s Republican Party. In January, the party installed a hard-right Trump supporter, Gina Swoboda, as its new leader; Ms. Swoboda runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states. Kari Lake, a fervent backer of Mr. Trump and his false election claims, was the party’s candidate for governor in 2022 (she lost) and is the leading Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat this year.

The Arizona Republican Party, in a statement, called the indictment “a blatant and unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial power, aimed solely at distracting the public” ahead of the 2024 election.

The United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Monday that challenged the state’s electronic voting machines. The case was brought by Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, who lost a 2022 race for Arizona secretary of state.

Having slates of people claiming to be electors for Mr. Trump was an integral part of the effort to keep him in office after his loss at the polls in 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies sought to block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, hoping that Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and Senate might then consider a challenge to the validity of the results in a number of battleground states like Arizona and Michigan — and then accept the pro-Trump electors from those states as valid.

In addition to the state cases, Mr. Trump is facing election interference charges himself in the Georgia case and in a federal case brought by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice.

Mr. Trump has long made a strategy of falsely claiming election fraud. After he was defeated in the 2016 Iowa caucus, he said that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the winner of that contest, “illegally stole it.” And after Mr. Trump received fewer votes nationwide in 2016 than Hillary Clinton did, he said that he had actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Faced with criminal charges in the state elections inquiries, some of Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers have backtracked from his 2020 claims.

“Biden was elected, the process was followed,” Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake elector plan, told investigators in Michigan last year. Mr. Chesebro has emerged as a key witness in the state prosecutions.

James Renner, a former Michigan state trooper who was a last-minute substitution as a fake elector in that state, expressed regret last year to investigators, saying that he “had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.” Charges against him were dropped as part of a cooperation agreement with the office of Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, a Democrat.

Richard Fausset, Alan Feuer, Jonathan Swan and Benjamin Protess contributed reporting.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics. More about Danny Hakim

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition

===

an 2 24

on the eve of a major evidentiary hearing in Fulton County, Georgia, an attorney for one of former President Donald Trump's codefendants in the ongoing RICO case announced plans to call a witness, with the prosecution balking at the eleventh-hour announcement.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, attorney Ashleigh Merchant — who is representing Michael Roman — announced her intent to call attorney Terrence Bradley to the stand ahead of Thursday's scheduled hearing in Fulton County Superior Court. Bradley is the former law partner of special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who is in a personal relationship with District Attorney Fani Willis. The Journal-Constitution's Tamar Hallerman reported that the two have since had a "falling out."

Bradley is reportedly planning to dispute a sworn affidavit Wade submitted under penalty of perjury that his relationship with Willis didn't begin until after she hired him onto her team. Merchant stated that Bradley can prove that Willis and Wade were romantically involved prior to the case, and that the two began cohabitating sooner than Wade stated in his affidavit. Atlanta-based defense attorney Andrew Fleischman, who is not connected to the case, said if Wade committed perjury it would be "extremely serious misconduct" that would not only result in Willis and Wade being disqualified from the prosecution, but could refer them both to the state bar for disciplinary hearings.

READ MORE:[Fani Willis admits to relationship with Nathan Wade but dismisses 'irrelevant allegations'

Hallerman tweeted that prosecutors are now asking Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing proceedings, to "exclude all evidence and reference to that testimony" during tomorrow's scheduled hearing.

"[Notice of Bradley's testimony] is untimely, incomplete and in direct violation of this court's case management order," a Wednesday filing read. "Compounding the foregoing acts of flagrant bad faith, the Defense has prejudiced the State by foisting this alleged testimony on the eve of the February 15, 2024 motions hearing previously scheduled on January 18, 2024. Clearly, the defendants delayed revelation prevents and precludes the State from adequately preparing for this expert witness."

McAfee has stated that if Merchant can prove her claims, it could "result in a disqualification."

Tomorrow's hearing is scheduled for 9:30 AM ET, and will be televised to the public.

READ MORE:Legal expert explains the one thing Fani Willis has to do to save her Trump investigation = leave of absence?

===

mma 12 23

Georgia election case co-defendant uses QAnon channel to attack prosecutor and fundraise for legal defense fund

Prosecutor had unsuccessfully asked for co-defendant Harrison Floyd's bail to be revoked for violating his terms

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

:{:{PUBLISHED 12/01/23 }:

One of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-tampering case appeared on a Rumble-based QAnon channel last month. Harrison Floyd used the appearance to criticize Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, comment on the guilty pleas by his co-defendants, and fundraise for legal expenses.

As noted by The Associated Press, Floyd was charged in August due to “allegations of harassment toward Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County election worker who had been falsely accused of election fraud by Trump and his supporters,” allegedly taking part “in a Jan. 4, 2021, conversation in which Freeman was told she ‘needed protection’ and was pressured to lie and say she had participated in election fraud.”

The indictment accuses him and 18 others of taking part in a broader effort to overturn Trump’s loss in the state during the 2020 presidential election.

On November 15, Willis asked a judge to revoke Floyd’s bail and jail him for violating his bail conditions. Among the allegations of his violation of bail terms were “comments on a conservative podcast about” co-defendant and former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, “who pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.” Days later, a judge denied the request, instead modifying Floyd’s bail requirements.

The day before Willis filed her request, Floyd appeared on Why We Vote, a show on the QAnon-affiliated Rumble channel Badlands Media. During the interview, Floyd commented on Ellis’ guilty plea — along with that of fellow co-defendant and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell — saying, “They already pled guilty. They’re going to have to do their probation one way or the other. I’m not going to be on probation because I’m winning. I’m not going to jail because I’m winning.”

He also accused Willis of illegally leaking Ellis and Powell’s proffer footage regarding their guilty pleas in order to “sway the jury pool.” And he attacked Willis, accusing her of prosecuting him because he is Black.

Video

CitationFrom the November 14, 2023, edition of Badlands Media's Why We Vote, streamed on Rumble

ASHLEY EPP (CO-HOST): Well, I was going to say for, you know, the audience, can you — how did you — how’d you end up here in this lawsuit? How’d you end up, you know, as kind of the — I mean, I think you’re a hero. Brian thinks you’re a hero. The what if — my favorite quote of all time is, “What if we can prove Trump won?” So how did — how’d you end up in this?

…

HARRISON FLOYD: So after the election, when I was done with the campaign, I received a phone call to see if I could ask or I was asked to go down to Georgia to help out with the situation involving one of the election workers who they were having difficulty connecting with due to race issues in the South and couldn’t go down there personally but offered to help. And, you know, long story short, an article that painted a totally different story of what actually transpired. And District Attorney Willis picked up on it and looped me into this whole RICO mess because, you know, if you’re going to have a big RICO case, you’ve got to have at least one Black guy in there that you’re going to try and take down, right? So I guess I’m it.

Toward the end of the interview, the hosts asked Floyd to promote his legal defense fund. The show also featured a link on screen to his defense fund page, alongside text saying, “Help support Harrison!!” After the interview, the hosts urged viewers to donate to the defense fund.

Video

CitationFrom the November 14, 2023, edition of Badlands Media's Why We Vote, streamed on Rumble

BRIAN LUPO (CO-HOST): All right, Harrison, where — do you have a GiveSendGo set up for your legal expenses?

HARRISON FLOYD: Yes. It’s at the top of my Twitter.

…

If anyone has already contributed, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And if anyone decides that they want to contribute something, no matter how big or how small, I promise we won’t waste it.

…

LUPO: So, Harrison Floyd, man, that’s some motivating stuff right there. Guys, if you can, donate to that. Like, I listened to that whole hearing and it — one of the recurring themes that they were talking about in that hearing is Fulton County and the secretary of state would argue that this is going to be extremely burdensome. And so the judge would ask them, “Well, OK, what if they — what if money wasn’t an option to pay for these open records requests and to pay for the clerks and the employees that would have to go through all these records?” And they said, “What if money wasn’t an option? What can we do?” And so I think it is going to get to the point where they’re going to say, “Hey, yeah, we can give you these records, but it’s going to cost you $15,000 or $10,000 or $50,000,” whatever it might come out to. We don’t know. But we need to make sure that this case right here, more than any other in the history of this whole “Stop the Steal,” whatever you want to call it. I know a lot of people –

ASHLEY EPP (CO-HOST): Don’t say that.

LUPO: I know. Well, yeah. I know. That’s what I was going to say — a lot of us are worn out and we feel like everything is a grift, and everything, and all this — this is in the courts, in a criminal case, folks. This is not going anywhere. Harrison is giving you his word that it will be used properly and accounted for. So if you can, donate to that GiveSendGo down below.

…

EPP: He’s not in this for personal gain. He’s suffering great personal cost to stand up for the rights of all of us and for our children and for future American generations. So, seriously, donate to his fund. As Brian is saying, this is a very important case.

Multiple people donated to Floyd’s defense fund, saying they had seen him on the show.

The interview on Why We Vote came a few weeks after Floyd did an interview on another Badlands Media show, SITREP. During that appearance he urged viewers to donate to the legal defense fund of another co-defendant, Mike Roman, and the link to Roman’s defense fund appeared on screen. QAnon-supporting co-host Brian Lupo (known online as “CannCon”) promised to match donations up to $1,000.

Video

CitationFrom the September 21, 2023, edition of Badlands Media's SITREP, streamed on Rumble

BRIAN LUPO (CO-HOST): Harrison, I want to ask you, do you have a website where people — a lot of people in chat are asking where they can donate. Do you have a site that we can send people to?

HARRISON FLOYD: Yeah. There’s a GiveSendGo up for me. It’s in my Twitter feed. If you scroll down — it was pinned up. I took it down because — I’m just going to be honest. You guys have done a lot for me. I really appreciate it. I think we’re sitting at like $320,000-something of the goal that we’re supposed to meet. But there’s some other folks and the co-defendants who need more help than I do right now.

LUPO: How about Mike Roman?

FLOYD: Mike, yeah. I was just going to say Mike Roman. Mike has eight kids. He’s lost all of his clients from work. I think he has like a $200,000 goal and he’s sitting at like $4,000 right now.

LUPO: There you go.

FLOYD: You got Cathy Latham. She’s a former school teacher. She’s living on her teachers pension. You know, teachers already don’t make enough. My wife is a teacher. She’s super shy of her role as well. So I appreciate everyone in the chat who wants to donate to me. If you want to, that’s great. But I would please ask if you could donate to some of the other co-defendants because, look, God has helped me out so much already and He is on my side. Look, I’m good, I’m good. I’m going down hooking and jabbing either on my shield or I’ll be victorious. And I truly believe we’re going to be victorious. But some of these other folks really need some more help than I do.

…

LUPO: I’m tearing up here thinking about the fact that you had an opportunity to help make sure that you’re taken care of and your first thought was to go to Mike Roman and Cathy Latham, which both of those people I love. Bro, you are above and beyond, man. That is incredible stuff right there.

FLOYD: That’s what we were taught, man, in the Marine Corps. Real leaders eat last, right?

LUPO: Yup.

FLOYD: So I have no problem with that. You got to put other people — when you put other people before yourself, that’s what makes you really a leader.

…

LUPO: But right now, Mike Roman is sitting at $4,800. Let me refresh and make sure. All right, so he’s sitting at $4,800 dollars. For the next 15 minutes until the show’s over, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to match anything you guys donate. So up to $1,000. I can’t go much over that. I’m not that — you know, I make a decent living, but up to $1,000, anything that’s donated in the next 15 minutes, I am going to match at the very end of the 15 minutes in real time. So put that out there.

Multiple people donated to Roman’s defense fund, citing the show or Lupo’s offer to match donations. Lupo also seemingly donated $1000 — the maximum amount he said he would match.

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Fulton County Superior Court INDICTMENT £375 Mozzfee

**FILED** CA

Date: August 14, 2023 CheAlexander, Clerk of Court Clerk No.7

FULTON SUPERIOR COURT

THE STATE OF GEORGIA

V. DONALD JOHN TRUMP

Counts 1,5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 2729, 38-39

RUDOLPH WILLIAM LOUIS GIULIANI Counts 1-3, 6-7, 9,11,13,15,17,19, 23-24

JOHN ChaRLES EASTMAN

Counts 1-2, 9, 11,13, 15, 17, 19, 27

MARK RANDALL MEADOWS

Counts 1, 28

KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO

Counts 1, 9,11,13,15,17,19

JEFFREY BOSSERT CLARK

Counts 1, 22

JENNA LYNN ELLIS

Counts 12 RAY STALLINGS SNIITH III Counts 1-2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13,15, 17,19, 23, 25

ROBERT DAVID CHEELEY

Counts 1, 9,11,13, 15, 17,19, 23, 26, 41

MICHAEL A. ROMAN

Counts 1, 9, 11,13,15,17, 19

:{:{}:

}:

 DAVID JAMES SHAFER

Counts 1, 8,10,12,14,16,18, 40

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

SHAWN MCAH TRESHER STILL

Counts 1, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18

O.C.G.A. 16-1020

STEPHEN CLIFFGARD LEE

Counts 1, 20-21, 30-31

HARRISON WILLIAM PRESCOTT

FLOYD

Counts 1, 3031 Emma

TREVIAN C. KUTTI Counts 1,

SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL  Counts 1, 32-37

CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM

Counts 1, 8, 10, 12, 14, 32-37

SCOTT GRAHAM HALL

Counts 1, 32-37

FORGERY THE FIRST DEGREE

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11

VIOLATION OF THE GEORGIA RICO

(RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) ACT O.C.G.A. 16144(c)

SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1640-1

FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 1610-20

SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1610-1

FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16102'0

IMPERSONATING PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. 16-1023

CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT

INIPERSONATIN PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-8 16-10-23

FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 169-1(b)

CONSPIRACY To COMMIT FORGERY 1N THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. §§ 16-48 16-9-1(b)

,,, 12 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

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 13 CONSPIRACY TO COMlWIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§

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14 CRWAL ATTEMPT To COMMIT

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FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. §§ 1641 16102o.1(b)(1)

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 15 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT Emma FALSE DOCUMENTS

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O.C.G.A. §§ 164-8 16102o.1(b)(1)

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16 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE 

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17 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT

===

Act 45.

On or about the 8th day of December 2020, MICHAEL A. ROMAN sent text message to unindicted co-conspirator 1ndividual 4, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, stated that he had spoken to MISTY HAMPTON, and asked unindicted co-conspirator

Individual to "get" MISTY HAMPTON to attend the hearing before the Georgia

...

144

On or about the 7th day of January 2021,SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL,CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL,and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of INTERFERENCE WITH PRIMARIES AND ELECTIONS,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-566, in Coffee County, Georgia, by willfully and unlawfully

tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating ...

145

On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, andMISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of UNLAWFUL POSSESSION OF BALLOTS, in Violation of O.C.G.A. 21-2-574, in Coffee County, Georgia, by causing certain members ofthe conspiracy, who were not officers charged by law with the care of ballots and who were not persons entrusted by any such officer with the care of ballots for purpose required by law, to possess official ballots outside of the polling place

in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an overt act in

furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 146.

On or about the 7th day 0fJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER THEFT,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 169-93(a),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without

authority and with the intention oftaking and appropriating information, data, and software, the property ofDominion Voting Systems Corporation in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of

racketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 1614-3 (5)(A)(Xix) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe

conspiracy.

Act 147.

On or about the 7th day of January 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER TRESPASS,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9- 93(b),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with knowledge that such use was without authority and with the intention ofremoving voter data and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation data from said computer

in Coffee County, Georgia. This was an act of racketeering...

148

On or about the 7th day of January 2021,SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON

committed the felony offense of COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-9-93(c),

in Coffee County, Georgia, by using computer with the intention of

examining personal voter data with knowledge that such examination was without authority. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(A)(xix) and an overt act in

furtheranCe ofthe conspiracy.

Act 149.

On and between the 6th day 0f December 2020 and the 7th day ofJanuary 2021, SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL, CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM, SCOTT GRAHAM

HALL, and MISTY HAMPTON committed the felony ofiense of CONSPIRACY TO

DEFRAUD THE STATE,

in Violation of O.C.G.A. 16-10-21, in Cofiee County, Georgia, by unlawfully conspiring and agreeing to commit theft of voter data, property which was under the

control of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Rafiensperger, state officer, in his official capacity. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3 (5)(B) and an overt act in

furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 150.

On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, and the 13th day of January 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 25, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Cofiee County, Georgia, by downloading said data fiom server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l6-l43(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 151.

On or about the 9th day of January 2021, the 10th day of January 2021, the 11th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 18th day ofJanuary 2021, and the 19th day ofJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 26, whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering...

On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 153.

On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.

Act 154.

On or about the 18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-

conspirators

Individual 25 and Individual 29, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury,to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 155.

On or about the 22nd day ofApril 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose

identity is known to the Grand Jury, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign. This

...

160

On or about the 10th day 0fJanuary 2021, the 12th day of January 2021, the 13th day of January 2021, the 25th day of February 2021, and the 26th day of February 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 27, Whose identity is unknown to the Grand Jury,unlawfully accessed certain data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading

said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. 16-14-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 153.

On or about the 13th day 0fJanuary 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, unlawfully accessed certain data copied from

Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coffee County, Georgia, by downloading said data from server maintained by SullivanStrickler LLC. This was an act ofracketeering activity under O.C.G.A. l614-3(5)(B) and an overt act in furtherance ofthe conspiracy.

Act 154.

On or about the 18th day of January 2021, MISTY HAMPTON allowed unindicted co-

conspirators

_{

}_

Individual 25 and Individual 29, whose identities are known to the Grand Jury, to access non-public areas of the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Ofiice in Coflee County, Georgia, and facilitated their access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Act 155.

On or about the 22nd day of April 2021, unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 28, whose

identity is known to the Grand Jury, sent an email to the Chief Operations Ofiicer of SullivanStrickler LLC directing him to transmit all data copied from Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the Coffee County Board of Elections Registration Office in Coffee County, Georgia, to unindicted co-conspirator

Individual 30, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, an attorney associated with SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL and the Trump Campaign. This...

===

===

https://www.newsweek.com/mike-roman-trump-fake-electoral-2020-election-1810082

no lnx

Mike Roman Flipping Could be a Catastrophe for Donald Trump

BY EWAN PALMER ON 6/30/23

Atop official in Donald Trump's 2020 campaign team who was a key part of the fake elector scheme to overturn the results in favor of the former president is cooperating with federal prosecutors, according to reports.

Mike Roman was director of Election Day operations for Trump's campaign. He has spoken to Special Counsel Jack Smith's office as part of the expansive criminal investigation into attempts to overturn the last election and into the events that led up to the January 6, 2021 attack, reported CNN.

Roman reportedly spoke to prosecutors under what is known as a proffer agreement. This means he can share information with investigators on an understanding that the statements will not be used against him in future criminal proceedings. Roman also may not have to appear before the grand jury as part of the agreement. It is unclear what precisely Roman was asked about during his meeting with prosecutors, or what information he may have provided.

The New York Times previously reported that Roman was preparing to answer questions voluntarily about the scheme to create a fake group of electors. They would falsely declare that Trump had beaten Joe Biden in several key swing states that the Republican had actually lost in 2020.

The New York Times also described Roman as doing "much of the legwork" in finding ways to challenge Trump's losses in the key battleground states at the last election. Roman is considered a major part of the plot to send fake electoral officials to declare falsely that Trump had won in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan in 2020.

Roman and Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign, had coordinated with others who played roles in advising Trump in the weeks after the Election day in 2020. This is according to a series of emails, reviewed by The New York Times in 2022.

In July 2022, Politico named Roman as a Trump operative who tried to get a list of false electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to Pennsylvania GOP congressman Mike Kelly on Capitol Hill in a hope they would eventually make their way to Vice President Mike Pence.

The fake electoral scheme has long been the main focus of Smith's probe. Trump's former lawyer Rudy Giuliani also recently voluntarily answered questions from federal prosecutors about the plan involving several members of the former president's inner circle.

The reports of Roman and Giuliani both meeting with prosecutors arrive amid suggestions the federal investigation into the 2020 Election may soon be drawing to a close, with indictments forthcoming.

Political reporter Jamie Dupree noted the potential significance of the reports that Roman may now be cooperating with federal prosecutors investigating the fake electoral scheme.

"Mike Roman could be a very important figure in unlocking how the fake ballots got to members and staff on Capitol Hill, who were trying to get the envelopes to VP Pence," Dupree tweeted.

In February 2022, Roman was subpoenaed to give evidence to The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, regarding the plot to send false slates of electors to Washington D.C. to "change the outcome" of the 2020 election.

In a letter to Roman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, said the panel has received communications allegedly sent by Roman. They suggested that he was involved in a plan to contact state lawmakers and tell them to "reclaim" their freedom by sending alternate electors to declare falsely that Trump had won in several states in 2020.

Thompson said itappeared Roman had "helped direct" Trump campaign staffers to participate in the plot.

Gary Michael Brown, Roman's former deputy, also received a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Brown was questioned in front of the grand jury under Smith's federal probe in mid-June, reported The New York Times.

While speaking to House investigators last year, Roman mainly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to CNN.

When asked about his ties to Giuliani—another key figure in the fake electoral plot—Roman replied: "I don't believe I had any interaction with him before the election."

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When asked about his interactions with Giuliani after Election Day in 2020, Roman said: "On the advice of counsel, I assert my constitutional privilege under the Fifth Amendment and respectfully decline to answer the question."

Newsweek has contacted Roman's office for comment via email.

===

https://www.mediaite.com/news/new-flip-ex-trump-staffer-cuts-deal-with-jack-smith-jan-6-election-interference-probe/

former Trump staffer Mike Roman has cut a deal to cooperate with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into ex-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Even as Trump faces a trial on 37 counts related to violations of the Espionage Act, developments in Smith’s other investigations continue to unfold.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Kaitlan Collins reported Thursday that Roman, a former campaign official, has reached a proffer deal with Smith’s team.

On Thursday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Collins detailed her scoop for guest host John Berman:

BERMAN: So Kaitlan, what have you learned?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF CORRESPONDENT: Yes, my colleague Zach Cohen and I have now learned that Michael Roman — who is not a household name, but he was a campaign official on the Trump 2020 campaign — is now cooperating with prosecutors from Jack Smith’s team, not the team that is investigating the documents investigation, which, of course, we’ve seen playing out in Miami. This is the one into January 6 and the efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election results.

And why it matters that Mike Roman is now cooperating is that he may not have to appear before the grand jury in a formal way. He did get a subpoena earlier this year. They did seize his phone a few months ago. So two notable factors there, obviously. He could speak to them in a more informal setting.

And it is notable, because he is someone who was involved with the fake elector schemeand we know that is what Jack Smith’s team has been zeroing in on in recent weeks and in inquiries they’ve had with certain witnesses, people they brought before the grand jury, that has been something that they’ve been talking about.

And this campaign aide is someone who was part of the coordination effort with advisers for the campaign, attorneys for the campaign in these seven states that Trump lost where they were trying to develop this alternate set of electors.

And so it remains to be seen what his cooperation could mean, what he could offer to Jack Smith’s team. But it is notable, as we have seen, You know, we’ve all been talking about the documents case, but there has been quite an uptick in activity when it comes to the January 6 case, raising the question of whether or not we could see indictments soon.

BERMAN: All right, a cooperating witness for the January 6 case, it seems perhaps in the area of fake electors. What happened with Mike Roman? The January 6th committee wanted to talk to him, yes?

COLLINS: Yes. He was someone who he pled the fifth for a lot of it. He did say and make some comments to them. They asked about Rudy Giuliani a lot. Rudy Giuliani has been someone they’ve asked about in a lot of these interviews, as well as the other attorneys that you saw on TV at the time.

He is someone who said he would speak about how he did not talk to Rudy Giuliani before the 2020 election, butwhen he was asked about speaking to Giuliani after the 2020 election, he used his Fifth Amendment rights.

BERMAN: That’s interesting. So you have sort of a selective pleading the Fifth on certain things when you do and when you don’t.

===

kelly “recently touted the results of an ‘internal investigation’ that identified Matt Stroia, his chief of staff at the time, as the intermediary for the lists…. Kelly’s office…said Stroia, now a Pfizer lobbyist had a previous relationship with members of the Trump team”

===

 D.C. - January 6, 2023 marks the second anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack. Supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. Their efforts were unsuccessful but following the attack, the House created a committee to investigate what led up to the attack. In their final report, the Committee points the finger at Trump for the attack in an attempt to stay in power. Also in this 800-plus report, it names northwest Pennsylvania Representative Mike Kelly’s (R- PA) former chief of staff asallegedly being part of the scheme. 

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack pulled out all the stops in their investigation. They gathered more than a thousand witness interviews, a million pages of documents and issued several subpoenas. Through their nearly 18-month long investigation, the Committee laid out what they said was a multipart plan by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.   

“He mounted a pressure campaign directed at individual state legislators to try to get them to go back into session and either declare him the winner, decertify Joe Biden as the winner or send two slates of electors to Congress; One for Biden, and one for him and pressure Vice President Pence to choose him as the winner,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) during one of the Committee’s hearings.   

The Committee said part of that plan was a fake elector scheme.  

“At the request of the Trump campaign, the electors from these battleground states signed documents falsely asserting that they were the ‘duly elected electors from their state,’” said a Committee investigator.  

According to the Committee’s final report, two days before the attack, the Trump campaign asked republican party officials in Wisconsin to fly their fake elector documents to D.C. The Committee alleges theformer Chief of Staff for Representative Mike Kelly (R- PA) for taking part in this. Transcripts would laterallege Matt Stroia as Kelly's former chief of staff. 

The report states, “On the morning of January 6, Representative Kelly’s then chief of staff texted an aide to the vice president, Chris Hodgson, about hand delivering the fake elector votes to the vice president’s team before the joint session, a message that Hodgson ignored: ‘Just following up any chance you or someone from your team can meet to take the Michigan and Wisconsin packets.’”   

The report continues saying according to the office of Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), Representative Kelly’s chief of staff then had a phone call with Senator Johnson’s chief of staff at 11:58 a.m. “about how Kelly's office could get us the electors [sic] because they had it.” 

“A staffer for Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson texted a staffer for Vice President Pence just minutes before the beginning of the joint session,” said a Committee investigator. “This staffer stated that Senator Johnson wished to hand deliver to the Vice Presidents two fake electors votes from Michigan and Wisconsin. The Vice President’s aide unambiguously instructed them not to deliver the fake votes to the Vice President.” 

A statement from Rep. Kelly’s press secretary initially denied those claims from Johnson's office, calling them “patently false”. Kelly’s office would later launch their own internal investigation. Kelly’s press secretary told us in an email “To date, our current chief of staff has not found staff members to have prior knowledge of Mr. Stroia’s reported actions.” They also add” Further, Mr. Kelly is unaware of Mr. Storia’s reported actions. We have closed the internal review.” 

According to transcripts released by the Committee, they interviewed Pennsylvania republican political operative Mike Roman. In the transcripts, they asked him about 25 messages between himself and Matt Stroia. 

In the transcripts,the Committee suggests Stroia may have been involved in a November state senate hearing in Gettysburg, which pushed unfounded claims of fraud in the state’s election. The Committee said Stroia and Roman shared text messages days before that meeting between the two, which they allege Stroia said in part “I hope it turns out like we envisioned”. 

Roman would plead the fifth quite often in the Committee’s questioning including when the Committee asked point blank: “Did Mr. Stroia or Representative Kelly assist in any efforts to have state legislators choose Trump electors in Pennsylvania after the November 2020 election?”  

Roman replied: “The fifth.”   

The Committee followed up with “Did you ever talk to Representative Kelly about having Pennsylvania state legislature choose Trump electors?”  

Roman would again reply, “The fifth.”   

Mr. Stroia declined to comment when we reached out to him. We also reached out to Rep. Kelly but his office said it’s unlikely they’ll have time for an interview because of the back-and-forth Speaker of the House vote. They also add “At this time, we have no additional comment on the Jan. 6th committee’s report.” 

===

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000916109/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000916109.pdf

For the WITNESS: 17 18 DAVID WARRINGTON 19 GLYNIS GILIO 20 JONATHAN SHAW 21 MICHAEL COLUMBO 22 Dhillon Law Group 23 2121 Eisenhower Avenue, Suite 402 24 Alexandria, VA 22314

...[worked for jutin]

Q Okay. So we spoke al ittle bit earlier about your role 5 and some of your job duties or functions on the Trump campaign 6 before the election. Did have you a formal role with the Trump 7 reelection campaign, or whatever that entity became, after the 8 November 3rd Presidential election? 9 10 A Q Fifth. I really couldn't hear you there. I'm sorry. Did you 11 say "Fifth"? 12 13 A Q Yes. Okay. 14 Between November 3, 2020, and January 2021, did you ever 15 participate in any discussions involving Sidney Powell or Jenna 16 Ellis related to election fraud or irregularities in the 2020 17 election? 18 19 A Q The Fifth. In that post-election period between November 3, 2020, 20 and January 20, 2021, did you have any conversations with any 21 White House officials, including President Trump, related to 22 potential election fraud or other irregularities in the 2020 23 e l e c t i on ? 24 25 A Q The Fifth. Did you, Mr. Roman, have any role investigating

[lotta 5th]

So, in this email, it looks like a mass mailing email sent 12 by the campaign on November 7, 2020, a little less than a month 13 before the Presidential election. And the "from" line includes 14 your name, Mike Roman, National EDO Director, from an email 15 address@team.donaldtrump.com. And the subject line is "Stop 16 elect i on fraud . " 17 The first question I have for you: Did you write this 18 email? 19 20 A Q The Fifth. Because this looks, at least to me, like it's kind of 21 a mass, like, marketing or outreach email. Did you have any role 22 in approving this message before it went out using your name, 23 from Mike Roman, National EDO Director? 24 A The Fifth. 25 Q The em a i l st a rt s , i t says , " E le ct i on f r au d i s real. " 34 1 That first paragraph there under the name "Laura," it says, "The 2 Democrats are busy changing the way ballots are cast and counted 3 in order to create chaos and confusion. Their goal is to steal 4 th i s elect i on f r om the Ame r i can people . They want to steal f r om 5 you." 6 What evidence did you or the campaign have that you' re aware 7 of at this time in October of 2020 that Democrats were motivated 8 by creating, quote, "chaos and confusion" and were going to have 9 a goal of stealing the election? 10 A The Fifth. 11 Q All right, you can take that down. Thank you. 12 All right. So I want to go to some tweets from election 13 day itself. 14 If we could pull up exhibit No. 5. 15 This is just one page as well. This is a tweet from your 16 account on November 3, 2020, which is election day, at 9:12 in 17 the morning is the timestamp. 18 And it says, "Illegal campaigning inside of a polling 19 location in Philly. Man in blue is handing out Dem literature 20 to voters in line to vote. This is why Dems are keeping Trump 21 watchers out. They are stealing it. This needs to stop." 22 Did you take either of the pictures that appear in this tweet 23 from your account on November 3rd? 24 25 A The Fifth.

...

December 18th email. 25 Can you see what we're showing you here as exhibit No. 9? 37 1 Yes. 2 A Q All right. So this first email is from somebody named 3 James Fitzpatrick at Donald Trump -- or, excuse me, with the 4 email address jfitzpatrick@donaldtrump.com. 5Who's James Fitzpatrick? 6 A The Fifth.7 Q All right. 8 The subject line of this email exchange, as you can see there 9 in the bottom email, is "Updated fraud examples in Arizona, 10 Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada, 11 Georgi a." Looks to be a file name . doc, meaning "document." 12 And Mr. Fitzpatrick told you, "See attached" -- excuse me -- sent 13 this to you, yes, and said "See attached." 14 And then, if we go up, you forward it along to somebody named 15 Jason Miller. And Mr. Miller responds, "Thank you, Mike." And 16 he asks you a question: "Safe to say this takes the best verified 17 examples we have from you, Navarro, Cleta, etc, and this is our 18 top -shelf s t u f f , you ' d be f i n e w i t h o u r d i s t r i bu t i n g p u b l i c l y ? " 19 And if we go up one more -- still on the 18th. And then 20 on, at least according to this timestamp, which is the 19th at 21 1:30 a.m., you write back to Mr. Miller, copying Mr. Boris 22 Epshteyn, saying, "This is the stuff we can validate, either a news a rt i cl e o r a c red i bl e a ff i d av i t . "  Do you recognize this email exchange that we have here as 25 ex h i b i t No . 9 ? 

...

So did you communicate after the election with Sidney 12 Powell, Cleta Mitchell, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Christina 13 Bobb, Ken Chesebro, or Jack Wilenchik? 14 A The Fifth.

...

associated with the campaign indicated that Mr.Giuliani and his 2 team didn't have evidence but did have theories about the 3 election and purported fraud? 4 5 A Q The Fifth. On page 7 of this same exhibit, exhibit 7, and this is 6 page Roman 0025, for the record. Mr. Stroia said: The mayor 7 may be calling you. Christina told me he's wanting to talk to 8 me about Pennsylvania. My mind is in no shape to talk with him 9 right now. I told him that you will know everything I do. Did 10 you speak with Mr. Giuliani on or about December 4th about 11 election issues in Pennsylvania? 12 13 A Q The Fifth. Do you know why Mr. Giuliani would have been calling Mike Kelly's chief of staff, Mr. Stroia, about Presidential election  issues rat he r than you , who was act i n g as the d i recto r of elect i on 16 day operations for the campaign? 17 A The Fifth. 18 Q In this message it mentions Christina. Is that 19 Christina Bobb? 20 21 22 Bobb? 23 24 A Q A Q The Fifth. Do you know how often Mr. Stroia interacted with Ms. The Fifth. Did Mr. Stroia or Representative Kelly assist in any 25 efforts to have State legislators choose Trump electors in 45 1 Pennsylvania after the November 2020 election? 2 A The Fifth. 3 Q Did you ever talk to Representative Kelly about having 4 Pennsylvania State legislature choose Trump electors? 5 A The Fifth. 

...[marriano]

:{:{}:

}:

The Fifth. 3 Q Were you involved in any other efforts to urge State 4 legislatures or State legislators to appoint electors, including 5 by reconvening for special legislative sessions, if necessary? 6 A The Fifth. 7 Q If we go to exhibit No. 11. This is -- and I'll 8 start -- excuse me. Can you see the top part of the first page 9 of what we just pulled up is exhibit No. 11? 10 A Yeah. I can see the top, yes. 11 Q Okay. This is an email exchange between you on December 12 2nd, 2020, with Tim Murtaugh, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, and 13 G. Michael Brown. The subject line: Michigan reporter 14 question. 15 And we go to the bottom of page 2. The Michigan reporter 16 question appears to be: Is the Trump campaign responsible for 17 emails from Kerrick Kuder and voicemails from Angela McCallum 18 to Michigan lawmakers, urging them to appoint their own electors 19 from Jonathan Oosting in Michigan. 20 After several emails, we get back to the near the top of 21 page 1. Mr. Murtaugh asked you and others: So what is the 22 answer actually? Is the campaign pushing emails and voicemails? 23 And you respond: The campaign did send emails and 24 voicemails. MR.

...

Q And same question: Did you ever discuss this concept 2 of or process for convening alternate electors with Rudy 3 Giuliani, Boris Epshteyn, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Bernie 4 Kerik, Christina Bobb, Judge James Troupis, Mike Brown -- G. 5 Michael Brown, or Robert Sinners? 6 7 8 A The Fifth. Q Pull up exhibit No. 12, please. All right. So we're putting up exhibit No. 12. Can you 9 see the top of the first page of exhibit 12 on your screen? 10 11 A Q Yes. This is a memo to Judge James Troupis from Kenneth  Chesebroor Chesebro, dated November 18th, 2020, in brackets, 13 12/10 streamlined version, re: The real deadline for setting a 14 State's electoral votes. 15 And then Mr. Chesebro introduces it by saying: Here is a 16 summary of my view that the Presidential election timetable 17 affords ample time for post-election judicial proceedings. 18 Have you ever seen this memo before? 19 Mr. Warrington. Can you scroll through it, - 20 Sure. 21 22 Q And if we go back to the top of page 1 and at least scroll 23 through it, that second paragraph under the summary - - I'll just 24 read the beginning of it. It says: Assuming the electors 25 pledged to Trump and Pence end up meeting in a State on December 56 1 14th to cast their votes and then send their votes to the 2 President of the Senate in time to be opened on January 6th, a 3 court decision or perhaps a State legislative determination 4 rendered after December 14th in favor of the Trump-Pence slate 5 of electors should be considered timely. 6 So now having scrolled through this and heard at least that 7 portion of it, do you recognize this memo dated November 18th? 8 A The Fifth.

 ...5th ...A Q It's been reported publicly that Pennsylvania State 3 Senator Doug Mastriano wanted assurances about the plan for the 4 alternate electors to meet and cast votes and wanted to speak 5 directly with Mr. Giuliani to ensure that the plan was legal. 6 Are you aware of any of Senator Mastriano's concerns about the 7 alternate electors? 8 9 A Q The Fifth. It's also been reported that Arizona GOP chair Kelli 10 Ward and Arizona State Senator Kelly Townsend also had concerns 11 about the alternate electors plan and that, according to an email 12 written by Mr. Chesebro, quote, Ward and Townsend are concerned 13 it could appear treasonous, end quote. 14 Did you ever learn about any concerns that Ms. Ward or 15 Senator Townsend had about the convening of alternate electors 16 in Arizona? 17 18 A The Fifth. Q We go to exhibit No. 18. This is a one-page email -- or 19 one-page exhibit rather, excuse me -- with an email from 20 Mr. Chesebro to you, Mike Roman, as well as Josh Findlay on 21 Saturday, December 12th, at 7:12 p.m. Can you see the exhibit 22 we've put up as exhibit 18?

...

63 1 Q In this exchange, Mr. Brown informed the other person, 2 Angela McCal lum, that he had, quote, just landed and that he had, 3 quote, never flown clutching his bag before, end quote. He 4 actually says "clutching my bag before," and he explained that 5 the reason why he flew clutching his bag was because he, quote, 6 didn't want to let the docs out of his sight. 7 Do you know what documents Mr. Brown was flying with in the 8 days before the joint session of Congress and that he says he 9 was clutching here? 10 11 A The Fifth. Q We go to exhibit No. 23. This is two pages of text 12 messages that we'll scroll through between Mr. Brown, Angela McCallum, and Madison Crawley. On this first page, you can see 14 here Mr. Brown sends a photo of himself wearing a suit and a mask 15 with the U.S. Capitol over his shoulder, and he writes, quote: 16 Mission accomplishedabout to Uber home, end quote. 17 And, regarding the photo, he said, below the picture, quote: 18 This has got to be the cover of a book I write one day, end quote. 19 And, if we go to the next page, he continues, if you can 20 zoom in on the middle of page, and he says, quote: I should 21 probably buy Roman a tie or something for sending me on this one. 22 Hasn't been done since 1876, and it was only three States that 23 did it.24 Question for you is, did you send Mr. Brown, Mike Brown, 25 to Wash i n gt on to de l i v e r any documents i n the days be f o re J an u a r y 1 6th? 2 3 A Q 64 The Fifth. And for what purpose did you send Mr. Brown to 4 Washington, as he says here, apparently to deliver documents? 5 6 A Q The Fifth. All right, you can take that down.

...

A Yes. 2 Q And, in this tweet, there are the hashtags 3 FightForAmerica, FightforTrump and January6th. Do you 4 recognize this tweet from your public Twitter account? 5 6 7 8 A The Fifth. Q Were you in Washington on January 6th, 2021? A The Fifth. Q Did you take this picture of the crowd with the 9 Washington Monument in the background on January 6th, 2021? 10 A The Fifth. 66 11 Q Did you attend the President's rally on the Ellipse in 12 the morning of January 6th and into the first part of the 13 afternoon? 14 15 16 2021? A Q The Fifth. Did you go to the Capitol at any point on January 6th, 17 A The Fifth. 18 Q Have you talked to anybody who went to the Capitol on 19 J an u a r y 6th , 2 0 21? 20 A The Fifth. 21 Q And, whether before, on, or after January 6th, so at any 22 point, did you discuss the rally on the Ellipse with anyone who 23 worked in the White House at the time, including President Trump? 24 A The Fifth.

===

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/15/jan-6-trump-operative-false-electors-00046175

Trump campaign operative who delivered Jan. 6 false elector lists is identified

Mike Roman passed the names to a House GOP aide in a bid to get them to then-Vice President Mike Pence, people familiar with the episode told POLITICO.

By KYLE CHENEY and NICHOLAS WU

07/15/2022

A little-known Donald Trump campaign operative delivered lists of false electors to Capitol Hill in a bid to get them to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two people familiar with the episode.

Mike Roman, then Trump’s 2020 director of Election Day operations, delivered those false elector certificates — signed by pro-Trump activists in Michigan and Wisconsin — to Rep. Mike Kelly’s (R-Pa.) chief of staff at the time, both people told POLITICO. Kelly was a Trump ally in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and his then-top aide received the documents from Roman before deputizing a colleague to disseminate copies on Capitol Hill, according to both people.

Roman’s role in the effort to deliver those slates of electors directly to Pence has not previously been reported. The onetime Trump White House researcher [bad code] ...

The origin of the false elector lists, which never got to Pence before he presided over certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, has become an enduring subplot in the select panel’s investigation of the Capitol attack designed to disrupt that day. After the committee revealed the role of a top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in the episode during a hearing last month, Johnson said the false elector lists came from Kelly — who has repeatedly denied any involvement by his office in their distribution.[vid?]

"They have changed their story, from denying their involvement outright to now not denying their former chief of staff’s involvement,” said Alexa Henning, a Johnson spokesperson. “Congressman Kelly should be issuing Senator Johnson an apology for participating in the perpetration of false stories regarding Senator Johnson’s minimal involvement in this matter.”

Kelly has recently touted the results of an “internal investigation” that identified Matt Stroia, his chief of staff at the time, as the intermediary for the lists. That inquiry found that the lists were never passed from Stroia, now a Pfizer lobbyist, to Johnson’s office. Kelly’s office, in response to a request for comment,said Stroia had a previous relationship with members of the Trump team and got contacted by someone linked to that team on Jan. 6.

“Matthew got the information,” Kelly’s current chief of staff, Tim Butler, said in an interview. “There was another staffer here in the office who was asked to physically walk it over. And it’s just those two individuals that were involved.”

Neither of those two individuals worked in Kelly’s office any longer, Butler said. Kelly’s office declined to identify the other staffer involved.

Neither Roman nor Stroia returned requests for comment for this story.

Both people who confirmed Roman’s involvement in the transmission of the elector lists spoke on condition of anonymity amid the select panel’s ongoing investigation into the runup to the attack and Trump’s role in it.

[INSURRECTION FALLOUT

‘His own choices’: Select panel says Trump — not his advisers — set Jan. 6 in motion

BY KYLE CHENEY AND NICHOLAS WU

The Jan. 6 committee’s mention of his office’s role put Johnson, facing a tough reelection race this fall, on the back foot. He later told a home-state radio host: “My office’s entire involvement in this thing lasted 70 minutes. My involvement was probably seconds, maybe a minute or two.”

Roman’s involvement, however, clarifies another piece of the puzzle behind Trump’s effort to seize a second term he didn’t win. Trump, relying on a band of fringe attorneys, spent much of December 2020 leaning on Republican state legislatures in a handful of states to ignore the results and deliver pro-Trump electors to Congress.

Under Trump’s plan, Pence — required by the Constitution to preside over the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — would cite the “alternate” and illegitimate electors to block Biden’s victory or delay the count altogether. Ultimately, no state legislature agreed to Trump’s plan, but the former president’s campaign still assembled activists to sign false documents claiming to be genuine presidential electors and delivered them to Congress.

The plan fell apart when Pence refused to go along, contending that doing so would violate multiple provisions of federal law and insisting he had no power to do anything other than introduce certified electoral votes. Pence, who had huddled with advisers and the Senate parliamentarian to flesh out his position, had decided well before Jan. 6 that he would not attempt to overturn Biden’s victory.

But that didn’t stop the Trump campaign from attempting to place some of the false slates directly into Pence’s hands on Jan. 6.

The Justice Department is in talks with the select committee about evidence specifically related to the false electors effort, Jan. 6 panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said this week.

DOJ has in recent weeks subpoenaed a slew of Trump allies who acted as false electors, including several state GOP chairs. It has also subpoenaed state-level operatives working on Trump’s campaign.

In addition, FBI agents recently seized the phone of attorney John Eastman, a top strategist for Trump’s effort who worked closely on the plan to appoint false electors. Eastman is fighting in a New Mexico federal court to get his phone back but was dealt a setback Friday evening when a judge denied his motion for a restraining order.

When subpoenaing Roman, who is from Pennsylvania, the select committee cited records reflecting his push to convince Republican state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump slates of presidential electors as part of a strategy to boost the losing campaign.

“[T]he Select Committee is in possession of communications reflecting your involvement in a coordinated strategy to contact Republican members of state legislatures in certain states that former President Trump had lost and urge them to “reclaim” their authority by sending an alternate slate of electors that would support former President Trump,” Thompson wrote in a letter accompanying the subpoena.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

===

===

https://www.goerie.com/story/news/politics/state/2022/07/23/rep-mike-kelly-speaks-in-erie-about-claims-of-pardons-and-fake-electors/65379480007/

no lnx vid

In combative news conference, Rep. Mike Kelly responds to claims of pardon, fake electors

Matthew Rink

Erie Times-News

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly on Friday challenged the veracity of a recent column written by the Erie County Democratic Party chairman and urged his opponent in the upcoming midterm election to condemn what he called "blatant lies."

Kelly, of Butler, R-16th Dist., however, was met with allegations of spreading lies of his own — about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election — from those political foes. And when asked by members of the Erie news media to address his past statements on the election and his office's recently alleged role in a false elector scheme aimed at overturning the election, the six-term congressman deflected and denied.

"We're at a point in this country where people are losing their faith and confidence and trust in our system," Kelly told the media Friday morning. "And when people can print whatever they print, whenever they want to print it and it be a blatant, outright lie, and then sit back to see how you're going respond to it, my response to it is they don't deserve a response."

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, of Butler, R-16th Dist., reacts to a question during a press conference held at Erie County Republican Party Headquarters in Millcreek Township on July 22, 2022.

2020 election:Ron Johnson now says he helped coordinate effort to pass false elector slates to Pence

Fake electors:Rep. Kelly calls U.S. senator's claims 'patently false'

Kelly calls Wertz article false

Kelly had already issued an unsolicited response and requested the media's presence Friday morning at his Erie campaign office to further denounce a recent column in the Erie Reader written by Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Jim Wertz, who is a contributing editor to the free alternative newspaper and news website.

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Wertz, in the article "Erie At Large: A Congressman and a State Senator Walk Into a Bar," addressed — in his words — how Kelly and state Sen. Dan Laughlin, R-49th Dist., Erie, "both found their way onto Donald Trump's pardon request list for their roles in attempting to overturn election results in 2020."

Jim Wertz is the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. He was elected by Democratic committee members at a June 2018 meeting. Wertz succeeds Bill Cole.

In the opinion piece, Wertz explains how on Jan. 11, 2021, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks emailed Molly Michael, former President Donald Trump's then-executive assistant, asking Trump to issue general "all-purpose" pardons to any lawmaker who either opposed the certification of the Electoral College votes from Pennsylvaniaor Arizona or who signed an amicus brief in an election-related lawsuit filed by Texas against several states, including Pennsylvania.

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That would include Kelly and Laughlin, even though their names or the names of others aren't specifically stated in Brooks' pardon request.

Kelly on his votes: Marriage Act a political ploy, says same-sex, interracial marriage 'law of the land'

The Texas lawsuit aimed to challenge the 2020 presidential election results in key battleground states because, the suit alleged, they violated the U.S. Constitution by making changes to election law through non-legislative means.

That's where Laughlin comes in. Though Laughlin supported Act 77 of 2019, the bipartisan election reform bill that allowed Pennsylvanians to cast no-excuse, mail-in ballots, he joined other state GOP lawmakers in signing what's known as a friend-of-the-court brief, or amicus curiae, in the Texas lawsuit. The brief asked the U.S. Supreme Court to also rule on the role Gov. Tom Wolf's administration and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court played when they extended by three days the deadline for county boards of elections to receive mail-in ballots in order for them to be counted. They argued that the Wolf administration and the state high court had usurped the authority of the GOP-controlled General Assembly.

At the time, Laughlin said he was not claiming there was fraud in the election and was not attempting to overturn the results by signing the document.

Kelly, as it has been widely reported, filed lawsuits against Act 77,saying that permitting no-excuse, mail-in voting required lawmakers to change the state's constitution, which did not happen. It was among the reasons Kelly objected to the certification of Pennsylvania's Electoral College votes, which gave President Joe Biden enough votes to defeat Trump.

Brooks' letter was sent five days after Congress certified the election results, the same day scores of Trump supporters violently forced their way into the U.S. Capitol in an effort to disrupt the proceedings.

Mail-in ballots: Supreme Court rejects US Rep. Mike Kelly's election appeal; he calls ruling 'astounding'

But in PA Commonwealth Court: U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly celebrates court's unconstitutional ruling on PA mail voting law

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, of Butler, R-16th Dist., holds a press conference at Erie County Republican Party Headquarters in Millcreek Township on July 22, 2022.

Wertz defends his claims

A statement from Kelly's office sent to the media early Friday said Kelly never asked Trump for a pardon. He had no reason to, the statement said. Kelly noted that he's considering filing a lawsuit against the Erie Reader.

But instead of stating what was inaccurate about Wertz's column, he said it was the job of the local media to vet the article.

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"The chairman of the Democrat party in Erie is the author of a blatant lie. And you want me to reply to it? Shame on it. Shame on it."

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"Didn't you call the press conference?" the Erie Times-News asked.

Wertz issued a statement in response to Kelly's remarks and then called a news conference of his own Friday at Democratic headquarters. Defending his column, Wertz called it "well-researched" and said he took care to include links to source information in the online version.

"Mike Kelly said this morning that he never requested a pardon in an attempt to refute what I had written in the Erie Reader," Wertz said, with fellow Democrats standing behind him. "The problem with that statement is that I never said in this article that Mike Kelly requested a pardon. It appears that he failed to actually read the article."

Kelly wanted Dan Pastore, the Fairview businessman who won the May 17 Democratic primary for an opportunity to face Kelly in November, to refute Wertz's piece.

"At the end of the day, the truth should count and character should count," Kelly said. "And so if I have an opponent (Pastore) that sits back and doesn't respond to it and says, 'oh, I think that's OK, because it's a piece of attacking, they're attacking my opponent' ... are you kidding me?"

But when the Erie Times-News questioned Kelly about his own past statements about the 2020 election, the car dealership owner wouldn't directly answer.

Asked if he still believed that the election was stolen from Trump, Kelly responded, "Well, we're already what, almost two years into this administration? So I think that's past tense. There's no use discussing it today. Nothing's going to change today. I stated my opinions back when it took place."

Kelly, however, brought it up about two months ago.

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At a rally with Trump in support of GOP Senate candidate Mehmet Oz on May 6, Kelly called the 2020 presidential election "the greatest steal in American history," but there is no evidence that the election was stolen or that there was widespread fraud.

Kelly has not been swayed by the findings of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump's efforts to overturn the election. That's because Kelly hasn't paid attention to the hearings, he said.

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"It's a sham," he said.

The hearings have included the testimony of former Trump administration officials, including former Attorney General William Barr, who have said under oath that they saw no evidence of election fraud.

Kelly would, later in Friday's news conference, say that the basis for his objection to certify Pennsylvania's Electoral College vote was because he believed Act 77 was unconstitutional. Kelly did not bring a lawsuit against Act 77 until after the general election, though. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his lawsuit.

Fake electors claims

Kelly on Friday also said he was unaware of reports that have shed more light on his office's alleged role in a scheme to introduce slates of fake electors from key battleground states to Vice President Mike Pence during the election proceedings. The House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 has made the scheme part of its focus of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

As Politico, The Hill and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have reported, a Trump campaign official, Mike Roman, allegedly asked Kelly's then-Chief of Staff Matt Stroia to get slates of electors for Wisconsin and Michigan to Sen. Ron Johnson's office. Stroia, as Politico reported, asked another Kelly staffer, who also no longer works for the congressman, to take the paperwork to Johnson's chief of staff.

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Early reporting:Sen. Ron Johnson wanted to hand-deliver fake electors' votes to Mike Pence on Jan. 6, texts reveal

Despite Kelly's office claiming to have conducted an internal investigation into the matter, Kelly himself said he was not aware of reports of Stroia's alleged role. Kelly said he had not discussed the matter with his current Chief of Staff Tim Butler, who was quoted in Politico:

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“Matthew got the information,” Butler, said in an interview with the publication, reported on July 15. “There was another staffer here in the office who was asked to physically walk it over. And it’s just those two individuals that were involved.”

A 'non-event'

Kelly called the alleged exchange a "non-event" because the slates were never given to Pence.

When first asked about the issue at his news conference, Kelly's first response was, "We've already responded to it."

"Not to us," a reporter from Erie News Now replied.

Kelly has also not accepted interview requests in recent weeks on the matter from the Erie Times-News.

Kelly said the Democrats and Pastore should focus on high inflation, record-high gas prices and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this past August, among other issues.

"All this action is about distraction," he said, challenging Pastore to condemn Wertz's remarks.

Dan Pastore, Democratic nominee taking on Republican incumbent Mike Kelly in the 16th Congressional District, talks with supporters at Calamari's in Erie on May 17, 2022 during the 2022 primary.

Pastore issued a challenge of his own Friday.In a statement, he called on Kelly to release phone records, emails, text messages between Kelly and his staff and anyone who served in the Trump Administration or his reelection campaign, and the "various groups that organized rallies that falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen" between Election Day and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“If Mike Kelly won’t take this simple step to be transparent, there is absolutely no reason to believe anything he says," Pastore said in the statement.

Contact reporter Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com or on Twitter at @ETNRink.

===

===

Republican Kris Kobach on Monday turned to a mysterious former special assistant to President Donald Trump to help him remain on the ballot in the governor's race.

In a brief appearance by phone at Monday's Objections Board hearing, Mike Roman defended Kobachagainstefforts by liberal activist Davis Hammet to knock the secretary of state off the ballot, partly over questions about mail-in votes that weren't counted because of mismatched signatures.

Roman, whom the Kobach campaign hired when it thought it might face a recount in the primary, generated . . .

===

an 9 22

The New York Times reported Monday afternoon that at least 40 subpoenas have been filed for allies of former President Donald Trump over the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election using the fake electors.

At least two of Trump's top advisers had their phones taken by the FBI, sources told the Times. Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-American Republican political strategist who served as a strategic adviser to Trump's 2020 campaign was one of those who had to surrender his phone. The other was Mike Roman an opposition researcher who worked for Trump from 2017 to 2018. He went on to work on the campaign, and became the person who handed off the envelope of fake electors to be given to Vice President Mike Pence.

The Times described it as an indication that the Justice Department's case is escalating after slow movement for the past several months.

Dan Scavino, Trump’s former social media director is also among those who got a subpoena from the case.

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was another subpoenaed. He was on the team with Rudy Giuliani and helping with the so-called "war room" on Jan. 6 at the Willard Hotel.

Some of the information, the Times explained, was asking about activities around theSave America PAC,which has been the main source of funding for Trump since leaving office.

Read the full report here.

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Roman has a history of making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.^[4][5] On Election Day in 2020, he posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud.^[6]He delivered the list of false electors for Michigan and Wisconsin to US Representative Mike Kelly who provided them to US Senator Ron Johnson.Staff of Ron Johnson tried to get these lists to Vice President Mike Pence before the count of the electoral votes on January 6th, 2021.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/11/trump-oppo-researcher-roman-403138

The mysterious oppo researcher working in the White House lawyer's office

Past administrations have also employed people with opposition research and investigative experience. But such dirt-digging operatives have typically not been installed inside the White House counsel’s office. | Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images

By NANCY COOK

02/11/2018

Updated: 02/11/2018 10:15 PM EST

Few people in or close to the White House have any idea what Michael Roman does all day.

Officially, Roman works as a special assistant to the president and director of special projects and research, a vague title that reveals almost nothing. He earns $115,000 a year for this work, according to White House salary records, and keeps an office inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

He reports to White House counsel Don McGahn, who represented the conservative Koch network as a lawyer during the period when Roman was working for the Kochs’ Freedom Partners group as head of research— a $269,000-a-year job that involved tracking the activities of Democratic political organizers and donors.

Roman, whose 25-person intelligence-gathering unit was officially disbanded by the Kochs in 2016, was hired by Donald Trump’s campaign to oversee poll-watching in the final weeks before the election and was among a handful of unannounced hires who quietly joined the White House soon after Trump’s inauguration.

He’s not involved in the kind of advance work that researchers hired by previous administrations have handled, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former White House officials and advisers.

Some said Roman is vetting special appointees by checking their social media footprints and financial backgrounds. A handful of people described Roman as McGahn’s researcher, while one described him as a “loyal soldier” to McGahn. Another characterized his work in the office as opposition research, but could not specify what precisely that entailed. One White House official said he was heavily involved in extensively researching the background of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was selected a year ago.

“Within the research world, he cultivates this ‘man of the world’ mystery,” said one former administration official. “Like, he was the guy who you would talk to if you want to find a Hungarian hacker in Hong Kong.”

Roman, McGahn and a White House spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Early in his career, Roman did political consulting work in New Jersey and his home state of Pennsylvania, as well as stints at the Republican National Committee and on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain.

On his blog, called Election Journal, Roman describes himself as a “veteran political consultant and private investigator.”

People who have known Roman professionally dating back to his work for Bush’s campaigndescribe him as a seasoned operative and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan, with a blue-collar upbringing.

“I’ve known him for 15 years. This is a guy you want on your side when you’re in a tough election,” said Mike DuHaime, a partner at Mercury and former political director for the RNC. “He does not back down from a challenge. I’m sure the Trump campaign saw that when not a lot of people would support the candidate.”

In much of his political work before joining the Koch network, Roman worked on boosting voter turnout and coordinating with state Republican Party leaders, DuHaime said.

On Election Day, Roman was stationed in Pennsylvania, his beloved home state. He also oversaw the campaign’s “election integrity” efforts across the country.

One Republican strategist close to the administration said Roman acted during the transition as a manager to help McGahn with his incoming team of lawyers, many of whom came from McGahn’s former firm Jones Day.

“That was a big priority and focus of Don McGahn,” said the strategist. “Roman played an important role during the transition for whatever came up for Don.”

Past administrations have also employed people with opposition research and investigative experience. But such dirt-digging operatives have typically not been installed inside the White House counsel’s office among the lawyers, who tackle everything from White House ethics to national security decisions to general legal advice to protect the institution of the presidency.

Rather, those positions typically are housed within the advance or scheduling offices to vet the hundreds of people who appear alongside the president during speeches, roundtables or factory visits.

“It was standard vetting to protect the office of the president and office of the vice president,” said Jeff Berkowitz, former associate director of scheduling research under President George W. Bush. “You can’t have a person on the stage with the president, in the age of Google, who has not paid his back taxes.”

Berkowitz added that his office also worked with the press shop and White House counsel’s team to vet greeters, event participants and requests for the first lady to be honorary chairs for groups and events.

The Obama White House did not employ high-level nonlawyers in its counsel’s office, said Norm Eisen, White House special counsel for ethics under President Barack Obama. The nonlawyers in that office during that administration were very junior fact-checkers, akin to paralegals, Eisen added.

Roman briefly cultivated a public profile, writing occasional bylined pieces from 2009 through 2011 for Breitbart News on topics ranging from alleged voter fraud in Pennsylvania and New York to the Department of Justice’s handling of the New Black Panther Party to a hit piece on Democratic Rep. John Adler.

Election monitoring, concerns about voter fraud and Election Day poll monitoring have long been a passion of Roman’s and the primary focus of his blog, with entries dating as far back as 2008. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post.

Roman also attracted notice a decade ago for disseminating a 2008 YouTube video showing two members of the New Black Panther Party, dressed in black with berets and one carrying a nightstick, milling around a North Philadelphia polling station — a video that ended up being played on a loop on the Fox News Network that year, personifying conservative fears about voter intimidation.

“The video was certainly used by political operatives to create this false impression of voter intimidation and fraud being a major problem,” said Rick Hasen, a professor who specializes in election law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. “Even today, people will say, ‘What about the New Black Panthers?’ They really are a nonentity.”

Eliana Johnson contributed to this report.

===

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/25/fann-townsend-subpoenas-arizona-trump/

no lnx  Democracy Dies in Darkness

Arizona fake-electors subpoenas show breadth of DOJ Jan. 6 probe

Requests for information from two state lawmakers were released under a state public records law

By Devlin Barrett and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez

July 25, 2022

Arizona state Sen. Kelly Townsend, pictured in 2019, and state Senate President Karen Fann received subpoenas seeking communications “relating to any effort, plan, or attempt to serve as an Elector” for Donald Trump after the 2020 election. (Bob Christie/AP)[

Grand jury subpoenas issued last month to two Arizona state lawmakers show the breadth of the criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington into efforts by supporters of Donald Trump to use “false electors” to try to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Copies of two subpoenas issued to Republican state senators from Arizona were released Monday via a public-records request, confirming what has been previously reported about the June demands for records related “to the signing or mailing of any document purporting to be a Certificate certifying Elector votes in favor of Donald J. Trump and/or Michael R. Pence.”

The subpoenas issued to Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate, and Sen. Kelly Townsend also seek communications “relating to any effort, plan, or attempt to serve as an Elector” in favor of the then-president and then-vice president.

A subpoena is not an accusation but rather a demand for information that investigators believe may help them solve a crime. The documents released Monday cast a wide net for any communications that Fann and Townsend may have had with any member of the executive or legislative branch of the federal government; any representative or agent of Trump or his campaign; or Trump boosters Jenna Ellis, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, Boris Epshteyn, James Troupis, Joe DiGenova, John Eastman, Joshua Findlay,Justin Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, Mike Roman or Victoria Toensing.....

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guk

trump's election day director is waging war on voting in Philadelphia

Mike Roman is claiming an increase in mail ballots will allow Democrats to steal the election, despite little evidence

Nick Fiorellini

Wed 28 Oct 2020

For decades before he worked for the president, Donald Trump’s director of election day operations has called out and made allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic party, building a lucrative career in the process. His name is Mike Roman, and this year he’s claiming an increase in mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic will allow Democrats to cheat and steal the election, despite little evidence.

Roman is best known for promoting a video of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in his home town of Philadelphia in 2008. Filed weeks before George W Bush left office, the justice department investigated the incident that was cited as evidence of Democrats seeking to influence the election. The case was later dropped because it lacked evidence.

In the decade after, Roman stayed busy. He wrote about alleged election fraud for conservative websites like Breitbart News. He managed a research unit for the Koch network, did consulting work for various Republicans and oversaw poll watching for Trump’s 2016 campaign. These days he’s focused on peddling the same myth in his hometown of Philadelphia, a key city in the battleground of Pennsylvania that could determine the outcome of the election.

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Earlier this year, Roman visited battleground states and worked with local candidates and parties to recruit volunteers to monitor election sites. The Trump campaign hasn’t released information about the number of volunteer observers it has recruited in each state but claims it has established a 50,000-plus army of volunteers across an array of swing states.

“This is one of the things about Mike Roman, is that he’s helping assemble this massive team of volunteers to ‘observe’ satellite voting places and it truly is voter intimidation, plain and simple,” said Tiffany Muller, president of Let America Vote, a voters’ rights organization.

Trump’s campaign sued Philadelphia this month over city officials preventing campaign representatives from watching residents register to vote or fill out mail ballots in satellite election offices. Before the lawsuit, Roman tweeted out a video of one of Trump’s observers being escorted out of the City Hall offices by Philadelphia police, claiming that “Trump observers [were] being blocked entry to all of the satellite voting locations in Philly”.

The video was shared by Eric Trump and President Trump, both claiming the incident was proof of “corruption” against the Trump campaign. But later, it would come to light that one of the supporters law enforcement escorted out of City Hall was James Fitzpatrick, the Pennsylvania director of election day operations for the Trump campaign. He was recording video on his cellphone, being disruptive and refused to leave when asked.

The campaign lost the lawsuit and the appeal. But the loss hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign or its supporters from trying to observe the satellite election offices. Trump’s campaign spent some time last week surveilling and videotaping voters dropping off mail ballots at Philadelphia City Hall. Pennsylvania’s attorney general warned that the campaign’s actions fall outside of permitted poll watching practices and could lead to voter intimidation.

On Monday, Roman posted a picture of a voter with five ballots on Twitter, alleging a Trump volunteer alerted election staff in Philadelphia of the crime. There’s no proof the voter was in Philadelphia or a crime was committed. In Pennsylvania, if a voter has a disability they can designate someone to deliver their ballot.

Roman’s personal blog and Twitter feed are filled with similar claims, with many posts targeting Pennsylvania. He has falsely accused the US Postal Service office in Thorndale, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, of having an anti-Trump sticker on its front door and asserted a random, unrelated theft of a laptop and USB devices at a Philadelphia election board warehouse may have compromised the election.

Despite many of Roman’s allegations of voter fraud being relatively new, it’s clear he’s been building his narrative for decades.

In 1993, Roman worked on a special election campaign in Philadelphia where voter fraud occurred. After Democrat William Stinson seemingly won the election against Republican Bruce Marks by a narrow margin, the Marks campaign successfully argued in court that some of his opponent’s campaign workers went to a neighborhood with a large Latino population and bribed, tricked and coached residents into voting for Stinson by mail. The judge threw out all mail ballots and declared Marks the election winner.

“That’s one of a handful of [voter fraud] cases in which the allegations of fraud were about absentee voting,” said Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist at the University of Rutgers Camden. “You could call it fraud, you could also call it voter intimidation, because some of that activity involved pressuring people to vote a certain way – by mail ballot – and telling them they were eligible to vote a new way when Pennsylvania actually had pretty strict rules.”

That case could herald Roman’s tactics ahead of the election results next week.

Philadelpiha MUST HAVE POLLWATCHERS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2020

Just days before the election and hours after Roman made his last claim of voter fraud in Philadelphia, Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning: “Philadelpiha [sic] MUST HAVE POLLWATCHERS!”

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/18/controversial-republican-mike-roman-to-run-donald-trumps-election-protection

controversial Republican Mike Roman to run Donald Trump's 'election protection'

This article is more than 5 years old

Operative best known for promoting video of apparent voter intimidation by New Black Panthers will oversee poll-watching efforts

Ben Jacobs in Washington

@Bencjacobs

Tue 18 Oct 2016

Donald Trump’s “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, a Republican operative best known for of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in 2008.

Roman is to oversee poll-watching efforts as Trump undertakes an unprecedented effort by a major party nominee by calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day.

The Republican nominee has insisted, without evidence, that dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in the United States.

Donald Trump's dark warning that dead will rise to rig the election

Read more

Trump has long claimed that the 2016 election is rigged but has amplified his claims of voter fraud in recent days. On Monday he tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was rampant in cities including Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago after long warning vaguely about fraud in “certain communities”.

multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network’s now defunct internal intelligence agency, will oversee the Trump campaign’s efforts to monitor polling places for any signs of voter fraud.

Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.

A justice department investigation into the incident – filed in the weeks before George W Bush left office – became a political football that divided career lawyers within the justice department. The incident was repeatedly cited as evidence of Democrats setting out to harm the election process.

The case was eventually dropped but not before it became a conservative cause célèbre. As Rick Hasen, a 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, who viewed the case as a “complete tempest in teapot”, said of Roman that he 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.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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https://en.**wiki**pedia.org/wiki/Mike_Roman

7 222

Michael Roman is an American political operative and opposition researcher.^[1][2] Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018.^[1][3] He subsequently worked for the Trump 2020 campaign.^[4] Prior to working for Trump, Roman ran an in-house intelligence unit for the Koch brothers.^[4]

Roman has a history of making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.^[4][5] On Election Day in 2020, he posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud.^[6]He delivered the list of false electors for Michigan and Wisconsin to US Representative Mike Kelly who provided them to US Senator Ron Johnson.Staff of Ron Johnson tried to get these lists to Vice President Mike Pence before the count of the electoral votes on January 6th, 2021.^[7]

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michael  a  Roman is an American political operative and opposition researcher.^[1][2] Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018.^[1][3] He subsequently worked for the Trump 2020 campaign.^[4] Prior to working for Trump, Roman ran an in-house intelligence unit for the Koch brothers.^[4]

Roman has a history of making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.^[4][5] On Election Day in 2020, he posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud.^[6]

Career

He began his career as a Republican Party activist in Philadelphia, his hometown.^[7][8] Early in his career Roman was a political consultant in his home state of Pennsylvania and in New Jersey.^[1] He was director of Election Day operations at the Republican National Committee.^[9][1] He has been employed by the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain.^[1] Roman also served as chief of staff to former Illinois Congressman Bobby Schilling.^[10]

Roman was a senior advisor on the 2016 Trump campaign as the campaign's chief poll watcher.^[11][12][13]

Prior to joining the Trump presidential campaign, Roman headed up an intelligence gathering operation for Charles and David Koch, industrialists and high-profile Republican donors.^[14] The now-defunct office surveilled and gathered intelligence on liberal opponents of conservative policies.^[14][2]

Roman describes his blog Election Journal as dedicated to "fraud, cheating, dirty tricks, absurdity and other election news."^[15][9] According to Richard L. Hasen, Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, the blog appears to focus, "only on incidents favoring Republican's claims against Democrats.^[9] During the 2008 presidential election, Election Monitoring, combined GoogleMaps, with Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to enable voters and poll watchers to post what they saw as instances of voter disenfranchisement and election fraud in a real time, online map.^[16] One scholar, while recognizing the non-verifiable nature of this approach, asserted that it "opens up new potential for election monitoring that addresses some of the limitations that established and official (election monitoring organizations) face.^[16]

White House role

Roman's role in the Trump White House as Director of Special Projects and Research, which Politico calls a "a vague title that reveals almost nothing," has drawn attention because in previous administrations it was usual for opposition researchers to work for the campaign or on the staff of the presidential transition team, rather than directly for the White House.^[1] He left the White House in April 2018.^[3]

References

1. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ ^d^ ^e^ ^f^ Cook, Nancy (February 11, 2018). "The mysterious oppo researcher working in the White House lawyer's office". Politico.
2. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ Haberman, Maggie (21 April 2016). "Koch-Backed Group Breaks Up Its Intelligence Unit". New York Times. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
3. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ Cook, Nancy (28 April 2018). "Oppo researcher leaves White House". Politico. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
4. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ "Trump 'army' of poll watchers led by veteran of fraud claims". Associated Press. 2020-11-03. Retrieved 2020-11-03.
5.  Analysis by Marshall Cohen. "How a false claim about anti-Trump bias at Philadelphia polling places jumped from Twitter to Trump's mouth at the debate". CNN. Retrieved 2020-11-03.
6.  Brandy Zadrozny. "Vote Watch: Conservative media influencers get early start pushing misleading claims about Pennsylvania election". NBC News. Retrieved 2020-11-03.
7.  Raghallaigh, Ciaran (6 June 2004). "O'Neill's Bhoys get Philly fillip". Sunday Mirror (London). ProQuest 339533782.
8.  Lieberman, Brett (31 March 1995). "They came "to make a crowd for Specter"". The Patriot-News. ProQuest 273219362.
9. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ ^c^ Hasen, Richard (2012). The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300184211. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
10.  Tibbetts, Ed. "Schilling makes staff hires". The Quad-City Times. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
11.  Jacobs, Ben (October 18, 2016). "Controversial Republican Mike Roman to run Donald Trump's 'election protection'". The Guardian.
12.  Levitz, Eric (October 8, 2016). "Trump Names Guy Who Accused the New Black Panthers of Voter Intimidation As Head of 'Election Protection'". New York Magazine. Retrieved June 15, 2018.
13.  Gauthier, Brendan (October 19, 2016). "Donald Trump taps shadowy GOP researcher Mike Roman as chief poll-watcher". Salon.com. Retrieved June 15, 2018.
14. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ Vogel, Kenneth (18 November 2015). "The Koch intelligence agency". Politico. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
15.  Brennan, Chris (24 October 2016). "2008 video weak support of 'rigged' idea: Trump building excuse if he loses". Philadelphia Inquirer. ProQuest 1831569518.
16. ^ ^Jump up to:^a^ ^b^ de Jong, Jorrit (Spring 2008). "Trends and Challenges in Election Monitoring". Innovations: 162. doi:10.1162/itgg.2008.3.2.159.

Categories: 

• American political consultants
• Trump administration personnel
• Opposition research
• Pennsylvania Republicans
• Living people
• 1972 births

===

huffpo

Early in his career, Alexander appears to have come to the attention of Mike Roman, the head of Charles and David Koch’s “competitive intelligence” team, a surveillance and intelligence-gathering unit that the Koch Industries brothers used to monitor and counteract liberal groups and activists. Roman, one of Alexander’s first Twitter followers, took to occasionally boosting the young operative’s account. Roman would go on to work for Trump, first in 2016 to oversee “election protection,” and, later, in the White House, where his duties were shrouded in secrecy, according to Politico. (On Election Day in 2020, Roman tweeted viral disinformation about Democratic voter fraud and was among the first people to amplify a “Stop the Steal” hashtag tweeted early that morning by Posobiec.)

In 2011, Alexander found his way to the heart of the GOP’s minority rule project when the Leadership Institute, a conservative grassroots training organization in Washington, invited Alexander, who was still on probation for debit card abuse, to give a presentation about online fundraising. The organization’s notable alumni include former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and violent pro-Trump neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, who told HuffPost in 2016 that the Leadership Institute had trained “this entire next generation of white nationalists.”

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http://www.politico.com/story**/2015/**11/the-koch-brothers-intelligence-agency-215943

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, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO and interviews with a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the group.

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.

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 and gears up to spend a jaw-dropping $889 million on policy and political battles headed into November 2016.

“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,” he told POLITICO.

The increasingly robust Koch network has seized on significant tactical advantages afforded to big-money independent organizations ― but not party committees ― in modern politics. Unlike party committees, which are mostly subject to five-figure donation limits, donor disclosure and all manner of campaign finance laws and party rules, the Koch network of non-profit groups and for-profit companies can accept unlimited cash without disclosing donors and faces few spending restrictions.

The Koch ATM

By Kenneth P. Vogel

The competitive intelligence effort, reported here for the first time, also hints at the audaciousness of the Koch network’s mission. While the Republican Party focuses on winning elections, the Kochs want to realign American politics, government and society around free enterprise philosophies that they hope to spread more broadly.

A key to accomplishing the mission, from the Kochs' perspective, is countering super PACs and other big-money groups funded by rich liberals, as well as allied public sector unions and academic and media elites. The Kochs’ allies feel that those forces have worked together for decades with Democratic politicians and government bureaucrats to institutionalize the philosophy that heavy regulation and taxation of business is the only way to ensure an equitable society.

The Kochs concluded that defeating this well-funded left-wing infrastructure requires tracking the professional left in real time ― a capability they realized they lacked after the 2012 election. In the run-up to that election, the Koch network spent $400-million-plus attacking Democratic politicians and policies, only to see President Barack Obama win re-election and his party maintain control of the Senate. A forensic audit of the network’s efforts concluded the Kochs had been out-maneuvered by the left on the airwaves, in the data war and on the ground. Vowing not to let that happen again, the network began investing in the competitive intelligence team and other efforts to keep tabs on the left.

To be sure, the Kochs’ operation isn’t the only one focused on pulling back the curtain on its opponents. In fact, liberal activists and groups have frequently worked to expose the activities of the Koch brothers and their network. But the competitive intelligence team, like so many other Koch-backed programs, appears to be unique in its scale and its thoroughly methodological approach.

‘The Opposition: Understanding Their Strategy and Infrastructure’

The Koch network’s interest in intelligence on the inner workings of the left was revealed by a secret audio recording of a panel at a June 2014 closed-door donor gathering at the tony St. Regis hotel in Dana Point, Calif. The session, called “The Opposition: Understanding Their Strategy and Infrastructure,” focused on the group that the Kochs’ inner circle regards as the Rosetta stone for figuring out, and ultimately neutralizing, the big-money left ― theDemocracy Alliance.

The group, which is meeting this week in Washington, D.C., is a club of wealthy liberal donors and influential operatives. Since its creation in 2005, the DA, as the club is known, has steered more than $500 million to endorsed groups supporting Democratic politicians and liberal causes like fighting carbon emissions, income inequality and the role of money in politics, while expanding voter access, abortion rights and gay rights.

As a fundraising vehicle, it's the closest thing on the left to a mirror image of the Kochs’ operation, though the cash raised by the Koch network in recent years has far eclipsed the amount credited to the DA. Donors to both networks write huge and mostly untraceable checks to a collection of endorsed for-profit companies and non-profit groups registered under sections of the tax code ― 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 ― that do not require the disclosure of donors’ identities.

During the session at the St. Regis, Mark Holden, a key Koch legal and policy advisor, pointed out the irony in liberal attacks on the Kochs’ secretive spending, calling the DA “a shadowy network of c(3)s, c(4)s ― who don’t disclose their donors, remember — who attack us as a shadowy network of c(3)s, c(4)s) … Whatever they may say about us goes the same for them.”

2016

Bobby Jindal drops out of White House race

By Alex Isenstadt

But Holden told the donors, according to the audio recording, which was obtained and posted by a liberal blogger, “We’ve been able to learn a lot more details about them in the last couple of months from documents that someone in the group, Democracy Alliance, left behind at their last seminar. And it’s very interesting stuff. And, at the end of the sessions here, we’re going to have some handouts, and you’ll be able to see some of the documents that we were able to get a hold of.” He adds quickly ― and to some laughter ― “I’m general counsel and I just want to say it was all legit, legal, appropriate.”

As Holden discussed the Democracy Alliance's efforts, internal DA documents were projected onto a screen at the front of the bronze-chandelier-lit St. Regis ballroom, including a “portfolio snapshot” featuring descriptions of 21 groups that the DA recommended for funding and a breakdown of the “core functions of the progressive movement.”

‘Like the CIA’

It is unclear precisely which documents Holden presented to donors (though similar documents appear to have been published in the weeks before and after his presentation by a handful of media outlets, including POLITICO) or precisely how the documents were obtained.

Holden ― who sits on the board of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce,which organized the St. Regis gathering and which oversees the competitive intelligence team ― declined to comment.

The competitive intelligence team is run by a veteran Republican researcher named Mike Roman, who is listed as Freedom Partners' vice president of research on the tax filing that group publicly released on Tuesday. That filing cites Roman's salary and benefits at $286,000 last year.

His team is part of Freedom Partners, but is managed through a limited liability company called American Strategies Group LLC, or ASG for short. ASG is set up as a type of corporate structure known as a “disregarded entity”, which exists only as a part of its parent group ― in this case Freedom Partners ― for the purposes of mitigating legal risk and separating revenue streams for accounting and tax compliance purposes.

ASG was the conduit for $13.3 million of Freedom Partners' cash between late 2012 and the end of last year, according to tax filings submitted to the Internal Revenue Service by Freedom Partners, including the filing publicly released on Tuesday covering 2014. It shows that ASG controls a holding company called CAVHOCO, Inc., which received a capital contribution of $17.5 million from Freedom Partners last year. CAVHOCO sits at the center of a confusing web of disregarded entities and holding companies, including one calledDemeter Analytics Services, Inc. That entity, which is the holding company for the Freedom Partners-owned data firm i360, was paid $11 million by Freedom Partners in 2014 for professional services, according to the tax return. Separate tax returns also listed Roman as trustee of a mysterious non-profit group called Public Engagement Group Trust, which appears to be dormant.

Roman, who did not respond to requests for comment, has worked to keep himself and his activity low-profile even within the discreet Koch operation.

One former network official said that when people were summoned to meetings at ASG’s offices, they sometimes had trouble finding the suite. “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.

The regular intelligence briefings from Roman's team, which are sent from an address ending in “http://amersg.org” to high-ranking network employees, begin with a warning that “This briefing contains information that is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not an authorized recipient, you are hereby notified that you are forbidden to read, disseminate, distribute or copy any of the material contained within. Authorized recipients are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this briefing is strictly prohibited.”

One such briefing sent in the weeks before the 2014 midterm elections and obtained by POLITICO contained highly detailed race-by-race breakdowns of the activities of liberal campaigns and their big-money supporters ― as well as conservative big-money groups ostensibly allied with the Kochs. It’s the sort of granular briefing that could be used to help the Koch network decide the most impactful ways to direct its own election spending. And it bears the hallmarks of research that combines close tracking of public information with original analysis of source documents, and possibly a dash of on-the-ground intel like that which could be gleaned by having an operative attend campaign events.

The briefing notes that in Arkansas, where there was a hotly contested Senate race between Koch network favorite Tom Cotton and Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor,Democrats were holding a statewide get-out-the-vote training in Little Rock, as well as a college organizing conference, while an immigrant rights group was “phone banking regularly with the intent of registering voters.” But the briefing also contains big-picture analysis flagging that union-affiliate Working America “has 400 paid canvassers knocking on 5,000 doors daily across 13 states through Election Day, especially focusing on Senate races in AK, IA, KY, MI, and NC. NRSC Vice Chair for Finance Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said the NRSC isn’t planning to devote any more significant resources to shore up key candidates in the red states of Kansas, Kentucky and Georgia.”

‘Scared to death of moles’

In addition to delving into the left, the competitive intelligence team also monitors potential Koch network threats, according to sources familiar with it. It tracks people deemed suspicious outside the offices of Koch network groups, circulating be-on-the-lookout photos to internal network email lists, while keeping an eye on the network's own ranks for possible leakers or disloyal employees.

One former network executive remembers an email containing a photo of a man identified as an operative with the environmental group Greenpeace who allegedly had been spotted taking his own photos outside the network’s cluster of offices in the Courthouse neighborhood of Arlington.

Connor Gibson, a Greenpeace researcher who focuses on the Koch network, said he visits its component groups’ offices once a year to pick up their tax filings, and he speculated he could have been the operative photographed by the competitive intelligence unit. While he said he’s never sought to conceal his identity during such visits, he added “If the Kochs consider me an opponent, I’m flattered.”

In another instance, sources say, Roman's team set out to identify an IT contractor who was working for one of the network's groups and was posting anonymous messages to Reddit, proclaiming that he worked for the Koch brothers but despised their stances. Within 48 hours, the team had sleuthed out the offender and his contract was terminated.

“They were scared to death of moles,” said the former executive.

A separate source ― an organizer who’s worked with the unit ― described it as “a full opposition research operation, only at about 10-times the level of any political campaign.” The organizer added “my guess is that most people inside the network don’t even know about it.”

Koch allies emphasize that the brothers and their network have been targets of regular sleuthing by the left. A nonprofit group called American Bridge 21st Century ― which is aligned with Hillary Clinton and the Democracy Alliance ― this year launched a $3-million project dedicated to researching, tracking and attacking the Kochs. Its staffers have been spotted recording the proceedings at Koch network events and appearances by the brothers, and it took credit for unearthing a trove of documents featured in a *New York Times*story about David Koch’s 1980 Libertarian vice presidential campaign. The group does not appear to be behind the untraceable recordings made from inside closed-door Koch donor gatherings over the years ― like the one of Holden’s dissection of the Democracy Alliance at the St. Regis.

Holden told the donors at the St. Regis that the big-money liberal groups in the Democracy Alliance were pursuing a two-pronged strategy that bears some similarities to the tactics of the Koch network. “What they do is they try to build a permanent infrastructure to win elections, and they obsess about us ― all of you,” Holden said. “And it’s the old quote ― first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they attack you, and then we win. We’re close to winning. I don’t know how close, but we should be, because they can’t attack the ideas. They don’t have the real path. All they do is target and they just try to silence people. You know, they’re afraid of us. They really are. They’re afraid of this room.”

==

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-election-fraud-mike-roman-58c0232a124e#.djcnwmicg

As Donald Trump insists to supporters that the election is about to be stolen from him, his campaign is putting its poll-watching operation in the hands of a man intimately tied to the racist machine that has tried to delegitimize President Barack Obama for the past eight years.

The campaign has hired a man named Mike Roman to run its voting integrity efforts in November, the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs URL

Roman’s major contribution to American public life is that his website, ElectionJournal.org, first published video of guys from the New Black Panther Partystanding outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

Fox News quickly picked up on Roman’s video and used it in a months-long smear of the Obama administration. It was mid-2010, and the right was hungry for something to substantiate the notion that Barack Obama was a white-hating racist.

Roman’s video clip of would-be paramilitaries outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 couldn’t slander Obama on its own. Fox News turned to a longtime GOP operative named J. Christian Adams, who insisted he’d witnessed Obama officials at the Department of Justice trying to sweep the NBPP incident under the rug during his time at the agency.

Adams’ story is riddled with factual holes. The administration had in fact won a default judgment against the guy holding the billy club in the video, after Bush administrators opted not to pursue the case. Some members of Fox’s own team eventually turned against the smear, though not until the network had aired Adams’ claims and Roman’s video in roughly 100 separate segments.

Trump’s call for election monitors could mean violence at the polls Only ten states explicitly prohibit guns at the polls.**thinkprogress.org

The episode captures the essence of anti-Obama derangement from those first two years he held office. Right-wing radio figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would insist the Obamas hated white America. Operatives like Roman and Adams would furnish a sorry excuse for proof of that charge. And the main column of the Republican Party would wake up knowing it would be a little easier to flat-out obstruct an absurdly popular president than it had been the day before.

Roman’s elevation now to an important position in the Trump campaign’s endgame preparations is a reminder of how the cult-like Obama hatred that the GOP harnessed for electoral gains eventually consumed the party. Thanks in part to his role in fueling the “racist Obama” narrative, the career operative got a chance to start writing for Breitbart. He penned 13 pieces for the site, most of them about voter fraud, while running a separate blog covering the subject and designing a smartphone app that was supposed to help conservatives root out election cheats at the polls.

Trump’s new hire has had a litany of odd jobs in Republican politics going back to his time with Philadelphia’s city government in the early 2000s. But he kept a hand in the voter-fraud paranoia realm throughout his various different stops around the right-wing infrastructure. Some of that work, like the Breitbart posts, was intended for the red-meat conservative public. But he also appears to have been a go-to name for conservative operatives looking to tilt at the election-rigging windmill.

Donald Trump’s first general election ad pushes election rigging conspiracy** Republicans are pushing voter ID laws to fix an imagined problem*.*thinkprogress.org

When right-wing activist James O’Keefe tried to pull together one of his undercover video operations in the Boston area in 2010, at the behest of right-wing button-pushers Foster Friess and John Fund, Roman was one of the people the disgraced smear merchant reached out to for tactical advice. A couple years earlier, O’Keefe had managed to destroy an organizing collective called ACORN — which Roman himself had been targeting for years on his election fraud website, with minimal success — with deceptively edited videos that tricked the media into believing ACORN had tried to help cover up child prostitution.

The particulars of Roman’s resume only reinforce the sense that Trump’s outfit is gearing up for a voter suppression effort far more explicit and modern than the traditional GOP approach. Republicans used to rely on a tactic called voter caging, where operatives would try to get tens of thousands of voters tossed off the rolls because they hadn’t responded to a sham letter generated by the party ahead of election day.

Old, subtle, low-fi methods aren’t a natural fit to Trump’s brash persona, or a campaign powered by people who roar for violence — with their candidate’s encouragement — anytime someone protests at a rally. In Roman, Trump’s hired a man familiar with a much louder, more confrontational approach to keeping political opponents off the Election Day scoresheet.

Sheriff openly calls for riots as Trump says election is ‘rigged’** David Clarke tweeted that it’s “pitchforks and torches time.*”*thinkprogress.org

In southern Pennsylvania in 2004, Republican poll-watcherschallenged every voter they thought looked like a Democrat. A voting line at the University of Pittsburgh stalled out for hours as GOP operatives tried to force provisional ballots on student-aged voters they believed were not properly registered, and stubborn election officials called the central office to confirm registrations one by one. With Trump urging supporters to go police polling places around the country next month, the confrontational tenor of that day in 2004 may end up looking downright quaint.

Roman was in charge of Election Day operations in Pennsylvania that year for the Republican National Committee. Two years later, he ran voting day nationwide for the party.

His work at the helm of the GOP’s Election Day machine must have been good, judging by the jobs that came afterward. He was a regional political director for Rudy Giuliani’s failed bid for the 2008 nomination. He helped Scott Brown win a special Senate election in Massachusetts the next year, and then guided Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) to a win in 2010.

After a year as chief of staff to a one-term Illinois Republican, Roman found an odd niche inside the Koch political empire. The multi-billionaire conservative tycoons hired Roman to run a sort of in-house security operation, patrolling for leaks and keeping tabs on opponents.

Roman reportedly took to the job with conspiratorial zeal, Politico’s Ken Vogel reported in 2015, running the brothers’ intelligence agency “all cloak and dagger — like the CIA.”

===

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mike-roman-trump-election-monitor

sneed

The Donald Trump campaign has brought on a controversial GOP operative with ties to the Koch brothers to run the campaign's "election protection" program, the Guardian reported.

Mike Roman, Trump's new elections monitor, is perhaps best known for his involvement in the New Black Panther controversy in 2008, as his website first posted the video and he continued to ring the alarms bells that the group was engaging in voter intimidation, even as the Department of Justice was divided about the case. He also led an "intelligence agency" connected to the Koch brothers' Freedom Partners network, Politico reported in 2015, that sought to monitor the election-related activities of Democrat-supporting groups.

Multiple sources confirmed with the Guardian that Roman was joining the campaign. His involvement comes as Trump has pushed the theory that the election is "rigged" against him, while urging his supporters to engage in vigilante monitoring at polling places.

Roman, a GOP researcher, has a history of claiming that the left was engaged in inappropriate activities to influence elections. His website, the Election Journal, blared the 2008 video of two members of the New Black Panthers lingering outside of a Philadelphia polling place, one of them holding a night stick. It prompted allegations of voter intimidation that became a conservative cause célèbre. The George W. Bush administration's Department of Justice brought a civil case against the group that was ultimately dropped after President Obama took office -- prompting discord within the agency -- while Roman continued to publicize any New Black Panther political activity, often posting to Breitbart.

The Politico report on the Koch brothers' intelligence group described Roman as a below-the-radar and even secretive figure.

"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,” one former member of the organization told Politico.

According to the Guardian report, Roman will now lead the Trump operation monitoring election sites for any signs of alleged voter fraud. The campaign did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment.

==

reg gustd uk

no link

Donald Trump’s “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, a Republican operative best known for promoting a video of apparent voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers outside a polling place in 2008.

Roman is to oversee poll-watching efforts as Trump undertakes an unprecedented effort by a major party nominee by calling into question the legitimacy of the popular vote weeks before election day.

The Republican nominee has insisted, without evidence, that dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in the United States.

Donald Trump's dark warning that dead will rise to rig the election

Read more

Trump has long claimed that the 2016 election is rigged but has amplified his claims of voter fraud in recent days. On Monday he tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was rampant in cities including Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago after long warning vaguely about fraud in “certain communities”.

Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network’s now defunct internal intelligence agency, will oversee the Trump campaign’s efforts to monitor polling places for any signs of voter fraud.

Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.

A justice department investigation into the incident – filed in the weeks before George W Bush left office – became a political football that divided career lawyers within the justice department. The incident was repeatedly cited as evidence of Democrats setting out to harm the election process.

The case was eventually dropped but not before it became a conservative cause célèbre. As Rick Hasen, a 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, who viewed the case as a “complete tempest in teapot”, said of Roman that he 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.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

==

Meet the man Donald Trump is trusting to marshall his troops at polling ...

https://thinkprogress.org/**trump**-**election**-**fraud**-mike-roman-58c0232a1...

ThinkProgress

22 hours ago - Trump's paranoid election monitoring work will be run by a man closely tied to anti-Obama derangement. ... The campaign has hired a man named Mike Roman to run its voting ... He penned 13 pieces for the site, most of them about voter fraud, ... Roman found an odd niche inside the Koch political empire.

Report: Trump Hires New Black Panther Alarmist To Monitor Elections

talkingpointsmemo.com/.../mike-roman-trump-election-monitor

Talking Points Memo

1 day ago - Mike Roman, Trump's new elections monitor, is perhaps best known for his ... The Politico report on the Koch brothers' intelligence group described Roman as a ... monitoring election sites for any signs of alleged voter fraud. ... servers use 13-year-old software whose manufacturer no longer issues security.

Koch Spy Agency Led by Voter Fraud Huckster | PR Watch

www.prwatch.org/news/2015/.../koch-spy-voter-fra...

Center for Media and Democracy

Nov 19, 2015 - Mike Roman, the head of the Kochs' "intelligence gathering" operation, helped propel perhaps the most egregious case of race-baiting voter ...

Missing: security ‎trump

Controversial Republican Mike Roman to run Donald Trump's 'election ...

www.theguardian.com › US News › Donald Trump

The Guardian

1 day ago - Donald Trump's “election protection” effort will be run by Mike Roman, ... In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was ... the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network's ...

Missing: security

Election Law Blog | Rick Hasen's blog

electionlawblog.org/

Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson commended this work and ... “Trump Supporters Have Been Primed For His Bogus Voter Fraud Claims For ..... to the Guardian that Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network's now ...

==

J. Christian Adams' accusations that President Obama's Justice Department engaged in racially charged "corruption" in the New Black Panther Party case do not stand up to the evidence. Adams is a right-wing activist tied to the Bush-era politicization of the Justice Department who has admitted he lacks first-hand knowledge of the events he is discussing, and his claims fall apart given the fact that the Obama DOJ obtained judgment against one defendant, while the Bush DOJ declined to pursue similar allegations in 2006.

Adams: DOJ's action in New Black Panther case shows unprecedented, racially charged corruption

Adams: DOJ decision not to pursue charges in New Black Panthers case demonstrates unprecedented, racially charged corruption.GOP activist J. Christian Adams penned a Washington Timescolumn leveling accusations of a "corrupt" and racially charged dismissal of the New Black Panther Party case and appeared in a two-part interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly. During the interview, Adams accused the Justice Department of "a hostility in the voting section and in the civil rights division to bringing cases on behalf of white victims for the benefit of national racial minorities." Adams further said that "the decision to dismiss this case was corrupt," adding, "to abandon law-abiding citizens and abet wrongdoers constitutes corruption." In a Pajamas Media post, Adams wrote:

If we had that frank, truthful discussion about race, we'd learn that the Obama administration doesn't believe some civil rights laws protect every American. The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination; during the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected. Americans have a right to know and judge the racial policies of the administration they elected in 2008.

Adams' unsubstantiated story spread throughout other right-wing media. Kelly brought the story to Hannity, and it was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, radio host Jay Severin, the blogs Hot Air, Atlas Shrugs, Ace of Spades, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, and the Fox website Fox Nation.

Reality: Adams' accusations don't stand up to the facts

• Adams is a long-time right-wing activist, who is known for filing an ethics complaint against Hugh Rodham that was subsequently dismissed, served as a Bush poll watcher in Florida 2004, and reportedly volunteered for a Republican group that trains lawyers to fight "racially tinged battles over voting rights";
• Adams was hired to the Justice Department in 2005 by Bradley Schlozman, who was found by the Department of Justice Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to have improperly considered political affiliation when hiring career attorneys -- the former head of the DOJ voting rights section reportedly said that Adams was "exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman";
• Adams has admitted that he does not have first-hand knowledge of the events, conversations, and decisions that he is citing to advance his accusations;
• The Bush administration's Justice Department -- not the Obama administration -- made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation at a polling center in Philadelphia in 2008;
• The Obama administration successfully obtained default judgment against Samir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party carrying a nightstick outside the Philadelphia polling center on Election Day 2008;
• The Bush administration DOJ chose not to pursue similar charges against members of the Minutemen, one of whom allegedly carried a weapon while harassing Hispanic voters in Arizona in 2006;
• No voters have come forward to claim that they were intimidated from voting on account of the New Black Panthers standing outside the polling center in 2008;
• The Republican vice chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which is currently investigating the Justice Department's decision, reportedly said that the other conservatives on the Civil Rights Commission were trying to use New Black Panther case "to topple" the Obama administration. Thernston has also called the case "very small potatoes" and criticized the "overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges" surrounding it, and said that rhetoric has not "served the interests of the commission"; she further said that DOJ has given a "plausible argument" for not pursuing additional charges in the case;
• The United States Commission on Civil Rights has been integral to the phony New Black Panthers scandal. Although the media have emphasized the fact that the commission is technically bipartisan, thanks to a "controversial maneuver" by the Bush administration, the commission is dominated by conservative activists;
• Adams himself testified that he had no "indication" that the decision involved anyone "higher up" than an acting assistant attorney general;
• The Obama Justice Department requested additional judgment against black leaders in Mississippi who were found to have discriminated against white voters;
• The existence of emails between political and career attorneys in the Justice Department does not contradict DOJ statements that career attorneys made the decision not to pursue additional charges -- DOJ officials have said repeatedly that political appointees were made aware of the decision-making process.

Adams is a long-time GOP activist

Kelly: A source "close to the case" said "Christian Adams is a conservative who has made willful misstatements in this interview." After airing a portion of her interview with Adams on the June 30 edition of America Live, Kelly reported the Justice Department's reaction to Adams' allegations and then noted, "Another source close to the case telling one of our producers that Christian Adams is a conservative who has made willful misstatements in this interview."

Adams reportedly filed ethics complaint against Hugh Rodham that was dismissed.In a February 26, 2001, Washington Timescolumn (accessed via Nexis) John McCaslin cited a formal ethics complaint filed by Adams against Hugh Rodham, brother of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. On February 24, 2001, The Washington Timeshad reported (accessed via Nexis) that "Adams said Mr. Rodham put his Florida law license 'in jeopardy' with an admission that he accepted a contingency fee in obtaining the commutation for Carlos Vignali, the convicted drug dealer released from prison after serving six years of a 15-year sentence." A July 22, 2001, New York Timesarticle (accessed via Nexis) reported, "The Florida bar has cleared Hugh Rodham of violating legal ethics."

Adams reportedly volunteered with GOP group that "trains lawyers to fight on the front lines of often racially tinged battles over voting rights." A December 2, 2009, article on the legal news website Main Justice reported:

Before coming to the Justice Department, Adams volunteered with the National Republican Lawyers Association, an offshoot of the Republican National Committee that trains lawyers to fight on the front lines of often racially tinged battles over voting rights.

Adams reportedly was a Bush campaign poll watcher in Florida.The December 2, 2009, Main Justice article further reported: "In 2004, Adams served as a Bush campaign poll watcher in Florida, where he was critical of a black couple for not accepting a provisional ballot in early voting after officials said they had no record of the couple's change of address forms, according to Bloomberg News. Democratic poll watchers had advised voters not to accept provisional ballots because of the risk they could be discounted under Florida law, Bloomberg reported."

Adams likened Obama to appeasers who caused "carnage" of WWII. In an October 30, 2009, American Spectator piece, Adams wrote: "President Obama's received his Peace Prize, according to the Nobel Committee, for his 'efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between nations.' Norman Angell's Nobel was awarded for similar reasons." Adams went on to blame Angell's ideas for World War II:

The 1933 Peace Prize winner profoundly influenced British policy in ways that led directly to German tanks rolling into Poland in September 1939. War did not break out because nations ignored Angell's advice; instead, the ensuing carnage in Europe happened because European democracies made Angell's ideas government policy.

Adams concluded: "Churchill, responding directly to Angell, asked 'who is the man vain enough to suppose that the long antagonisms of history and of time can in all circumstances be adjusted by the smooth and superficial conventions of politicians and ambassadors?' The Nobel Committee may have answered Sir Winston's query for the 21st century."

Adams is deeply tied to Bush-era politicization of DOJ

Former Voting Rights section chief: Adams is "exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman."A July 6 article on Main Justice reported that Joseph Rich, former head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division Voting Section, said that Adams "was hired in the Civil Rights Division Voting Section under a process the DOJ Inspector General later determined was improperly influenced by politics," by Schlozman. Main Justice further reported:

Rich said Schlozman asked him to attend an interview with J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner from Alexandria, Va., who had worked for the Secretary of State in South Carolina. Adams had also volunteered for the Republican National Lawyers Association, a GOP-funded group that sought to draw attention to voting fraud.

Adams did not have an extensive background in civil rights, Rich said, but may have had limited voting rights experience from his time in South Carolina. "He is exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman," Rich said.

Rich said he sat in on the interview, but Schlozman asked most of the questions. There was no discussion of Adams' political background at the meeting, according to Rich. Adams was offered the position shortly thereafter, and Rich said he doesn't believe anyone else was interviewed for the job.

"I was invited to the interview but was never asked for a recommendation," Rich said. "This was an example of the way things were being done. There's no evidence that this was a normal hiring process." As a supervisor, Rich said, he normally would have been involved in hiring decisions.

Schlozman's politicization wrought havoc on Civil Rights Division

DOJ IG "found that Schlozman considered political and ideological affiliations when hiring and taking other personnel actions relating to career attorneys, in violation of Department policy and federal law." A July 2008 report from the Department of Justice Inspector General's Office and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Schlozman "considered political and ideological affiliations when hiring and taking other personnel actions relating to career attorneys in violation of Department policy and federal law." The report concluded:

The evidence in our investigation showed that Schlozman, first as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and subsequently as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Acting Assistant Attorney General, considered political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys and in other personnel actions affecting career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division. In doing so, he violated federal law -- the Civil Service Reform Act -- and Department policy that prohibit discrimination in federal employment based on political and ideological affiliations, and committed misconduct. The evidence also showed that Division managers failed to exercise sufficient oversight to ensure that Schlozman did not engage in inappropriate hiring and personnel practices. Moreover, Schlozman made false statements about whether he considered political and ideological affiliations when he gave sworn testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee and in his written responses to supplemental questions from the Committee.

Schlozman is said to have picked attorneys who "lacked relevant experience" and "rarely expressed any interest in civil rights enforcement."The IG/OPR report stated that Special Litigation Section Chief Shanetta Cutlar "said that the applicants whose résumés she reviewed after they had been culled from the applicant pool by Schlozman or others in the front office typically reflected membership in conservative organizations. She also said the most striking thing she noticed about the résumés was that the applicants generally lacked relevant experience. She said Schlozman minimized the importance of prior civil rights or human rights work experience." In addition, the report states:

Former Criminal Section Chief [Albert] Moskowitz also said the candidates for career positions chosen by Schlozman had conservative political or ideological affiliations and rarely had any civil rights background, rarely expressed any interest in civil rights enforcement, and had very little or no federal criminal experience.

Schlozman testified that he "probably ha[d]" boasted about hiring Republicans or conservatives.From a June 5, 2007, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on politicized hiring and firing in the DOJ (from the Nexis database):

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER: Did you ever boast to anyone that you hired a certain number of Republicans or conservatives for any division or section at the Justice Department?

MR. SCHLOZMAN: I mean, I probably have made statements like that.

In addition, the IG/OPR report cited a January 2004 email in which Schlozman wrote to an attorney he had hired: "Just between you and me, we hired another member of 'the team' yesterday. And still another ideological comrade will be starting in one month. So we are making progress."

IG/OPR documented Schlozman discussing the removal of "disloyal" "liberals" and hiring of conservative "real Americans." The same report outlined statements from Justice Department officials who said that Schlozman attempted to remove Democrats and liberals and hire "real Americans" or "right-thinking Americans," which the report determined to mean conservatives. From the report:

Several attorneys in the Division also told us that Schlozman was open about his disdain for and lack of trust in the attorney staff of the Division. Appellate Section Chief Diana Flynn told us that in conversations with her, Schlozman alternately referred to the Appellate Section lawyers hired during prior administrations as "Democrats" and "liberals," and said they were "disloyal," could not be trusted, and were not "on the team." Flynn said Schlozman pledged to move as many of them out of the Division as he could to make room for the "real Americans" and "right-thinking Americans" he wanted to hire.

Accounts from numerous other Division employees and officials, including former AAG Wan Kim and Section Chiefs Cutlar and Flynn, as well as the context of Schlozman's e-mails, indicate that his use of terms such as "real American," "right-thinking American," being "on the team," and similar terms were Schlozman's way of referring to politically conservative applicants and attorneys. For example, an e-mail dated July 17, 2006, from Schlozman to Monica Goodling, who at the time was Senior Counsel to the Attorney General and White House Liaison, sheds light on the meaning of Schlozman's terms. In that e-mail, Schlozman recommended a friend who had interviewed with Goodling for a political position. Schlozman wrote, "I can assure you that [the applicant] is a good American. [The applicant] and Sheldon Bradshaw and I (and [one] other person) made up a four-member Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy at my former law firm." In another e-mail sent to Goodling on December 4, 2006, in which Schlozman recommended a different friend for an Immigration Judge position, Schlozman wrote, "[D]on't be dissuaded by his ACLU work on voting matters from years ago. This is a very different man, and particularly on immigration issues, he is a true member of the team."

A May 9, 2003, e-mail provides additional evidence of the meaning of Schlozman's phrases. Luis Reyes, then Counsel to the AAG for the Civil Division, sent an e-mail to Schlozman in connection with a legal matter, endorsing an attorney in the Department's Office of Legal Policy as a "right thinking american [sic] to say the least." In an e-mail response, Schlozman wrote that he "just spoke with [the attorney] to verify his political leanings and it is clear he is a member of the team."

IG/OPR: Schlozman cut section managers out of the hiring process.As explained in the IG/OPR report, a memorandum on hiring procedures sent out by Ralph F. Boyd Jr., then the Civil Rights Division assistant attorney general, indicated that section chiefs were supposed to interview and provide hiring recommendations. However, the report states that Schlozman "prevented many career section chiefs from reviewing résumés of the complete applicant pool, and he only provided to them résumés of applicants he interviewed. Five of the six section chiefs whom Schlozman supervised while [deputy assistant attorney general], from May 2003 to June 2005, told us that Schlozman further minimized their roles in the hiring process by providing little advance notice of applicant interviews, discouraging their asking questions during the interviews, and ignoring their assessments and recommendations regarding attorney applicants." In sections of the Civil Rights Division where Schlozman was not responsible for hiring, by contrast, "[c]areer section managers and attorneys in these sections had greater roles in the process for hiring experienced attorneys."

IG/OPR: Schlozman forwarded "inappropriate jokes," such as calling former Civil Rights Commission chairwoman "black and bitter." According to the IG/OPR report, Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta said that Schlozman was "very loose with his language" and made "inappropriate jokes" during his tenure at the Justice Department. In an example provided to the inspector general, Acosta described as inappropriate an email Schlozman forwarded around the office:

In that incident in August 2004, Voting Section Chief John Tanner sent an e-mail to Schlozman asking Schlozman to bring coffee for him to a meeting both were scheduled to attend. Schlozman replied asking Tanner how he liked his coffee. Tanner's response was, "Mary Frances Berry style -- black and bitter." Berry is an African-American who was the Chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from November 1993 until late 2004. Schlozman forwarded the e-mail chain to several Department officials (including Principal DAAG Bradshaw) but not Acosta, with the comment, "Y'all will appreciate Tanner's response." Acosta said that when he was made aware of the incident, he required Schlozman to make a written apology to him for his role in forwarding the e-mail and that Schlozman did so. Acosta said that he believed Schlozman wrote him the apology in an e-mail, but we were unable to retrieve Acosta's e-mails and did not find such an e-mail among Schlozman's recovered e-mail messages.

Adams admits he lacks first-hand knowledge to support his accusations

Adams: "I don't know. I wasn't there."During the June 30 edition of America Live, Kelly hyped what she called Adams' "explosive new allegations." But during the interview, Adams relied on hearsay and things that others said to support his allegations. For example, after claiming that a Justice Department attorney "threw [a] memo at" another attorney, Kelly asked, "What was the response? I mean, that's an extraordinary story," and Adams replied, "I don't know. I wasn't there."

Adams admits he did not talk to the attorneys he said made the decision not to pursue additional charges.During the interview, Kelly asked Adams, "So, what happened at the Department of Justice to get you to the point where you literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?" Adams said: "[W]hat happened was -- and it's been -- there's been testimony -- we were ordered to dismiss the case. We were told, 'Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party.' " Kelly asked, "Who told you that?" Adams responded, "Well, the testimony's been that Steve Rosenbaum and Loretta King, two political officers at the department, ordered the dismissal of the case [emphasis added]." Kelly then asked Adams, "Did you, personally, speak with Mr. Rosenbaum and Ms. King about the dismissal of this case?" Adams responded: "No. Chris Coates and Bob Popper did. Two other attorneys."

Adams: "[T]here are some things I'm not going to reveal as far as who they are. They know who they are." During the interview, Adams suggested his allegations about the decisions surrounding the case were evidence of "a pervasive hostility to bringing these sorts of civil rights cases." Kelly asked Adams whether the DOJ has "a policy now of not pursuing cases if the defendant is black and the victim is white." At one point, Kelly also asked, "Who specifically has issued that mandate?" Adams responded, "[T]here are some things I'm not going to reveal as far as who they are. They know who they are."

Republican Civil Rights commissioner: Adams "doesn't know why the decision was made."Abigail Thernstrom, the Republican vice chairwoman of the Civil Rights Commission, said during an April 23 hearing into the case:

I know Chris Adams very well, and he doesn't know why the decision was made, which was the question before -- that we were supposed to be addressing at this Commission.

Decision not to pursue criminal charges was made by Bush DOJ, not Obama

Bush DOJ, not Obama, made decision not to pursue criminal charges.Before President Bush left office, the Department of Justice filed a civil complaint asking for an injunction against the New Black Panther Party and some of its members. In his May 14 testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez explained that the Bush administration's Justice Department "determined that the facts did not constitute a prosecutable violation of the criminal statutes" but did "file a civil action on January 7th, 2009." From Perez's testimony:

PEREZ: Moving to the matter at hand, the events occurred on November 4th, 2008. The Department became aware of these events on Election Day and decided to conduct further inquiry.

After reviewing the matter, the Civil Rights Division determined that the facts did not constitute a prosecutable violation of the criminal statutes. The Department did, however, file a civil action on January 7th, 2009, seeking injunctive and declaratory relief under 11(b) against four defendants.

Obama DOJ actually obtained judgment against individual carrying weapon at polling place

May 2009: DOJ obtained default judgment against Shabazz for carrying weapon outside polling station.On May 18, 2009, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania entered default judgment against Samir Shabazz. In his May 14 testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights, Perez stated that the Justice Department had obtained "sufficient evidence to sustain the charge" of voter intimidation against Shabazz, identified by Perez as "the defendant who had the nightstick," and that "the default judgment was sought and obtained as it related to him." Perez testified:

PEREZ: Based on the careful review of the evidence, the Department concluded that the evidence collected supported the allegations in the complaint against Minister King Samir Shabazz. The Department, therefore, obtained an injunction against defendant King Samir Shabazz, prohibiting him from displaying a weapon within 100 feet of an open polling place on any Election Day in the City of Philadelphia or from otherwise violating Section 11(b).

The Department considers this injunction to be tailored appropriately to the scope of the violation and the constitutional requirements and will fully enforce the injunction's terms.

No voter has alleged intimidation stemming from incident

Civil Rights commissioner: "[N]o citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting."In an April 23 hearing on the DOJ's decision in the case, Civil Rights Commissioner Arlan Melendez stated that "no citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting," which "was clear to the Justice Department last spring, which is why they took the course of action that they did." From the April 23 Civil Rights Commission hearing:

MELENDEZ: My remarks are going to be brief because I think far too much of our time has been consumed on this seemingly unnecessary investigation. Citizens should be able to vote without intimidation, and it is our Commission's duty to investigate complaints from citizens that their voting rights have been infringed.

In this case, however, no citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting at the Fairmount Avenue Polling Station in 2008. This absence of voter intimidation was clear to the Justice Department last spring, which is why they took the course of action that they did.

This absence of voter intimidation was clear to the members of this Commission as well, or at least it should've been. Our investigation has been going on now for the better part of a year. We have wasted a good deal of our staff's time, and the taxpayers' money.

Main Justice: "[N]o voters at all in the Philadelphia precinct have come forward to allege intimidation."A July 2 Main Justice article reported that "no voters at all in the Philadelphia precinct have come forward to allege intimidation," adding, "The complaints have come from white Republican poll watchers, who have given no evidence they were registered to vote in the majority black precinct."

Bush-era DOJ chose not to pursue similar allegations against Minutemen -- one of whom carried a gun

DOJ did not pursue allegations that Minutemen intimidated Hispanic voters with a gun in 2006. Perez testified that in 2006, the Justice Department "declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation" "when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in Spanish." U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, [5/14/10]

Anti-immigrant activist in 2006 case reportedly had "9mm Glock strapped to his side" at polling place.A November 8, 2006, Austin American-Statesmanarticle reported (from the Nexis database): "In Arizona, Roy Warden, an anti-immigration activist with the Minutemen, and a handful of supporters staked out a Tucson precinct and questioned Hispanic voters at the polls to determine whether they spoke English." The article continued:

Armed with a 9mm Glock automatic strapped to his side, Warden said he planned to photograph Hispanic voters entering polls in an effort to identify illegal immigrants and felons.

Arizona Daily Star: "[A]nti-immigrant activist" "stood by with a firearm in a holster."A November 8, 2006, Arizona Daily Star article reported (from Nexis):

A crew of anti-immigrant activists, meanwhile, visited several South Side polling places in what one poll-watch group called a blatant attempt to intimidate Hispanic voters.

Anti-immigrant crusader Russ Dove circulated an English-only petition, while a cameraman filmed the voters he approached and Roy Warden stood by with a firearm in a holster.

Diego Bernal, a staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), said the trio was trying to intimidate Hispanic voters. "A gun, a camera, a clipboard before you even get to the polls -- if that's not voter intimidation, what is?" he asked.

Bernal said his group encountered the men at the Precinct 49 polling place at South 12th Avenue and West Michigan Street and began documenting the scene with their cameras. "There was an interesting period where they were taking pictures of us taking pictures of them."

Tucson Citizen: Incident "reported to the FBI." A November 8, 2006, Tucson Citizen article (from Nexis) reported that Bernal "said he reported the incident to the FBI." The article also reported that Pima County elections director Brad Nelson said: "If intimidation or coercion was going on out there, even though it might have been outside the 75-foot limit, it's something we take very seriously, and we'll be looking into it."

Conservative Civil Rights Commission vice chairwoman ridicules investigation

Thernsrtom reportedly said Civil Rights Commission's conservatives trying to use New Black Panther case "to topple" Obama admin. A July 16 Politico article reported that Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican who serves as co-chairwoman of the Civil Rights Commission and who is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "has made a dramatic break from her usual allies" on the Civil Rights Commission. Politico reported, "'This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers, this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,' said Thernstrom, who said members of the commission voiced their political aims 'in the initial discussions' of the Panther case last year. 'My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage the president,' Thernstrom said in an interview with POLITICO."

Thernstrom: "Forget about the New Black Panther Party case."Thernstrom wrote a July 6 National Review Online blog post criticizing the "overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges" surrounding the case. Thernstrom wrote, "Forget about the New Black Panther Party case; it is very small potatoes."

Thernstrom: Perez "makes a perfectly plausible argument" for DOJ's decision not to pursue additional charges.Thernstrom also wrote: "Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, makes a perfectly plausible argument: Different lawyers read this barely litigated statutory provision differently. It happens all the time, especially when administrations change in the middle of litigation."

Thernstrom: "I do not think that this inquiry has served the interests of the Commission."During an April 23 hearing into the DOJ's decision, Thernstrom also said, "I do not think that this inquiry has served the interests of the Commission as being a bipartisan watchdog for important civil rights violations, and I do not believe it has served well the party to which I belong."

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is dominated by conservative activists

• "Independent" commissioner Gail Heriot is a long-time GOP activist and member of the conservative Federalist Society who became an independent seven months before her appointment. Heriot was an alternative delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention, previously served as counsel to GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, and has been an activist for statewide initiatives to outlaw affirmative action.
• "Independent" commissioner Todd Gaziano is director for the Center for Legal & Judicial Studies at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. He has called "so-called hate crimes laws" "counterproductive," and once compared Bill Clinton and federal civil rights officials to segregationists.
• Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds was appointed by President Bush in 2004. His appointment was said to mark "the end of the commission as an independent voice for the protection of civil and human rights," and he has acknowledged that conservatives "game[d] the system" by stacking the Civil Rights Commission with conservatives.
• Commissioner Ashley J. Taylor Jr., was appointed by Bush in 2004. He served as counsel to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and was a delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention.
• Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow is a National Review Online contributor who has promoted false right-wing attacks on progressives.

Adams testifies he had no "indication" higher-ups were involved in decision

Adams: No "indication" of involvement by higher-ups. As The American Prospect's Adam Serwer noted, during his July 6 testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Adams was questioned about who was involved in the decision to pursue a civil penalty against one of the defendants, King Samir Shabazz, and drop other charges in the case (from Page 35):

MR. [David] BLACKWOOD [general counsel, DOJ Office of General Counsel]: Was there any indication that anyone higher up than Loretta King [then the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division] or Steve Rosenbaum [then the acting deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division] was making the decision to override the six career attorneys who said the case should go forward?

MR. ADAMS: None that I had any indication of.

Obama Justice Department asked court to extend injunction against black defendant found to have discriminated against white voters

Adams: Obama DOJ "blew an opportunity to put to rest the issue of whether they are willing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral fashion." In a July 13 Pajamas Media blog post, Adams wrote that "the Department of Justice blew an opportunity to put to rest the issue of whether they are willing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral fashion by objecting to a request by a proven discriminator to further discriminate." Adams claimed that the DOJ's handling of a voting rights case in Mississippi indicated that the Justice Department "do[es] not want whites and Asians, when they are the discriminated-against minority, to be protected under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act." Adams argued that a "no determination" letter the DOJ sent was "effectively a cop-out against using Section 5 to protect the white minority in Noxubee Countee."

Obama DOJ is seeking to extend injunction against black leaders in Mississippi who discriminated against white voters. In 2007, a federal judge determined that Ike Brown, chairman of the Noxubee (Mississippi) County Democratic Executive Committee, discriminated against white voters. As part of an injunction against Brown, Judge Reuben Anderson was named referee-administrator responsible for overseeing Democratic primaries through 2011. But earlier this year, the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee, chaired by Brown, submitted a request under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to create a closed Democratic primary. In a July 12 letter T. Christian Herren, chief of the DOJ's voting section, responded to that request and wrote that "it would be inappropriate for the Attorney General to make a determination concerning your submission." In addition to reaffirming that Brown has no standing to make such requests, the Justice Department also filed a motion to extend the 2007 injunction against Brown and the Noxubee County Democratic Party for an additional two years, citing Brown's and the Noxubee Democratic Party's efforts to "dictate the terms of electoral qualifications," which "violated the Remedial Order." In seeking additional penalties against Brown, the Justice Department explicitly cited the potential harm to white voters.

Adams relied on outdated, controversial lawsuit to bolster his argument

Adams: "There's actually a record" of hostility "where they dismissed a case the Bush administration brought against Missouri." During an appearance on the July 7 edition of Fox News' America Live, Adams claimed that the Justice Department had issued a mandate not to enforce election laws that deal with voter registration maintenance, which host Megyn Kelly claimed amounted to "sanctioning voter fraud." To support his unsubstantiated allegation, Adams said:

And you could look at the record. There's actually a record on this during this administration where they dismissed a case that the Bush administration had brought against Missouri, and they haven't brought any new cases.

NYT: Lawsuit against Missouri was part of "highly suspicious case" connected to U.S. attorney scandal. A May 10, 2007, New York Times editorial connected the lawsuit to the U.S. attorneys scandal, citing statements made by Todd Graves, the U.S. attorney for Missouri at the time the lawsuit was filed, that he was "pushed out in part because he refused to support" the lawsuit. A May 10, 2007, Washington Post article reported that Graves said he "clashed with [the Department of] Justice's civil rights division over" the voter registration lawsuit and that Bradley Schlozman "signed off on [the complaint] after [Graves] refused to do so." The Post article further reported that Graves said "he was asked to step down from his job by a senior Justice Department official in January 2006, months before eight other federal prosecutors would be fired by the Bush administration."

DOJ sought dismissal due to outdated evidence. The Bush administration filed a complaint against the state of Missouri in November 2005. In 2007, Judge Nanette K. Laughrey of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri entered judgment against the Bush DOJ. On July 29, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit remanded the case, asking the district court to consider whether local election agencies were complying with voter registration laws. In a March 4, 2009, motion for voluntary dismissal signed by Robert Popper, deputy chief of the civil rights division's voting section, the Justice Department noted that discovery in the underlying lawsuit against Missouri closed July 24, 2006, and that on October 9, 2008, the court declined a request to reopen discovery, and said that "events have overtaken this litigation" and that "the evidence in the record at that time may have limited applicability to current conditions in Missouri."

Conservatives falsely claim existence of emails is "proof" that DOJ officials lied

Right-wing media cite email index to accuse DOJ of lying. On September 20, Judicial Watch claimed that an index of emails released by the Department of Justice contradict "sworn testimony" that "no political leadership was involved in the decision" not to pursue additional charges in the case. That day, Adams claimed in a Pajamas Media post that the email index was "an explosive announcement" that "shows -- in a rather dramatic way -- that the DOJ haw been untruthful. Former DOJ official and conservative activist Hans von Spakovsky wrote that the emails "indicate that high-level Justice Department officials have been misleading the public and Congress." The Fox Nation linked to Adams' post with the headline "New Records Show DOJ Lied About Black Panther Dismissal."

DOJ has repeatedly said that political appointees were made aware of the decision-making process. In his May 14 testimony before the Civil Rights Commission, Perez directly addressed the lines of communications between political appointees and career attorneys, saying: "Whenever there is a decision involving a case that has attracted attention, we -- when the decision is made, we obviously communicate that up the chain." In a January 11 response to interrogatories and document requests made by the commission, the DOJ made clear that "[c]onsistent with the Department's practice, the attorney serving as Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil rights informed Department supervisors of the Division's decisions related to the case." In an April supplemental filed with the commission, DOJ officials further explained:

As is customary with complex or potentially controversial issues, the then-Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights advised the Associate Attorney General that she was making a case-based assessment of how to proceed in this case, engaged in discussions about how to proceed with the Associate Attorney General's staff, and informed the Associate's office of her decision before it was implemented.

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