Michael Roman, a top official in former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 campaign, is in talks with the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith that could soon lead to Mr. Roman voluntarily answering questions about a plan to take slates of pro-Trump voters in key swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to a person familiar with the matter.
If Mr. Roman eventually gives the interview – known as a proffer – to prosecutors working for Mr. Smith, it would be the first known instance of cooperation by someone with direct knowledge of the so-called bogus voter scheme. That plan has long been at the center of Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The conversations with Mr. Roman, who served as Mr. Trump’s director of election day operations, were the latest indication that Mr. Smith is actively pursuing his investigation into election interference, even as attention is focused on the other case in his portfolio: the recent indictment of Mr. Trump in Florida on charges of illegally preserving classified documents and then obstructing the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve them.
In recent weeks, several witnesses with connections to the bogus voter scheme have appeared before a grand jury in Washington’s Federal District Court investigating the ways Mr. Trump and his allies attempted to reverse his defeat by Mr. Trump. to pray. Among them was Gary Michael Brown, Mr Roman’s former deputy, who was questioned before the grand jury on Thursday.
According to emails reviewed by NewsMadura last summer, Mr. Roman did much of the legwork in crafting the fake voter plan and finding ways to challenge Mr. Trump’s losses in several key battlefield states. . Mr. Roman, the emails show, coordinated with several other attorneys and aides to Mr. Trump in seeking support to create the bogus voters in states such as Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.
Among those with whom Mr Roman worked closely, the emails revealed, were Boris Epshteyn, a campaign attorney and political adviser who has since served as Mr Trump’s internal counsel, and Jenna Ellis, another attorney which Mr Roman advised Trump after his defeat to Mr Biden on how to challenge the election results.
In March, as part of a disciplinary proceeding by bar clerks in her home state of Colorado, Ms. Ellis admitted to knowingly misrepresenting facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Trump’s defeat.
The emails reviewed by The Times revealed that Mr Roman and others were discussing options to avoid Mr Biden being certified as the winner of the election. He reported details of their activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney, who defended Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.
The fake voter strategy was perhaps the longest running and most extensive of the many attempts by Mr Trump and his allies to reverse the results of the 2020 election. It involved an extensive cast of pro-Trump lawyers, Republican officials and White House aides, in an effort that began before some states had even counted their ballots.
The plan culminated in a campaign by Mr. Trump and others to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the false slates to undermine congressional certification of the election’s outcome for a joint session of congress on January 6, 2021. was interrupted when a violent mob of Mr. Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol and drove lawmakers away.
Even some of those involved in efforts to keep Mr Trump in office seemed to recognize that the election plan was legally questionable.
“We would just send ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can object when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix – based attorney who helped organize Arizona’s pro-Trump voters, wrote in a December 2020 email to Mr. Epshteyn.
In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik that it was probably better to call them “alternate” voters than “fake” voters, and he added a smiley emoji.
The FBI formally opened an investigation into the bogus voter scheme in April 2022, according to people familiar with the matter, and federal prosecutors issued a spate of grand jury subpoenas to Republican officials in states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada two months later .
Two top Nevada Republican officials involved in the scheme — Jim DeGraffenreid and Michael McDonald — testified before the grand jury in Washington two weeks ago, the same day Mr. Trump was indicted in Miami in the classified documents case.
Throughout the winter and into the spring, a steady stream of witnesses—some of them exceptionally close to Mr. Trump—were subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and answer questions about the former president’s phony electoral plan and other efforts to gain power. stay after losing the election.
Among those forced to show up were Pat A. Cipollone, former White House counsel to Mr. Trump; Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff; and former Vice President Mike Pence. Most of these witnesses attempted to limit the scope of their testimony by asserting various forms of privilege in a long-running behind closed door legal battle that ultimately failed.
In a separate line of investigation, in June 2022, the Justice Department confiscated the cellphones of a handful of lawyers affiliated with the bogus voter scheme. They included John Eastman, a California law professor who advised Trump on the plan, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was close to serving as acting attorney general and who helped draft a letter to Georgia state officials recommending creating a list of pro-Trump voters.
Last July, the Department of Justice assembled a team of prosecutors – working under the codename Project Coconut – to sort through the various messages seized from Mr Eastman, Mr Clark and another former attorney for the Department of Justice. Justice, Ken Klukowski, for all that may have been protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege, according to a person familiar with the case.
This so-called filtering team grew in size and scope, the person said, as researchers obtained more data from other research subjects, including Mr. Meadows; Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who recruited Mr. Eastman to work on the fake voter scheme; and Mr. Epshteyn.
Adam Goldman reporting contributed.
