"Mike Roman set us up." Operative within the 2020 Trump Campaign with ties to General Flynn and the Koch brothers caused Michigan alternate electors to be indicted
Roman and a Flynn attorney were involved in omitting language that would have indemnified electors.
MICHIGAN - According to some of the indicted 2020 Michigan alternate electors, Mike Roman, who worked as Director of Election Day Operations (EDO) for the RNC in 2020, was responsible for the decision to strike language from the documents signed by the electors that would have likely prevented their indictments.
The documents signed by Pennsylvania’s alternate electors included a clause that indicated that they would only become electors in the event a court ruled that Trump had won that state. Because of that clause, the Pennsylvania alternate electors have not been charged with a crime.
In a text message made public in the Michigan electors court case, Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro appears to be suggesting to Mike Roman - who is not an attorney - that the language in all the states should mirror the documents used in Pennsylvania, which is Roman’s home state. Mike Roman responded, “I don’t,” then “f—k these guys.”
One of the Michigan alternate electors told Bigger Truth, “Well, Mike Roman f—ked us alright. He set us up.”
Another elector told Bigger Truth that s/he agreed that if Roman had included the conditional language they wouldn’t have been prosecuted. The elector added, “We were just told that we were needed to serve in the roles that we were elected to in case any fraud was uncovered, and that it has been done before historically, and that the RNC attorneys were involved.”
This elector added, “I completely trusted Ronna and her attorneys - Ronna is the point of the sword on this. She was the one signing the paychecks to the attorneys.”
Both electors spoke with Bigger Truth on the condition of anonymity due to their ongoing court cases.
In an April hearing for the Michigan electors’ case, the Detroit News reported that George Donnini, attorney for RNC Committeewoman Kathy Berden, who is one of the electors, said in court that if Roman hadn't blocked the conditional language from Michigan's certificate, there would have been no charges against the electors.
In a May hearing, Anthony Zammit, former Communications Director for MIGOP, testified and echoed Donnini’s assertion when describing why he had contacted the January 6 Committee a year prior, “I thought that several of the people that were involved in this, they weren’t implicated and that a lot of the electors were not necessarily responsible for what had happened.”
One of the people Zammit seemed to think should have been implicated was Shawn Flynn, a Washington, D.C. attorney and partner of Jesse Binnall in the Binnall Law Group. Bigger Truth ran background checks on Shawn Flynn and General Mike Flynn and they do not appear to be family relatives. However, Shawn Flynn and Binnall have frequently represented General Flynn in several lawsuits, including litigation against journalists and an interesting failed suit against the United States of America.
Binnall himself is a paid subscriber of Bigger Truth.
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One elector told Bigger Truth that Shawn Flynn was asked to testify and declined. Neither any of the defense attorneys nor the prosecutors have thus far subpoenaed Flynn.
Shawn Flynn grew up in Michigan. His brother, Matthew J. Flynn, is also an attorney in Washington D.C. and served as President Trump’s secretary to the Cabinet, acting as the liaison between the Cabinet and the President.
Tony Zammit said in court, “I think a lot of folks listen to lawyers. I think it’s a position of authority and I think they were being told something by a lawyer that they needed to sign certain documents so that Michigan would not be disenfranchised.”
Zammit said he believed that Shawn Flynn led the electors to believe that if they didn’t sign the documents, it wouldn’t just harm Trump’s chances, it would disenfranchise Michigan’s voters.
Time was also very much of the essence. There was pressure on the electors to act immediately. Every state that sent alternate electors signed on the same day, December 14, 2020, which was the legal deadline to do so.
When Bigger Truth spoke with some of the electors, they indicated they felt pressure and a sense of duty to sign the documents. They clearly did not have criminal intent - they were simply hoping it would help their state’s voters, President Trump and the Republican Party.
Zammit suggested that Shawn Flynn may have had a clearer understanding of the gravity of what was going to happen with the documents the electors signed. Zammit testified that Flynn told him after Flynn had gathered the signatures, “Can you believe that I have to send this to the Secretary of State, the Vice President and the National Archives?”
They were represented as the official electors to the National Archives.
Mike Roman’s connections to the Koch brothers - and Mike Flynn
Roman worked several years for Charles and David Koch, brothers and long-time Republican donors who are widely known as being neverTrumpers and supported Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Roman himself is strong connection between the Kochs and Mike Flynn, as he has worked directly for both. Roman is described as an expert opposition researcher and led the Public Engagement Group Trust (PEGT), which received $3.5M from the Koch network in the 2011-2012 election cycle.
Roman then scaled up significantly in 2015 with the Kochs’ help, creating a private intelligence organization with a staff of 25 that included a former CIA analyst. The Koch brothers spent about $900M - nearly as much as either the Democrats or Republicans - in the 2016 election cycle but did not endorse any presidential candidate.
Roman’s skill at opposition research may make him something of a feared person within the party. He is one of the indicted individuals in Fulton County, Georgia, with Trump and others. In fact, it was Roman who was responsible for discovering and exposing Fanni Willis’ affair, which she had obviously gone to great lengths to hide.
As Roman was working for the Trump White House doing opposition research, then for the RNC, he also worked for the International Democratic Union (IDU), a center-right international coalition of center-right political parties, as Assistant Director and Treasurer.
As a foreign NGO, the finances of IDU are extraordinarily opaque. However, it is widely speculated that the Kochs have long been involved in the IDU, providing one more potential link between Roman and the Kochs - even as he was working for President Trump.
If Roman remained a Koch loyalist even while working for Trump, he wasn’t the only one. Vice President Mike Pence also had long and well-established ties to the Kochs.
Shortly after Joe Biden’s heavily fortified inauguration on Jan 20, 2021, Roman took a job with Mike Flynn’s The America Project. He was involved in preparing for and executing the Arizona election audit on behalf of The America Project.
In text messages and emails obtained by American Oversight and reviewed by Bigger Truth, Roman is mentioned or discussed by Doug Logan of Cyberninjas, General Flynn, Jeff DeWit and audit treasurer Randy Pullen. Interestingly, Roman was more than once paired in internal communications with Todd Sanders, self-proclaimed forensics expert close to Flynn and Logan.
Mike Roman therefore demonstrates a point of connection between Mike Flynn and the Koch brothers, a connection that is of particular interest heading into the National Convention, where the only potential (although at this point highly unlikely) threat of chaos to Trump’s nomination could come from a partnership between Flynn’s anti-Republican cult and the Koch establishment.
Roman and Shawn Flynn team up on Election Day Operations
With Roman at the helm, RNC’s Election Day Operations (EDO) in 2020 were a remarkable failure in Michigan.
In 2020, Roman had the role of Director of Election Day Operations for the Trump 2020 Campaign. This email sent by Roman to a group of EDO volunteer leaders in Michigan suggests that he brought Shawn Flynn into the fold with EDO in June, 2020.
Two of the lead volunteers in Michigan told Bigger Truth that there was essentially no support from Roman and Shawn Flynn leading up to, on, and immediately after election day. The volunteer leaders recruited a couple hundred volunteers without the promised support. And on election day, when help was desperately needed at TCF Center in Detroit, calls were not returned and help was not provided.
The following video, made public here for the first time, shows an ad hoc poll watcher training that was held by volunteer leaders on November 4, 2020 in TCF Center. This occurred after volunteer leaders put out an emergency call that morning for more poll watchers as chaos was unfolding in the massive mail-in ballot counting center. There was no support from Roman or Shawn Flynn or anyone else at the RNC.
Prior to the 2020 election, the RNC promised significant numbers of attorneys on call. But when November 3 came along, they massively underdelivered - at least in Michigan.
More questions than answers
The Koch network’s efforts to counter Trump and the conservative populist movement are well documented. Charles Koch has even worked directly with George Soros, jointly funding the Quincy think tank, which has been accused of anti-Semitism by Tom Cotton and others.
Based on that, a potential motive to sabotage Trump’s reelection efforts seems obvious. But why would they want to set up for indictment the electors in all the states but Roman’s home state of Pennsylvania?
Could it be related to the political persecution around J6? Could they have been seeking to discourage fighting back over a plan to encourage noncitizen voting potential fraud in the upcoming 2024 election?
All of this leads to more questions than answers:
Was Roman a Koch plant in Trump’s administration and the RNC?
Who else had infiltrated key roles in the White House and RNC?
Did Mike Roman and Shawn Flynn sabotage the EDO operations for the RNC? Or were they directed to do so by Ronna McDaniels, who signed their checks? Or was it the Koch or Flynn networks?
Did Mike Roman and Shawn Flynn deliberately set up the alternate electors?
What was General Flynn’s involvement and communication with Roman and/or Shawn Flynn (if any) prior to November 3?
- and -How does this fit in with Flynn’s other operations in the days and weeks before and after November 3, 2020?
Much more to come.