Key Player in Trump’s 2020 Campaign Mulls Special Counsel Interview

The New York Times is reporting that a former President Donald Trump 2020 campaign official may cooperate with Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of Jan. 6, 2021, election interference.

According to the report, Michael Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day operations, is talking with Smith’s office about giving an interview called a “proffer” to prosecutors working for Smith. Should he do so, according to The Times, it would be the first known instance of cooperation by a key player in the “fake electors” plan at the heart of Smith’s investigation.

The fake electors plan involved creating pro-Trump slates of electors in key swing states that Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 to give then-Vice President Mike Pence a reason to challenge the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote count during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, the day Trump supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol.

Attorney Merrick Garland tasked Smith with investigating Trump on two separate fronts, including his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House and his role with others to subvert the 2020 election.

The former president is already facing 37 federal felony charges for his handling of documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office and has pleaded not guilty to the counts during his arraignment in Miami.

The report said that several people involved in the fake electors’ plot testified in front of a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., including Roman’s deputy, Gary Michael Brown, who testified Thursday.

The Times said it has reviewed emails it obtained last summer that show Roman doing much of the “legwork” for the scheme and assembling a team of lawyers and aides to assist that effort.

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” The Times reported Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who was helping to organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, writing in a December 2020 email reviewed by the publication.

The Times reported that the FBI formally opened an investigation into the alleged plan in April 2022, issuing “a flurry” of grand jury subpoenas to Republican officials in the battleground states two months later.

In June 2022, the DOJ seized several cellphones from lawyers connected to the plan and created a team of prosecutors to go through the communications, the report said.