The mysterious oppo researcher working in the White House lawyer's office
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.
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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 Judge 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 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 RNC 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 campaign describe him as a seasoned operative and diehard Philadelphia Eagles, with a blue-collar upbringing.
“I’ve known him for 15 years. This is 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 that 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 of 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, the 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.”
The Obama White House did not employ high-level non-lawyers in its counsel’s office, said Norm Eisen, former White House Special Counsel for Ethics under President Barack Obama. The non-lawyers in that office in 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 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. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post, with entries dating as far back as 2008.
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 nightstick, milling around a North Philadelphia polling station – a video that ended up being played on loop on the Fox 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 non-entity.”
Eliana Johnson contributed reporting.
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