Michael Roman, a senior official in former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 campaign, is in talks with the office of special counsel Jack Smith that could soon have Mr. Roman voluntarily answering questions about a plan to create a list 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 ends up giving the interview — known as an offerer — to prosecutors working for Mr. Smith, it would be the first known instance of cooperation by someone with direct knowledge of the so-called fake voter scheme. This plan has long been the focus of Mr. Smith about the extensive efforts of Mr. Trump to nullify the 2020 election.
The conversations with Mr. Roman, who served as director of election day operations for Mr. Trump, were the latest indication that Mr. Smith is actively pushing his election interference investigation even as attention has focused on the other case on his docket: the recent indictment of Mr. Trump in Florida on charges of illegally keeping classified documents and then obstructing repeated government efforts to retrieve them.
In recent weeks, several witnesses related to the fraudulent voter scheme have appeared before a grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington that is investigating the ways in which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to reverse their defeat by Mr. Biden. Among them was Gary Michael Brown, Mr. Roman, who was questioned before the grand jury on Thursday.
Mr. Roman did much of the work in crafting the bogus voter plan and finding ways to challenge Mr. Trump in several key battleground states, according to emails reviewed last summer by The New York Times. Mr. Roman, the emails show, coordinated with several other lawyers and aides to Mr. Trump to try to gather support to create the fake voter rolls in states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.
Among those with whom Mr. Roman worked closely, the emails showed, with Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer and campaign political adviser who has since served as Mr. Trump, and Jenna Ellis, another lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after his loss to Biden on how to challenge the election results.
In March, as part of a disciplinary proceeding by bar officials in her home state of Colorado, Ms. Ellis admitted that he had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of his public claims that widespread vote fraud had led to Mr. trump
Emails reviewed by The Times showed Mr. Roman and others discussing options to try to prevent Mr. Biden from being certified as the winner of the election. He reported details of his activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump, who defended the baseless claims of Mr. Trump of widespread election fraud.
The fake voter strategy was undoubtedly the longest and most expansive of Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved a broad cast of pro-Trump lawyers, state Republican officials and White House aides in an effort that began before some states even and they just finished counting their ballots.
The plan culminated in a campaign by Mr. Trump and others to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake slates to subvert Congress’s certification of the election results before a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. This proceeding. was interrupted when a violent mob of Mr. Trump stormed the Capitol and kicked out lawmakers.
Even some of those connected to efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office appeared to acknowledge that the voters’ plan was legally dubious.
“We would only send ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can object when he starts counting the votes and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix. a lawyer based in Arizona who helped organize pro-Trump voters, wrote in a December 2020 email to Mr. Epstein.
In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that calling them “alternate” voters was probably better than “fake” voters, adding a smiley face emoji.
The FBI formally opened an investigation into the voter fraud scheme in April 2022, according to people familiar with the matter, and federal prosecutors issued a series of grand jury subpoenas to Republican officials in states like Georgia , Arizona, Michigan and Nevada two months later.
Two senior Nevada Republican officials who were involved in the scheme — Jim DeGraffenreid and Michael McDonald — testified before a grand jury in Washington two weeks ago, the same day Mr. Trump was arraigned 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 a grand jury and answer questions about the former president’s fraudulent voter scheme and other efforts. clinging to power after losing the election.
Among those forced to appear was Pat A. Cipollone, a former attorney for Mr. Trump in the White House; Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff; and former Vice President Mike Pence. Most of these witnesses tried to limit the scope of their testimony by asserting various forms of privilege in a lengthy closed-door legal battle that ultimately failed.
In a separate line of investigation, the Justice Department seized the cell phones of a handful of attorneys connected to the fraudulent voter scheme in June 2022. They included John Eastman, a California law professor who advised Mr. Trump on the plan, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was nearly installed as acting attorney general and who helped draft a letter to Georgia state officials recommending that they create a list of pro-Trump voters.
Last July, the Department of Justice had created a team of prosecutors — working under the code name Project Coconut — to sort through the various communications seized from Mr. Eastman, to Mr. Clark and another former Justice Department lawyer, Ken Klukowski, for anything. were potentially protected by attorney-client or executive privilege, according to a person familiar with the matter.
That so-called filter team grew in size and scope, the person said, as investigators obtained more data from other research subjects, including Mr. Meadows; Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who recruited Mr. Eastman to work on the fraudulent voter scheme; and Mr. Epshteyn.
Adam Goldman contributed to the report.
