The New Unindicted Co-Conspirator

Federal prosecutors discuss an “agent” of Trump within his campaign who is apparently a new, unindicted co-conspirator.

Protestors at TCF Center in Detroit on Election Night, 2020. Photo by Rebecca Wood, Reuters

Special Counsel Jack Smith just dropped a bombshell filing on Wednesday, and it has legal observers buzzing. 

Prosecutors in the D.C. case filed what’s called a “404(b) notice.” That refers to evidence not necessarily mentioned in the charges, or even part of the conspiracies themselves but that nevertheless shows Trump’s motive or propensity to commit crimes.

There were a lot of new twists and facts in that filing, but I want to focus on one big one that jumps out: Smith has evidence that a Trump Campaign employee tried to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit on election night, while workers were counting ballots.

Remember the ugly scenes on Election Night 2020 in Detroit, with MAGA Trump supporters banging on the walls and hurling false accusations of fraud? It really looked like things were about to explode into violence. We now know from stellar reporting who helped organize and send throngs of protestors to disrupt the counting at the TCF Center. 

But until yesterday, we didn’t know this: A Trump Campaign employee had exchanged text messages with an attorney on the ground there, actually encouraging the protestors to riot and obstruct the count when it became clear as the night wore on that the vote was trending toward Biden. 

Even more tantalizing is what we are now left guessing at: There are seven lines redacted from the brief! Curiouser and curiouser…

We already know that Trump made false claims about the election activities at TCF. But now we also know that, in truth, his own agent—an important word here—was busy encouraging a riot. 

The unredacted evidence already helps show that Trump not only knew he’d lost, but that his whole M.O. was to use rioters to obstruct the counting. Sound familiar?

Folks naturally have lots of questions. Just who is this mystery agent? What’s up with those critical redacted lines, and what might the evidence mean for the case? 

Let’s dive in.

The mystery “Unindicted Co-Conspirator”

The 404(b) notice talks about familiar co-conspirators. There’s Co-Conspirator 1, for example, who is Rudy Giuliani. The brief discusses how Giuliani and Trump sought to punish a lawyer for the Republican Party who dismissed Trump’s election fraud claims as nonsense.

But on the question of the attempted riot and obstruction of the count in Detroit, the brief refers to a “Trump Campaign Employee” who is also an “unindicted co-conspirator”—but one without a number. That indicated someone new, and so legal sleuths began sleuthing.

I concur with some of my favorite legal eagle-eyed commentators, including Marcy Wheeler and Allison Gill, who both posit that the mystery riot instigator is a fellow named Mike Roman.

I always wondered why Roman was not listed among the six co-conspirators, five of whom are clearly identifiable from the record (Giuliani, Eastman, Powell, Clark, Chesebro) with the sixth likely to be Boris Epshteyn, who was also deeply involved in the fake elector scheme. I wrote about Roman over a year ago in September 2022, after it became clear that he was part of the effort to get the fake elector certificates from certain swing states into the hands of the right people.

Before joining the White House, Roman worked for the Koch Brothers as head of research for the “Freedom Partners” where his job was to track the activities of Democratic political organizers and donors. That 25-person intelligence-gathering unit was officially disbanded in 2016, after which Roman was hired by the Trump campaign to oversee poll-watching in the final weeks before the 2016 election. He then quietly joined the White House where he reported to White House counsel Don McGahn.

According to Politico, “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, with entries dating as far back as 2008.” This passion appears to have dovetailed with his role in the Trump campaign. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post, unintentionally foreshadowing his activity for Trump.

The January 6 Committee subpoenaed Roman back in February, but there have been no public reports about his testimony. Still, there are important stories that swirl around him. Of particular note is his role on January 6 itself. Roman was identified as the campaign aide who attempted to deliver false lists of fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to Capitol Hill so that Vice President Mike Pence would have them for his counting of the ballots. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), whose chief of staff wisely declined to accept the lists from Roman, initially tried to portray Roman as a green and inexperienced intern and not the experienced operative that he is. That Roman’s phone was seized by the FBI means that a federal judge has agreed that there is probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime exists on it.

Roman definitely has some background in poll watching and election disruption. And he posted a video from TCF of “challengers” allegedly being “ejected” from ballot canvassing in Detroit, claiming in his caption, “The Steal is on!” Did Roman receive the video from the “attorney on the ground” who is mentioned in the brief?

This past June, CNN reported that Roman was cooperating with federal prosecutors in the case against Donald Trump. Just what he knows and has provided to them as part of his proffer isn’t clear, but if the “Trump Campaign Employee” and unindicted co-conspirator really is Roman, that could spell trouble for Trump.

Recently, as Wheeler noted, right wing agitator Jack Posobiec was helping to fundraise for Roman’s legal defense. Roman was indicted by a Georgia grand jury in connection with the RICO conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election there. Roman was charged with conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree; conspiracy to commit false statements and writings; violation of the Georgia RICO Act; conspiracy to impersonate a public officer; and conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

The Trump Campaign Employee as “Agent” for Trump

As Joyce Vance notes in her piece this morning, the use of the term “agent” to describe the Trump Campaign Employee is very telling. That’s because agents generally do things at the request of their principals, meaning their actions are legally binding upon them. If the Trump Campaign Official really was Trump’s agent, and he really was urging a riot to disrupt and obstruct the election count in Detroit, then that’s legally the same as Trump himself doing it.

Indeed, that might be what those tantalizing redacted lines contain:

Right before the redaction, the prosecution discusses how the Trump Campaign Employee, in messages to the on the ground attorney, “encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was tending in favor of the defendant’s opponent.”

Then comes the redaction, seven and a half lines.

The brief then says, “The government will also show that around the time of these messages, an election official at the TCF Center observed that as Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count. Thereafter, Trump made repeated false claims regarding election activities at the TCF Center, when in truth his agent was seeking to cause a riot to disrupt the count.” (Emphasis added.)

Somewhere in those redacted words, my bet is prosecutors establish that the Trump Campaign Employee was acting as Trump’s agent, and that the two coordinated the false claims and the effort to start a riot. This is speculation, of course, but it would also stand to reason. Without this connective tissue, it’s hard to get to the conclusion of the paragraph:

This evidence is admissible to demonstrate that the defendant, his co-conspirators, and agents had knowledge that the defendant had lost the election, as well as their intent and motive to obstruct and overturn the legitimate results.

Some takeaways

The playbook here may sound rather familiar if we go back a bit further in time.

In the 2000 election, the so-called “Brooks Brothers” riot caught election officials off guard and raised the stakes considerably down in South Florida. It began as a demonstration by Republican staffers bent on shutting down the recount in Miami-Dade County, and it quickly turned ugly, with canvassers even fearing for their lives. 

One of the operatives on the scene was political dirty trickster Roger Stone, a long time confidant and ally of former president Trump. Stone learned from that incident that the threat and use of physical force can effectively shut down election counting efforts. 

Did Stone find an acolyte in Mike Roman? Perhaps. We have heard strangely little about Stone and his role in all of this. That remains one of the central mysteries around January 6.

Whatever Roman knows about the TCF Detroit protest, however—including how Trump riled up supporters with election falsehoods while his agent, perhaps Roman, tried to instigate a riot—is now in the hands of Jack Smith and his team. And they believe it will go to show Trump’s intent around January 6 and the use of rioters there.

November 4 was, after all, a kind of warm up to January 6 and the insurrection at the Capitol—the very way Trump sought to obstruct the canvassing in Detroit months before, smaller in scale, yes, but with the same corrupt intent of disrupting the count.