Nobody seems to know what it is that he does exactly for the $115,000 he gets as special assistant to the president and director of special projects and research, but former Koch guy Michael Roman is definitely doing something. But chances are pretty good that it is unsavory, because his speciality is opposition research—and because his personal obsession is voter fraud.
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.
That's quite the pay cut from the Kochs, so he must feel like he's now in a position to do his thing, since he's not in charge of actually doing any one thing officially, it would seem.
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 Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was selected a year ago.
Right. We're supposed to believe they actually vetted Gorsuch. Or any of their other nominees. So what's he really doing there?
On Election Day, Roman was stationed in Pennsylvania, his beloved home state. He also oversaw the campaign’s “election integrity” efforts across the country. […]
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. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post.
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 carrying a nightstick, milling around a North Philadelphia polling station—a video that ended up being played on a loop on the Fox News 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 nonentity."
Oh. So that's what he's doing there. They couldn't put all of the voter suppressing in Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's hands, because he's a way-too-public buffoon. Better keep that in an obscure and quiet corner of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where no one is paying attention.