Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes reportedly issued a subpoena to Mike Roman, the opposition researcher who worked for former President Donald Trump and was criminally charged in the Georgia election case against the former president.
Cable news outlet CNN reported Wednesday that Roman is “being subpoenaed by prosecutors” in the “state-level probe” launched by Mayes into the former president’s contest of the 2020 election results.
The attorney general’s probe into the 2020 election was first revealed last summer when Mayes began contemplating criminal charges for Trump supporters who agreed to serve as alternate slates of electors to preserve the former president’s legal challenge.
Mayes (pictured above) is now coming closer to a decision about criminal charges for the 22 alternate electors in Arizona, CNN reported. There were 22 alternate electors in Arizona, including former Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward and Arizona State Senators Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) and Anthony Kern (R-Glendale).
A Democrat, Mayes won her own election by just 280 votes in 2022, making her victory the slimmest win for a statewide office in Arizona history. Her former opponent, Arizona U.S. House candidate Abe Hamadeh, maintains that Mayes was not the authentic winner of the election.
Ashleigh Merchant, who represents Roman in the Georgia election case, first surfaced the affair between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, the married private defense attorney she paid over $650,000 to serve as her special counsel.
Willis has narrowly survived disqualification from the case so far, with the judge instead forcing her former lover to resign. The decision has since been appealed by multiple defendants, including Trump, and Merchant recently suggested she expects the appeal will take at least six months if it is accepted by an appellate court in a timely fashion.
Roman reportedly served in the Trump White House as a special assistant to the president and director of special projects and research and previously was in charge of a 25-person intelligence division at Freedom Partners.
He reportedly used opposition research skills to vet potential hires for the Trump administration, but his official duties were unclear in 2018, when a White House source told German-owned Politico that Roman cultivated a “man of the world” image, explaining, “he was the guy who you would talk to if you wanted to find a Hungarian hacker in Hong Kong.”
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Georgia Star News, The Virginia Star, and the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kris Mayes” by Attorney General Kris Mayes.
