A lesser-known co-defendant charged alongside former President Donald Trump in Georgia is jeopardizing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s racketeering election interference case by making allegations of impropriety that, if true, may result in her removal from the case.

Mike Roman, 52, is one of 18 allies of Trump indicted by a Fulton County grand jury for allegedly conspiring to undo President Joe Biden’s victory in the Peach State. Last month, Roman dropped a bombshell complaint alleging Willis and her hired special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, engaged in an “improper, clandestine” relationship that raises questions about whether the pair misused thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds.

While Roman’s filing lacked specific evidence, a separate court record from Wade’s previously-sealed divorced case leaked on Jan. 19, revealing credit card transactions from Wade showing he and Willis went on a Royal Caribbean cruise together in October 2022 and that he paid for at least two flights, months after her office hired him in January of that year.

Now, Trump and a third co-defendant, Robert Cheeley, are joining Roman’s motion to disqualify both Willis and Wade from the case and dismiss the indictment, a steep request that could, at a minimum, result in a judge ordering a substitute prosecutor.

Here is what we know about Mike Roman and his knack for opposition research:

A ‘skilled operative’ who is ‘fighting for his life’

Roman was a campaign aide during Trump’s 2020 election and is known for his previous job overseeing a research unit for the Koch network, working in the former Trump administration alongside a top attorney, Don McGahn, and helping to vet judicial nominations, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, among other accomplishments.

A source familiar with Roman’s background who did not want to be named due to occupational concerns told the Washington Examiner that Roman is such a “skilled operative” that it “does not surprise me” if it was Roman himself who uncovered the information leading to the allegations of Willis and Wade first raised in a filing by his lawyer.

“All this quality of information, where it’s not happening anywhere else in the Trumpworld, the reason it’s happening here, if I’m guessing, is because Mike Roman is personally fighting for his life,” the first source said.

A second source who has known Roman since the early 1990s told the Washington Examiner that Roman had actually recently admitted to handling much of the research work that went into the complaint against the district attorney. The source did not get into specifics about how Trump’s co-defendant discovered the alleged relationship between Willis and Wade.

How did Roman know about Wade’s divorce?

Without proceedings in Wade’s divorce from his wife of 26 years, Joycelyn Wade, Roman may not have had the means to convince the public or a courtroom of his claims that Wade and Willis were behaving improperly and financially benefiting from Wade’s placement as special counsel.

“Somebody might have tipped him off that there was an ugly divorce,” J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney who has been following the developments in Fulton County, told the Washington Examiner.

“Roman probably got wind of a divorce or found out on his own because all you have to do is log into county clerk litigation records if they exist online. Or you just run down to Atlanta and you get on a morning flight and go down to the courthouse and start looking. He might, in fact, have some familiarity with them, considering he has a matter in Fulton County Court,” Adams said.

On the same day as Roman’s Jan. 8 complaint, Joycelyn Wade’s divorce lawyer Andrea Hastings issued a subpoena to Willis to testify in Wade’s divorce case. Hastings told a local NBC News affiliate this week that she issued the subpoena after receiving information from an open records request and Wade himself.

“We didn’t know about a potential romantic relationship between Nathan Wade and Fani Willis until immediately before Christmas,” Hastings said. “When we came back after the first of the year, we prepared and issued the subpoena.”

Joycelyn Wade’s counsel previously sought to depose Willis for the divorce case, though the district attorney may not be deposed in the case after all. In a ruling last week, a judge said he wanted to hear from Nathan Wade at a Jan. 31 court hearing before deciding if he needed to hear from Willis.

The Wades this week reached a temporary agreement before the scheduled hearing, which settled the issues surrounding attorneys fees and alimony, and that hearing was canceled as a result.

However, the financial records related to Wade’s transactions and travel purchases in Willis’s name may have been the most necessary revelation needed to aid Roman’s complaint, as the allegations in his filing lacked supporting evidence until the credit card statements came to light in Wade’s divorce case mid-January.

A ‘devout Catholic’ and a ‘highly moral man’

Roman was charged alongside Trump and 17 others in August in a sweeping racketeering indictment alleging that a criminal enterprise conspired to overturn Fulton County’s 2020 presidential election results.

His seven charges include racketeering conspiracy and conspiracies to commit forgery, to impersonate a public officer, to commit false statements, and to file false documents in the Fulton County racketeering case.

The first source described Roman as a “highly moral man and a devout Catholic” from Kensington, Pennsylvania, who would not “go to the grave having subverted the greatest single democracy in existence.”

Two other sources indicated to the Washington Examiner that Roman is the type of person who would not knowingly commit a crime, and if he did, their expectations are that he would own up to any alleged wrongdoing.

Roman has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

“Roman is going to beat his foes, and he knows how to do it,” Adams said, adding that Willis “picked the wrong oppo researcher to indict.”

Will prosecutors try to make Roman ‘flip’ on ex-POTUS?

Part of Willis’s strategy in handling the racketeering case has been to convince some of Trump’s co-defendants to accept plea deals. Former attorneys for Trump Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis all took plea agreements just days apart from each other and agreed to “testify truthfully” at a future trial in the case.

According to communications that surfaced in 2022 thanks to congressional investigators for the Jan. 6 committee, Roman in 2020 handled the brunt of organizing seven slates of fake Trump electors purporting to represent the electoral votes from battleground states, including Pennsylvania.

A report from the Guardian in November indicated that Fulton County prosecutors were not interested in offering plea deals to three main defendants: Trump, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and attorney Rudy Giuliani. However, the report noted prosecutors could potentially foresee additional plea deals made for defendants outside of that small group.

The second unnamed source, who confirmed Roman was behind the research that led to the complaint against Willis, said he thinks it would be convenient for Roman to be offered a plea deal as a means to resolve his legal troubles but that any potential offer by prosecutors would be “viable.”

“There’s no avenue in a plea deal for him to make any money for him and his family to survive,” the source said, noting that Roman has at least six children.

If he agreed to take a plea offer, he “can’t work on any more campaigns,” the source said. “What a great way for a Democrat to take the No. 1 Republican opposition researcher in the country, if not the world, off the table.”

The three sources familiar with Roman all described his loyalties to Trump as conventionally supportive, suggesting that he strongly backs the former president based on his viability as the strongest candidate for the Republican Party to take on President Joe Biden in the November general election.

But like many of his co-defendants who have been forced to help themselves, Trump also isn’t helping Roman with any funds for his legal fees, and several of the sources pointed to Roman’s establishment of an online fundraiser as a sign that he is willing to fight the charges the whole way through.

“Guys like Mike won’t lay down. You know, they’re not going to go quietly in the night. Not when they’re getting screwed,” the second source said.

What will the judge decide at the Feb. 15 hearing?

In addition to the subpoenas for Willis and Wade, Roman’s lawyer issued subpoenas to several employees of the district attorney’s office, including Daysha Young, an executive district attorney who is assigned to the Trump case. Also on the subpoena list is Tia Green, an executive assistant to Willis, Sonya Allen, an assistant district attorney who previously worked with Wade in Cobb County, Mike Hill, an investigator assigned to the Trump case, Dexter Bond, the office’s chief operating officer, Capers Green, the office’s chief of investigation, and Thomas Ricks, an investigator assigned to Willis’s security team.

Willis is expected to resist any calls to recuse herself from the case, according to a statement from her office on Thursday, while she and other targets of Roman’s subpoenas could attempt to quash them.

Although it’s unclear how the judge in Fulton County will decide to handle Roman’s complaint, the co-defendant has clearly composed a gambit strong enough to convince Trump to join in making the same allegations.

Legal experts told the Washington Examiner that the judge could at best decide that Willis can no longer prosecute the case herself, casting doubt on the idea that Roman’s complaint could doom the indictment entirely.

“I think Roman has a winning case here. I don’t think the same thing for all the defendants,” Adams said, adding that his understanding of the indictment leads him to believe that Roman was following the advice of lawyers on Trump’s team when he assembled a group of alternate electors.

Adams said he believes the charges levied against Roman are “extremely weak.”

“I don’t believe that about everybody that’s been charged,” Adams added. However, he said the decision by Trump and another defendant to join Roman’s complaint could hurt the trio of defendants in the end.

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“I don’t think it helps Roman that all these other defendants are piling on the theory. I think that actually hurts him. Because it was his idea,” Adams said.

“Everybody else jumping on without doing the legwork is going to make it harder for the judge to rule in favor of Roman,” the attorney added.