Here is a brief diversion from Trump’s convenient firing of the FBI director. Propublica is reporting that the former head of the Koch brothers spy network has been hired to be the White House “director of special projects and research.” It is one of the hires that the White House has not disclosed to the public.
Mike Roman, a longtime Republican opposition researcher who worked for billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch before joining the Trump campaign, is now the White House’s director of special projects and research. He is one of a half-dozen unannounced hires the White House has made since President Trump took office.
The Koch brothers spy network was an impressive operation before being shut down last year. Here is a description in Politico. (The Politico story made DK front page news when it broke.)
The competitive intelligence team has a staff of 25, including one former CIA analyst, and operates from one of the non-descript Koch network offices clustered near the Courthouse metro stop in suburban Arlington, Va. It has provided network officials with documents detailing confidential voter-mobilization plans by major Democrat-aligned groups. It also sends regular “intelligence briefing” emails tracking the canvassing, phone-banking and voter-registration efforts of labor unions, environmental groups and their allies, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO and interviews with a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the group.
The competitive intelligence team has gathered on-the-ground intelligence from liberal groups’ canvassing events in an effort to assess the technology and techniques of field efforts to boost Democrats, according to the sources. And they say the team utilizes high-tech tactics to track the movements of liberal organizers, including culling geo-data embedded in their social media posts.
Confirmation of Roman’s role as head of the Koch competitive intelligence team can be found here, here, and here.
A few months after the existence of Koch spy organization hit the pages of Politico, it was disbanded with great fanfare and media coverage suggested it represented a change in heart by the Koch brothers about their strategy for political engagement. I am more inclined to believe they just reorganized the competitive intelligence team after it became public knowledge.
During his tenure as head of the Koch spy team, here is one of Roman's greatest hits.
Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.
A justice department investigation into the incident – filed in the weeks before George W Bush left office – became a political football that divided career lawyers within the justice department. The incident was repeatedly cited as evidence of Democrats setting out to harm the election process.
Mike Roman left Team Koch to join Team Trump during the presidential campaign as the head of “election protection.” By election protection, they mean spreading unsubstantiated allegations of rampant voter fraud, especially by people of color. According to Trump, he lost the popular vote because millions and millions of people voted illegally. It is a lie that he continues to promote.
So what will the “director of special projects and research” be doing on the taxpayers dime? Given Roman’s background, I would guess the duties include keeping an eye on political opponents and dissidents. For the Trump Resistance movement, it means the eyes of Koch are upon us. It is safe bet that the person running dirty tricks for Trump is Roman. I cannot imagine why else the White House would have worked so hard to keep his hiring a secret from the American public.