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Net Widens Around Trump And His Many Opportunist Sycophants

Phil Garber
9 min readApr 27, 2024

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Trump uses reverse vetting to screen potential workers for the dubious honor of being named trump soldiers, seeking the most unqualified and amoral applicants, like trump himself.

To get a job on the front lines, candidates must be devoid of ethics, minimally intelligent and be willing to be hoisted on their own petards.

The foot soldiers keep the MAGA movement going and three of the latest influential, opportunist, trump sycophant attack dogs and apologists are relatively unknown figures who have played an important role in promoting trump and his bogus claims of voter fraud. They are not household names, and include Borris Epshteyn, Mike Roman and Christina Bobb, among 18 trump loyalists who were indicted this week in connection with trump’s voter fraud conspiracy. Other more well known trumpers named by an Arizona grand jury include Rudy Giuliani, a close trump confidant once revered as “America’s Mayor” and trump’s former right hand man and chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

It will become evident when their lawyers’ bills come through that the trump loyalty door does not swing both ways.

Epshteyn, 42, a lawyer, is among trump’s top advisors and has been highly visible as a fixture seated next to trump during the Stormy Daniels hush money trial in New York City.

Epshteyn was indicted in Arizona and has a habit of getting into trouble in the Grand Canyon State. In addition to the recent indictment, he has been arrested twice in Arizona over the last 10 years, once in 2014 for assault after a bar fight, in which he pleaded guilty and the conviction was set aside. In 2021, he was accused of inappropriately touching two women and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, received probation and a fine, and the conviction again was set aside while he was ordered to undergo anger management and alcohol abuse counseling.

Trump also called on Epshteyn to press officials in Arizona to support the voter fraud claims and overturn the election. He worked with Christina Bobb, a former One America News anchor and pro-Trump lawyer, and others.

Epshteyn was born in Russia and came to the U.S. when he was just 3. He was raised in New Jersey, where his mother was a real estate agent and his father worked as a project manager for a telecommunications company.

While attending Georgetown University, Epshteyn became fast friends with a classmate that would help him in the future in climbing the trump ladder. That classmate was Eric Trump, the younger son of the former president. Epshteyn was a guest at trump’s 2014 wedding. Epshteyn also met his future wife at Georgetown, and the couple married in 2009, and have one child. But the trump connection would not gel for a while.

In 2008, Epshteyn served briefly as a communications aide for the presidential campaign of the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Epshteyn describes himself as a managing director of a boutique investment bank. But his business career has not always been smooth.

In 2009, he became vice president for legal affairs at a small financial firm, West America Securities, where his wife’s uncle, Charles J. Newman, held a stake. By then, the company and its chief executive, Robert B. Kay, who was a longtime associate of Newman’s, had a history of scrapes with regulators. As a result of an episode in 2013 involving Kay, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority expelled West America, effectively shutting it down. Epshteyn and Newman were not accused of wrongdoing in the matter.

In 2016, Sigma Development Corp. of Sugarland, Texas, filed a lawsuit against Epshteyn and his employer, TGP Securities Inc. TGP Securities, based in Summit, N.J., closed down in 2023. Sigma Development Corp. alleged that Epshteyn and his partner had accepted an initial $100,000 payment to help find investors for a Disneyland-style theme park in Houston, and then failed to deliver on promises. Epshteyn said in court filings that Sigma paid only half of its promised fee before “pulling the plug” on the project.

The lawsuit, which is pending, said that in seeking Sigma’s business, Epshteyn had boasted about his clout in the Republican Party and frequent television appearances.

Epshteyn worked on trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and is advising the former president on his 2024 White House run.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Epshteyn blossomed as a prominent trump supporter, publicly defending trump’s boorish behavior including his comments on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes and attacks on Gold Star families.

Epshteyn’s ascent in the trump ranks really began to soar when he started aggressively pushing trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Epshteyn worked closely with Giuliani, pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman, former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Together, they worked to support trump’s claims of voter fraud and attempted to overturn the election results.

In 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty to eight federal felony charges involving tax fraud and obstruction. He was sentenced in 2010 to four years in prison. On February 18, 2020, trump granted Kerik a full pardon for the federal convictions.

Eastman also was named in the latest Arizona indictment. Eastman has been recommended for disbarment for his efforts in trying to keep trump in office. Eastman is also a co-conspirator in the federal indictment brought against trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and prevent the certification of Biden’s election.

Bannon was trump’s chief strategist for the first seven months of his administration. He is a former executive chairman of the far right, Breitbart News. In August 2020, Bannon and three others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. Trump pardoned Bannon from all federal charges on Jan. 20, 2021, trump’s last day in office.

In September 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court on counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection with the “We Build the Wall” campaign.

Bannon was held in contempt of Congress in October 2021 after he refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. He was indicted by a federal grand jury and was convicted of contempt of Congress. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine and is appealing the conviction.

In a statement, trump called Epshteyn “a high energy person with tremendous drive and great intelligence. He takes heat, but he usually ends up being right, and I’m very comfortable with him.”

After the 2016 election, Epshteyn became an aide on the transition team and in the White House. But he lasted just two months before he was named communications director for the inaugural committee.

Epshteyn soon took a job in 2017 with the conservative, pro-trump Sinclair Broadcast Group. He had a regular show until 2019, “Bottom Line with Boris,” that also drew appreciation from trump.

Trump drew harsh criticism in 2017 after he made a statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning Jews. The statement was written by Epshteyn, a Russian Jewish emigre. A White House spokesman defended the speech and said the press was “nitpicking” while the statement was “written with the help of an individual who is both Jewish and the descendent of Holocaust survivors,” referring to Epshteyn.

Epshteyn refused to comment despite the fact that his descendants were among the 1.5 million and 2.5 million Soviet Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

In 2013, Epshteyn moderated a panel at a conference hosted by Russia, called, “Invest in Moscow!” The panel was mainly comprised of Moscow city government officials promoting investments in Moscow. A year later, Epshteyn defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine’s southern peninsula. The international community does not recognize Crimea as part of Russia because of illegal acquisition of the territory.

“Again, Russia did not seize Crimea,” Epshteyn said. “We could talk about the conflict that happened between Ukraine and the Crimea, it’s an ongoing conflict, but there was no seizure by Russia. That is an incorrect statement, characterization, of what happened.”

Trump has implied that the annexation of Crimea was acceptable because of popular support.

The media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, criticized CNN, Fox News and PBS in September 2016 for failing to disclose Epshteyn’s “financial ties to the former Soviet Union, which include consulting through Strategy International LLC for ‘entities doing business in Eastern Europe’ and moderating a Russian-sponsored conference on ‘investment opportunities in Moscow.’”

Michael Roman, 51, a longtime political consultant, was a senior advisor on the 2016 trump campaign as the campaign’s chief poll watcher. He worked in the White House from 2017 to 2018, as a special assistant to the president with a salary of $115,000 a year.

Roman worked for the White House’s top attorney, Don McGahn, and helped vet judicial nominations, including that of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Roman later worked for the trump 2020 campaign as director of election day operations, where his job was to dig up damaging political information. Prior to working for trump, Roman was paid $269,000 a year to run an in-house intelligence unit for the GOP mega-donors Charles and David Koch. The unit surveilled and gathered intelligence on liberal opponents of conservative policies and Democratic political organizers and donors.

On Election Day in 2020, Roman posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud. On August 14, 2023, Roman was indicted in Fulton County, Ga., related to activities attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

In 2020, Roman created a campaign that claimed to have enlisted 50,000 poll watchers as part of an “Army for Trump.” The effort was criticized for possibly violating the federal law against partisan efforts to influence voters at the polls.

Trump has once again called for recruitment of an army of poll watchers for the 2024 election. Trump’s son, Donald Jr., said the plan was needed to avoid voter fraud.

“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father … We need every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation,” trump’s son said.

Early in his career, Roman was a political consultant in New Jersey and his home state of Pennsylvania, as well with the Republican National Committee and on the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain.

Roman has written for Breitbart News on topics ranging from alleged voter fraud in Pennsylvania and New York to the Department of Justice’s handling of the New Black Panther Party to a hit piece on former Democratic Rep. John Adler. In 2008, Roman was criticized for showing a YouTube video of 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. The video was later played on a loop on the Fox News Network to dramatize conservative fears about voter intimidation.

Christina G. Bobb, 39, has been a close associate of Epshteyn, spouting the same crazy claims about voter fraud and a 2020 stolen election. For her efforts, she was recently named the senior counsel for election integrity at the Republican National Committee.

Bobb, a lawyer, former Marine who served in Afghanistan, and ongoing robust trumper and member of the trump legal team, was formerly an on-air host for the far right, news network “One America News Network.” The network is known for promoting lies and conspiracy theories. She first covered the White House and then hosted “Weekly Briefing with Christina Bobb,” a weekend political talk show.

Bobb weaseled her way into mainstream news channels after insisting the FBI had political motives for searching and finding top secret documents at trump’s Mar-a-Lago castle. She has become one focus of the government probe after she signed a statement for the FBI that trump’s lawyers had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government. The statement was a lie as authorities later seized additional boxes of classified documents. But Bobb has maintained that the FBI is on a political witch hunt, to quote her leader.

“I’m not too worried about it (FBI investigation),” she said. “They are all a bunch of cowards; they don’t have anything. I’m a little bit befuddled as to why they would do such a drastic thing, so disrespecting and so dishonoring, other than the fact it’s a political tool.”

Bobb was Giuliani’s gopher with state officials in Arizona and helped raise funds for a recount in Maricopa County that trump and Republican leaders called a “sham.” Dominion Voting Systems is suing Bobb and OAN for promoting unsubstantiated claims that the company was part of a vote-switching scheme to favor Biden. The House committee investigating the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol riot by trump supporters, subpoenaed Bobb to testify about her “attempts to disrupt or delay” certification of the election and her reported involvement in drafting the executive order.

In 2014, Bobb waged a losing campaign as an independent for a House seat in the San Diego, Calif., district. She finished last of eight candidates, winning 929 votes. A few years later, she moved to Washington, D.C. and in mid-2019, she was hired as an executive secretary in the Department of Homeland Security. Later in the year, she took the job at AON as she grew into a hardline trumper.

By March 2022, Bobb left OAN and moved to Florida to be closer to Trump. She took a staff job with Trump-affiliated Save America PAC, at a salary of $144,600 a year.

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