Tina Peters, the election denier and former Colorado election official imprisoned over a breach of her county’s voting system, said she met with President Donald Trump in October and asserted that he has the power to send federal law enforcement to investigate how votes are counted.

“He already has the authority to do all this — he doesn’t have to go to Congress to ask,” Peters said in an exclusive interview with MS NOW ahead of Election Day. “If there’s something that is criminal in nature, he has every right to have the administration, the attorney general’s office, or, you know, law enforcement go in and investigate.”

Since her release from a Colorado prison in June, Peters has teamed up with other election skeptics making a case that federal statute allows Trump’s executive branch to exert unilateral action without court warrants or state cooperation.

“I think the president knows his powers,” said Peters.

Federal law enforcement can investigate suspected election crimes, but obtaining ballots or voting equipment typically requires a legal process, such as a search warrant or subpoena. In January, the FBI took 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, under a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge.

The Constitution leaves the running of elections to the states, subject to rules set by Congress, and federal judges have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to assert control over them. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Judge Denise Casper wrote in one such ruling. A Civil War-era federal law also makes it a crime to send troops or armed federal agents to places where elections are held. And on Friday, a federal judge temporarily barred the Justice and Homeland Security departments from threatening election workers with prosecution for counting ballots, finding the agencies had likely overstepped their constitutional authority.

Her comments offer a window into the case some of Trump’s election-denying allies are making to the White House on the eve of the midterms. They come as Trump has said he regrets not doing more to overturn the 2020 results and has hinted that he would go further in future elections.

She has met personally with Trump at least twice since her release, including in the Oval Office with her attorney, Peter Ticktin, who — in a separate interview with MS NOW on Friday — suggested that Trump should be prepared to “enter an emergency order that basically would be tantamount to martial law.”

“I’m pushing for it,” Ticktin said.

When asked whom he is pushing to execute this plan, Ticktin responded: “With those whose ear I have.”

MS NOW reached out to the White House on Sunday to ask if the president has considered sending federal law enforcement or the military to investigate or seize voting equipment or ballots during the tabulation process. The White House has not provided comment.

Following the 2020 election, a Colorado jury found Peters guilty of allowing an unauthorized individual to access, photograph and disseminate files and hard drive information from county voting systems while serving in her capacity as a Colorado county clerk. That info was later published by the right-wing outlet Gateway Pundit. Peters continues to deny wrongdoing.

Peters and Ticktin have both stopped short of revealing details about their personal conversations with Trump or how receptive he has been to their proposed actions.

“I don’t want you to overestimate my influence on the White House. You know, they’ve been gracious enough to grant me an audience, and I don’t take that lightly,” Peters said.

“Do I have major sway over the administration? No, I don’t. But they are, like I said, they are willing to listen and open to information,” she continued, adding, “It’s up to them what they do with it.”

In addition to meeting directly with the president, Peters said she has held a Zoom meeting with officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency tasked with helping state election administrators on cyber threats. That would be a significant development considering Trump’s warning to the nation last summer.

Trump told Americans in a July primetime address from the White House that his administration had discovered “critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” The White House, however, did not provide evidence that foreign or domestic actors have hacked into or hampered voting systems in the U.S. On Sunday in Iowa, Trump directly referred to the “crooked machines” on stage at a campaign rally.

Trump has lamented that he did not go far enough in his efforts to overturn the will of voters in 2020 and has hinted he would go further in future elections.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, he reflected that he regretted not ordering the federal seizure of tabulating machines after the 2020 presidential election by the National Guard.

“Well, I should have,” he said.

At the time, two draft memos circulated that — if signed by then-President Trump — would have given the green light to the Pentagon or Department of Homeland Security to attempt to seize voting machinery.

A cohort of outside allies, including retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell and Patrick Byrne, had urged such action at the time during a White House meeting, as then first reported by The New York Times. The January 6th Select Committee, in its final report, wrote that Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani “were repeatedly asking the leadership of DHS whether the agency had authority to seize voting machines.”

In a radio interview this August, Trump responded to a broad question about the potential he would seek to declare a national emergency around the midterms. “Let me just say: Stranger things have happened, okay?” Trump answered.

Peters pushed back on the “narrative” that any presidential involvement in elections could be a violation “against peoples’ will.”

“I think using radical terms that the left uses about seizing and all that stuff is very destructive to the discourse of having free, fair, and transparent elections,” she said.

Ticktin, however, suggested a more aggressive pronouncement by Trump would be necessary if Tuesday’s results indicate a sizeable blue wave with Democrats winning beyond the expected battleground contests.

“This is too serious and too much of an emergency, and they’re going to have to rely on the military,” Ticktin said, when asked how he would advocate the executive branch seize the ballots and equipment.

“Even if we lose the House by one or two, I don’t know that that would cause a major reaction, but let’s just say 10 senators go over to the Democrats,” he said.

Ticktin, who said he first befriended Trump when they attended the New York Military Academy together as teenagers, said he did not anticipate any federal action taking place on Election Day, such as deployment of  federal agents or National Guard members to polling locations.

“I don’t see that happening where there’s any interference or any — I shouldn’t call it interference, but any edicts that basically come down that are going to affect the way the elections are conducted,” Ticktin said.

Mike Lindell, the prominent Trump ally who helped fund Peters’ legal defense and was found liable for making defamatory claims about 2020 election machinery, told MS NOW in an interview last week that he intends to file a “class action lawsuit” after the election in an attempt to have the courts intervene with states’ use of tabulating systems.

“I don’t trust any election ever done with an electronic voting machine,” Lindell said. “We are going to be doing a class action lawsuit against all the machines.”

The post Election deniers who’ve met with Trump urge federal role in midterm vote count appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.