Tina Peters, the disgraced Colorado election clerk and professional election denier, reportedly sat down with President Trump this week and urged him to seize ballots after the midterms. Her attorney then went on Denver TV and explained that if Trump loses Congress, a civil war is fine so long as it comes with martial law and "our side in control of the armaments." That is a real sentence a real lawyer said to a real news camera.
The Plan, As Described By The Plan's Lawyer
Peters reportedly met with Trump earlier this week and pitched him on putting elections under some form of federal control by seizing ballots after the November midterms. The scheme was flagged by Denver's 9News in a segment Wednesday night that also featured her attorney, Peter Ticktin.
Ticktin did not exactly bury the lede. He said Trump "is not going to relinquish control" if he loses both the House and the Senate. Then he added, "He's got nothing to lose, the nation has nothing to lose."
The nation has nothing to lose. Okay. Somebody should tell the nation, because the nation seems to have a few things it's attached to, like the Constitution and not being shot.
Martial Law, But Make It Aspirational
Here is the quote in full, because paraphrasing it would only make it sound saner. "It's better if we're going to have a civil war of any sort that it be martial law with our side in control of the armaments."
Read that again. This is not a guy warning about a danger. This is a guy drafting a preference. If we're going to have a civil war, he'd like the good kind, the kind where his side holds the guns.
There is a word for lawyers who say this on television on behalf of a client who just met with the president. The word is not "fringe," because fringe implies distance from power, and this reportedly walked into the Oval Office earlier this week.
Kyle Clark Is Not A CIA Asset, Sadly For The Replies
Naturally, viewers rushed to social media to accuse 9News anchor Kyle Clark of fear-mongering. Some also accused him of being a CIA asset, which is a neat trick, because those two accusations require him to be both a hysterical amateur and a flawless spy.
Clark's response deserves a plaque. "You caught me," he wrote. "The CIA planted me at a local news station in Denver 20 years ago and made me do years worth of stories on snowstorms and rodeos so that I could drop this one report in 2026 quoting Tina Peters' attorney talking about civil war."
Note what the angry viewers did not say. They did not say Ticktin never said it. He said it, on camera, in a segment the reporter aired in full. The complaint is that someone repeated it.
Who Is Tina Peters, For Anyone Who Forgot
Peters is the former Colorado election clerk who became a folk hero of the election-denial movement. She is the person you call when you want someone with an official title to lend credibility to the idea that machines flipped votes and the system is rigged.
That makes her the ideal messenger for a plan to seize ballots. If you want to take control of an election, you need a story about why the election was never legitimate in the first place. Peters has spent years supplying that story.
And now, per her own lawyer, she is supplying the strategy too.
Meanwhile, In The Rest Of Today's Fever Dream
The same live blog that carried the ballot-seizure story also noted that Trump spent the afternoon at the "recently renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace." There he handed out the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Silicon Valley executives, Elon Musk among them. He also spent time on his late uncle, Dr. John Trump, who once got a similar medal from Ronald Reagan, and the event reportedly ended only after Trump himself was presented with his uncle's old medal.
This is the same administration that has undermined fundamental science research and caused chaos in grant funding. So the award ceremony for science was held by the people dismantling it, at a Peace Institute named after the guy, on the same day his ally's lawyer floated martial law.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, reportedly wants to charge former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson with lying to Congress over her Jan. 6 testimony, according to Punchbowl News. She has not been formally subpoenaed. The case reportedly originated in the Civil Rights Division, which has been gutted by firings, demotions, and resignations since Trump took office again.
The Dingo Take
Nobody should be calm about this.
Start with what we actually know. A lawyer for Tina Peters said, on the record, that the plan involves seizing ballots and that civil war is acceptable if the right people hold the weapons. We do not know that Trump agreed to anything, and the reporting is secondhand from her camp. But the camp is not hiding it. They are bragging, and the person they are bragging about is the president of the United States.
Now put that next to the Hutchinson story. The woman who testified under oath about Trump's behavior on Jan. 6 is reportedly facing a possible indictment, steered through a Civil Rights Division that has been emptied of the veterans who might have said no. One side gets a meeting and a medal. The other gets a grand jury. If you want to know how a democracy dies, it is this: the people who threaten the election get access, and the people who testified about the last attempt get prosecuted. Pay attention now, because "we'll see" is not a plan.
Comments