Tina Peters And The Plot Washington, DC Fears
amuse – The newly released letter from attorney Peter Ticktin to President Trump is more than a plea for justice for Tina Peters. It is a window into a national security failure that powerful institutions fought to keep hidden for years. Some readers may wonder whether this claim is overstated. It is not.
A sober review of the record shows that the core allegations had been quietly validated within government by Labor Day 2025, but never disclosed to the public because entrenched bureaucrats blocked that process until February 15. Understanding how this happened requires starting with what the Ticktin letter actually reveals.
Ticktin argues that foreign-supported operatives began infiltrating U.S. election systems as early as 2006. The allegation sounds extraordinary, so it helps to make it concrete. Imagine a small team of foreign technicians arriving in Chicago with newly issued VISAs. Each had been approved despite warnings that their purpose was to modify Sequoia election equipment.
According to Hugo Carvajal, Venezuela’s former military intelligence chief, this was exactly what happened. Carvajal described Smartmatic-linked personnel as having intentionally accessed American election infrastructure to embed code that permitted later manipulation. His account aligns with long public reporting about early concerns raised inside DHS about foreign access to voting systems.
The analogy that best captures this pattern is one of a locked house with a back door quietly installed by a contractor who insisted the homeowner trust his workmanship. The problem is not only the presence of the door, but the fact that its existence was hidden.
Ticktin’s letter takes this picture further by tracing how several of the same personnel resurfaced years later working under Dominion supervisors during the 2020 cycle.
Ronald Morales, Eric Coomer, and David Moreno appear repeatedly in the record. According to Ticktin, they orchestrated remote access via VPNs, altered logs, modified adjudication software after certification, and deployed versions of software inconsistent with state contracts.
A reader might ask whether such actions are even possible given the supposed safeguards of U.S. certification regimes. The evidence suggests they are. Reports from EAC audits show that certain systems allow post-certification patching under narrow conditions. If those controls are ignored or misrepresented to local officials, the practical barrier to undetected modification becomes thin.
Ticktin claims the unauthorized modifications were not isolated technical deviations but deliberate steps in a 20-year plan. Even skeptics should admit that the continuity of personnel, the pattern of access, and the corroboration from foreign intelligence sources like Carvajal present a coherent mosaic. If one wants an analogy, consider a patient whose unexplained symptoms only make sense once one returns to a forgotten injury years earlier. The long arc of infiltration is what gives the recent revelations their explanatory power.
This brings us to Tina Peters. Readers unfamiliar with her case may assume she was a local clerk who mishandled sensitive data. Ticktin presents a radically different picture. Peters imaged Mesa County’s election server before Colorado’s statewide Trusted Build because she suspected that the build would erase the 2020 records she was obligated to retain under federal law. That suspicion proved correct. The update wiped roughly 29,000 files, including audit logs, access logs, and adjudication records. Peters’ copy is therefore the only intact snapshot of what happened inside the system.
Some wonder whether her imaging was lawful. The relevant statute, 52 U.S.C. 20701, requires preservation of election records for 22 months. Federal guidance interprets that obligation broadly to include system-level data necessary for later reconstruction. Peters was fulfilling that duty. Local clerks vary in technical expertise, and Peters relied on an expert with DHS contracting experience. The state argued that she violated policy by allowing an unidentified expert to be present for the Trusted Build. Yet the undisputed testimony at trial was that this was a Covid policy rather than a law.
Ticktin sees the prosecution as a calculated effort to destroy the only witness who could authenticate the data and explain its provenance. The court’s refusal to allow exculpatory testimony about Peters’ expert and the failure to instruct the jury on her federal law obligations created what amounted to a show trial. That description may feel strong to some readers, so consider this. One juror admitted after the verdict that she believed Peters had vandalized her business, a belief later disproven by police. Had that fact come to light earlier, the verdict would have been structurally unsound. The court declined to review it.
Why would any institution take such risks to secure a conviction in a case that normally would attract little attention outside Colorado? Ticktin’s answer is that Peters was on the verge of exposing evidence that would call into question the conclusions of multiple federal courts handling January 6-related matters. If systemic irregularities existed, the reasoning that underpinned those rulings would become unstable.
Every D.C. judge involved in those cases faced the same structural incentive to avoid reopening settled facts. This does not imply personal malice, only that institutions tend to preserve their own authority.
The national pattern began shifting in 2024 when the DOJ unsealed indictments against foreign operatives connected to Smartmatic. Smartmatic was later indicted directly. Carvajal’s proffer followed. Each step confirmed what Peters had claimed years earlier. Ticktin argues that the sequence vindicates her. If the foreign architecture existed, and if it interacted with systems used in U.S. elections, then the lone unaltered server image she preserved is an irreplaceable piece of forensic evidence.
There is also the human cost. Peters has endured 431 days in prison under dangerous conditions. She was threatened repeatedly, assaulted three times, forced to sleep on a thin mattress despite spinal degeneration, and housed in a cell so small that only one inmate could stand at a time. She has a history of lung cancer with part of a lung removed, and yet, medical care was limited. The pattern resembles the treatment of political prisoners in authoritarian regimes. It is difficult to avoid that comparison because her imprisonment serves no legitimate penological purpose.
Ticktin closes by presenting a constitutional argument for presidential pardons of state offenses. Some readers will find this surprising, but the textual evidence is stronger than commonly assumed. Before the Civil War, the phrase offences against the United States was understood collectively, referring to the United States as plural polities. This meaning appears in the Treason Clause, which speaks of levying war against them. It appears again in the 13th Amendment, which refers to any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The textual pattern suggests that the pardon power originally extended to offenses within individual states where federal interests were implicated. That reading avoids the odd consequence of allowing states to nullify the President’s pardon authority by recasting federal law compliance as a state crime. Ticktin identifies Peters’ case as the very scenario the framers would have feared.
The stakes are high. If the Ticktin letter is accurate, then the U.S. experienced a coordinated influence operation that shaped its political trajectory for four years. The infiltration spanned administrations, crossed jurisdictions, and involved both foreign intelligence services and domestic bureaucrats who ignored or suppressed signs of compromise.
The Mesa County server image stands as the only surviving forensic record of what took place. One can draw a comparison to the Pentagon Papers, but with a crucial difference. Here, the revelations cut against the interests of the administrative state itself. Institutions that usually present themselves as guardians of democratic norms now appear as gatekeepers who restricted public access to information that would have changed national political understanding.
Reasonable citizens may disagree about the full implications, but the minimum conclusion is unsettling. The U.S. allowed critical election infrastructure to be accessed by foreign actors, failed to disclose what it knew in a timely way, punished the one official who obeyed federal record preservation laws, and enabled a narrative that obscured the scope of compromise. That combination is not sustainable for a constitutional republic. Peters’ case is a test of whether the country still values transparency over institutional self-preservation.
President Trump has both the authority and the obligation to correct the injustice. A pardon would not erase what happened, but it would signal that lawful preservation of evidence is not a crime. It would also affirm that the Constitution’s pardon power remains capable of addressing state-level prosecutions that obstruct federal interests. Above all, it would acknowledge the seriousness of the threat documented in the Ticktin letter, a threat that deserves full public investigation.
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SF Source American Liberty Dec 2025