Election denier pushing sweeping Trump anti-voting order makes bid for attorney general

A lawyer pushing an extreme proposal to hand control of elections to President Donald Trump has a new idea: make him attorney general.

Peter Ticktin — a longtime Trump ally and attorney for convicted election denier Tina Peters — has publicly declared his bid to serve as attorney general with an agenda that reads like a greatest hits collection of election conspiracy theories.

“I have thrown my hat in the ring to become the next AG, as I don’t know who else could do the job,” Ticktin wrote in a post published by the far-right conspiracy outlet The Gateway Pundit. “There are many others who know how to run big companies or agencies, but they don’t realize that we are at war and need to fix the whole department.”

Ticktin’s version of “fixing” the Justice Department would involve, among other things, reopening investigations into the 2020 election, targeting political opponents and pursuing sweeping claims of election fraud that have been repeatedly debunked.

“We have sufficient information and evidence at this point to prosecute numerous individuals,” he wrote — before escalating even further. “We have evidence of phone chips in the tabulators and of the massive plan to rig our elections and to take over our country.”

Among his priorities would be investigating election officials, hunting for people who “manipulated the Voter Rolls” and revisiting long-discredited theories about voting systems — all with the backing of federal law enforcement.

And it’s not just hypothetical.

Ticktin has already been tied to efforts to turn these ideas into actual policy, including a draft executive order that would supposedly allow Trump to declare a national emergency and take sweeping control over elections — a proposal widely viewed by legal experts as blatantly unconstitutional. 

He also represents Peters, the former Colorado clerk convicted for her role in a voting system breach tied to election denial effort, pushing for her to be fully pardoned and released from prison.

In other words, Ticktin isn’t just interested in relitigating the 2020 election — he’s proposing to build it into the mission of DOJ itself.

His agenda also includes investigating a wide range of political figures, issuing sweeping pardons to allies and compensating those he views as victims, including individuals convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.

It is, in effect, a vision of DOJ not as an independent law enforcement agency, but as a vehicle for the election denial movement — one that would revisit past grievances while expanding federal power over future elections.

Ticktin’s chances of becoming attorney general are practically nonexistent.

But his self-nomination highlights how ideas that once lived on the fringes of election conspiracy circles are increasingly being packaged as governing agendas — and, in some cases, auditioned for power.