President Donald Trump met in the Oval Office with a former Colorado election clerk convicted over a breach of her county's voting equipment, to discuss "the plans" for next month's midterm elections, according to former Justice Department official Ed Martin.
Martin revealed the president's meeting with fellow 2020 election denier Tina Peters during an appearance with conservative host Eric Bolling on Real America's Voice, saying it had happened about two hours earlier.
"Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans," Martin said.
Martin referred to an August directive from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, claiming the DHS chief had found that voting machines use parts "from China and Russia and foreign places and are therefore compromised."
Mullin's Aug. 24 letter said machines with components made by foreign adversaries posed "significant security risks," and it tied federal security grants to random manual audits of paper ballots, but the review did not find that any voting system had been compromised or that any votes had been changed.
Martin, who said he once ran the election board in St. Louis, acknowledged that elections are under local control, but he argued that national security gives Washington a role.
"The laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws," he said.
He then tied the Peters meeting to the stalled SAVE America Act, which would impose new citizenship documentation and ID requirements for federal elections. The Senate left Washington without passing the Republican-backed bill.
"The president's taking it seriously," Martin said. "If the Congress won't pass the Save America Act, and they won't, then the president's going to have to do what he's going to do, and it is not a local issue when it's national security."
Martin did not say what the "plans" were or what action Trump might take.
Later in the interview, Bolling cited Fox News' settlement with Dominion Voting Systems as evidence that voting machines were "compromised." Fox paid $787.5 million in 2023 to settle Dominion's defamation suit over false claims the network aired about the 2020 election, but Martin called the litigation "a kind of lawfare thing" and repeated the false claim that none of the 2020 election lawsuits reached the merits.
Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, was convicted in 2024 on seven counts, four of them felonies, for her role in a 2021 breach of the county's voting equipment. Prosecutors said she let an unauthorized person access the system while searching for evidence to support claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis reduced Peters' prison sentence earlier this year under heavy pressure from Trump.
