BREAKING: Trump's lifelong friend, attorney Peter Ticktin, appears to have taken over Tina Peters' legal defense
Flynn/Byrne/Lindell's legal defense of Tina has been shockingly bad. Is there hope for her freedom?
A source with direct knowledge of Tina Peters’ legal situation has revealed to Bigger Truth, under condition of anonymity, that President Trump has asked his longtime friend and attorney, Peter Ticktin, to take over Peters’ defense.
This move underscores Trump’s desire to help Peters, despite the legal limits of presidential authority—he cannot pardon her, as Peters was convicted of state crimes, and presidential pardons apply only to federal offenses.
Peters’ legal team was previously backed by attorneys funded by The America Project (TAP) and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. TAP, a 501(c)(4) founded by Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne, along with Lindell, reportedly covered $2 million in legal fees, according to Byrne on various podcasts.
Peters is currently serving a nine-year sentence in Colorado after a jury convicted her on four felony and three misdemeanor counts. The charges stem from her role in helping former pro surfer and T-shirt salesman Conan Hayes gain unauthorized access to the Mesa County Election Management System (EMS) room in May and June 2021.
Hayes created forensic images of the EMS hard drives before and after a June 2021 “trusted build” software update. The Flynn network claims missing log files in the second image suggest tampering. However, even Josh Merritt—a member of Lindell’s Cyber Symposium Red Team—acknowledged in an interview with Bigger Truth that Hayes himself could have deleted those files. Merritt also admitted the post-update image might not even be from the same machine, due to the absence of chain of custody. Peters had the building’s security system disabled that week, eliminating evidence trails and signaling her awareness of wrongdoing.
Instead of mounting a conventional legal defense, Peters’ lawyers attempted to turn her trial into a referendum on the 2020 election. Months ahead of trial, they sought to admit thousands of pages of documents—illegally leaked by Byrne’s attorney Stefanie Lambert from the Dominion v. Byrne civil suit—as evidence. Their repeated efforts to inject election fraud claims led the judge to bar any mention of it during the trial. Flynn-aligned media predictably spun that ruling as evidence of judicial bias.
Bigger Truth began following the case more closely when Dan Hartman—Kristina Karamo’s former lawyer and a graduate of the worst law school in the U.S.—joined Peters’ defense. Hartman’s involvement, based on our direct experience with him, suggested the team was not serious about keeping Peters out of prison.
Peter Ticktin, by contrast, is a veteran Florida attorney and one of Trump’s most trusted allies. His direct relationship with the former president gives him the latitude—and responsibility—to report any internal misconduct within Peters’ previous legal team.
Ticktin initially filed an amicus brief in support of Peters’ habeas corpus request, which sought her release on bail while her appeal is pending. His filing echoed her appeal’s main argument: that Peters, as a county election official, was acting in a federal capacity to preserve election records and should therefore be granted federal immunity from state prosecution.
Though the Flynn network and The Gateway Pundit hyped the filing, both the habeas petition and the appeal are unlikely to succeed. Federal habeas relief is rare, and especially while a state appeal is active. In Peters’ case, the court already issued a “show cause” order, questioning why the petition should not be dismissed outright. Ticktin’s amicus was denied.
Ticktin submitted a follow-up response on June 4, supporting our source’s claim that he has formally taken over her defense.
An AI trained on U.S. legal precedent confirms that state courts typically do not entertain habeas petitions until after appeals are exhausted. Despite this, Trump has reportedly directed the DOJ to pursue habeas relief.
Peters’ appeal, filed before Ticktin entered the case, hinges on a legal argument with no precedent: that a local election official should be granted federal immunity. No court has ever accepted such a claim, and judges tend to naturally resist setting new precedent.
On June 7, just hours after Elon Musk made the accusation, without evidence, that President Trump was preventing the release of “Epstein files” because Trump is on the list, Ed Martin, who lobbied persistently for Flynn’s 2020 pardon, posted “FREE TINA PETERS NOW.” Minutes later, Flynn reposted it.
It seems strange that Ed Martin, who is an attorney, would choose that timing to make a demand of Trump that he is in a position to know that Trump cannot do more than he already has to fulfill.
The only person who can really free Tina Peters is Colorado’s governor, Democrat Jared Polis. Unless that happens, Peters, MAGA, and even Trump need to reckon with the lies we’ve been fed by the Flynn network.