Convicted election denier Tina Peters reportedly met with President Donald Trump this week in the Oval Office to discuss plans for the midterms. Details of the meeting are scarce, but lately Peters has been pushing the president to take action to intervene in the midterms.

Specifically, Peters wants Trump to pressure Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to exploit an executive order Trump signed in his first term related to protecting U.S.-made technology, by using it to seize voting machines.

• Peters and other election deniers are pushing the conspiracy that voting machines use parts from China, Russia and other foreign countries that make them vulnerable to hacking.
  
  
• On his online show, former Trump DOJ official Ed Martin said Peters discussed this conspiracy with Trump, which was recently boosted by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Peters has been pushing Trump to take action to control voting for the midterms and laid out a step-by-step plan for what the president can do — starting by declaring the security of voting machines a national security issue.
  
  
• “The president is taking it seriously,” Martin said. “If 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. It’s not a local issue when it’s national security. And it’s clearly national security.”

It’s not a new scheme — Peters first floated this plan over the summer — but the renewed push from her and other prominent election deniers as Election Day nears is worrisome.

Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell is pushing the same plot.

• “Lots of people are asking [Trump] to declare a national emergency to protect against the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems,” Mitchell explained on social media. “It turns out that [Trump] already declared such an emergency in May 2019.”
  
  
• That 2019 order declared a national emergency because of the threat of foreign adversaries exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology. The order banned transactions involving foreign-owned manufacturers that “present threats to the security or resiliency of critical infrastructure.”
  
  
• Mitchell and Peters think voting machines qualify as critical infrastructure — and that Lutnick has the power to act.

➤ Why election deniers are calling on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to interfere in the midterms.

Quote of the week

Conservative attorney and Trump ally Peter Ticktin backtracks on his recent comments to The Atlantic that Trump needs to declare martial law to save the midterms on a far-right podcast.

Last week Kurt Olsen — a Trump loyalist and election conspiracist brought into the administration last year to probe voter fraud — abruptly resigned as a federal prosecutor.

Olsen’s resignation was somewhat of a milestone: He was at least the fifth Trump loyalist in recent months to quit their post after being brought in to prove 2020 election conspiracy theories, or indict the president’s political enemies, and utterly failing to do so.

So despite Trump’s allocating enormous federal resources to prove his false voter fraud claims, their efforts have continuously come up empty.

Here are some of the election deniers and loyalists who quit without accomplishing their mission:

• Trump brought Olsen in last year to lead a special White House task force probing 2020 election conspiracies. Olsen played a central role in the FBI’s January raid of a Fulton County, Georgia elections hub and reportedly spearheaded a failed probe into voting machines used in Puerto Rico. Neither effort spawned the proof that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
  
  
• Joe diGenova was appointed in April to the DOJ team in South Florida to lead the president’s effort to indict his political enemies. DiGenova quit amid pressure from Attorney General Todd Blanche to make progress in the case, which has dragged on since last year.
  
  
• During his time in the DOJ, Martin — a hardcore election denier who served as pardon attorney — played a key role in trying to prosecute Trump’s political enemies and was central to the DOJ’s efforts to probe 2020 voting conspiracies. Martin’s work in both efforts came up empty by the time he left the department in August.

➤ What other Trump administration officials left without finding evidence of election fraud?