By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Widespread reports last week linked Deerfield Beach lawyer Peter Ticktin to a scheme for President Trump to seize the midterm elections by way of an executive order Ticktin drafted.
The supposed emergency behind the executive order is this: Chinese hackers are ready to corrupt U.S. voting results in November, just like they did in 2020, so a national response is necessary. No matter that U.S. intelligence agencies have debunked 2020 election-interference conspiracy theories, including the one about China, ever since Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Ticktin put a benign spin on his work for Trump, describing himself as “an outside person who’s attempting to influence things” in an interview Thursday with Florida Bulldog.
Trump is acting in the best interests of the American people, according to Ticktin. “It’s important for the president to make the elections transparent so that whichever party wins, there will be no question as to whether it was fair.”
In fact, however, only Trump and his allies have questioned election integrity. After the 2020 election, they filed 62 legal challenges and nearly all were dismissed or dropped; 30 judges, including Trump appointees, found them groundless.
Trump, responding to a question from a PBS reporter on Friday, said he’s not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections, as Ticktin’s draft executive order circulating among the president’s allies suggests.
A seasoned election-denial litigator and the author of “What Makes Trump Tick,” Ticktin has known the president since their high school days in the early 1960s. Ticktin was Trump’s platoon sergeant at the New York Military Academy.
Now he collaborates with Trump advisors such as retired Army lieutenant general Mike Flynn and MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon. Combating election fraud will require not only an executive order but military troops – ground and airborne – and federal agents, Bannon says.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said recently on his War Room podcast. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
Bannon’s opponents are equally adamant they won’t let Trump and his allies hijack the midterm elections. Norman Eisen, executive chair of the nonprofit State Democracy Defenders Fund, warned that Ticktin’s handiwork, the planned Chinese-emergency executive order, would be challenged immediately.
“If Trump tries this we will be in court in the blink of an eye,” Eisen said Friday on MS NOW. “If he tries this, he will fail. There’s no constitutional basis for this.”
TICKTIN’S FLORIDA BAR HISTORY
Ticktin is known for his ongoing representation of Tina Peters, a Republican county clerk in Colorado who’s serving a nine-year prison sentence for plotting to tamper with election equipment in 2021. Calling her a “political prisoner” who was trying to reveal the truth about what she calls the stolen 2020 presidential election, Ticktin has been agitating for her release.
His current mission is far removed in subject matter and location from where he started out.
Peter Ticktin began his legal career in 1972 in Ontario, Canada. “His record in Ontario was impeccable,” according to his firm’s website, but in 2022 Florida Bulldog couldn’t verify part of his resume.
Ticktin claimed he “changed the law regarding breaking and entering before the Supreme Court of Canada.” Or maybe it was the Ontario Superior Court, which his website listed separately as the venue even though superior court judges follow significant laws, as opposed to changing them.
Peter Ticktin relocated to Florida in 1985 and was graduated from the University of Miami School of Law three years later. He set out to position himself, the website says, “on the cutting edge of the law.”
The website highlights his fight to prevent doctors from disclosing HIV patients’ status to their employers. However, in 1996 Ticktin lost his case raising this issue, Doe v. Potash, in the Third District Court of Appeal.
Still, the law was changed, and Ticktin took full credit. “Mr. Peter Ticktin was the leader in this field in South Florida,” the website boasts.
In 2008 Ticktin opened The Ticktin Law Group, a general civil litigation practice that “endeavors to live up to the ideals of the new lawyers who first graduate from law school,” according to the firm’s legalbrains.com website.
The following year, ruling on a Florida Bar ethics complaint against Ticktin, the Florida Supreme Court ordered him to briefly close his practice. The court’s opinion says he’d shown “poor professional judgment” resulting in “misconduct … unbecoming of a member of the Florida Bar.”
Another Bar complaint also resulted in a brief suspension of Ticktin’s law license. Both ethics cases are too old to appear in his current Florida Bar profile; it now says he’s a “member in good standing.”
More recently, West Palm Beach U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks slammed Ticktin and other lawyers in a high-profile election case, Trump v. Clinton. Ticktin was a member of the plaintiff’s team led by Alina Habba, who later was Trump’s pick for acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey. Her stint ended in December when a federal appeals court ruled she was appointed illegally.
A FEDERAL COURT LOSS
Trump’s complaint alleges Hillary Clinton and a crowd of co-conspirators tried to steal the 2016 election, violating the federal civil racketeering law even though Trump won the presidency. Middlebrooks dismissed the case in September 2022.
He didn’t stop there. The judge issued sanctions against Ticktin, Habba and Trump totaling almost $1 million for pressing what Middlebrooks called “political grievances masquerading as legal claims.”
And he referred the lawyers to their state ethics supervisors, writing he was “pessimistic” that sanctions alone could “effectively stem this abuse. Aspects may be beyond the purview of the judiciary, requiring attention of the Bar and disciplinary authorities,” he wrote in his 2022 opinion.
Yet the Florida Bar didn’t investigate Ticktin, he confirmed 16 months later. “Nor should it,” he told Florida Bulldog. (It’s noteworthy that the Bar doesn’t operate independently but as an arm of the Florida Supreme Court, a conservative stronghold since 2019.)
At that point, with an appeal pending in the 11th Circuit, Ticktin called Middlebrooks “good, decent, honest” but misinformed.
“The decision was political,” Ticktin said. “I’m not saying the judge is political, but in the current environment you’ve got two different kinds of people, those that believe what they see in the media and those who look at alternative news and tend to believe what they see in the alternative news.”
In November the conservative 11th Circuit upheld Middlebrooks’s dismissal of Trump v. Clinton. Last week Ticktin changed his tune.
”We have rules of ethics that require we don’t say things that criticize the courts publicly and so for me to say what I think about that opinion would cause me possibly to violate the rules of ethics,” Ticktin said. “You can say I was extremely disappointed.”
Still, he said he believes any challenge to Trump’s planned executive order would fail. The 11th Circuit wouldn’t resolve an appeal, Ticktin said.
“Hopefully it will have a fair decision from the U.S. Supreme Court because there are emergency powers that the president has to have,” Ticktin said. “And it’s not as though he’s trying to control the election in such a way as to gain control for the Republicans.”
In fact, though, Trump says that’s his goal: enable Republicans to prevent Democrats from “cheating” to win.
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