2024-10-04 08:35:02
GRAND JUNCTION — Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters was sentenced Thursday to nine years behind bars by a judge who labeled her a “charlatan” for her role in a 2021 breach of her own county’s election system.
Peters will serve 60 days to six months in the Mesa County jail before she is transferred to the state Department of Corrections.
Peters was handcuffed and taken to jail immediately after she was sentenced.
As deputies removed her from the courtroom, Peters at the last instant raised her shackled hands, fluttered a wave and a blew a kiss to her supporters in the packed courtroom.
Twenty-first Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett handed down the sentence after saying Peters had found a way to profit off of lies and would continue to do so if she remained out of prison.
“Your lies are well-documented and these convictions are serious,” he said. “I am convinced you would do it all over again. You are as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen.”
Based on the seriousness of her crimes and the damage they caused to trust in voting nationwide “prison is the only place” for Peters, Barrett said. He added that the damage she caused is “unmeasurable.”
Peters, 68, was convicted Aug. 12 of three counts of attempting to influence a public official; conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation; official misconduct; violation of duty; and failure to comply with an order of the Secretary of State.
The jury acquitted Peters of three counts: conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, criminal impersonation and identity theft.
Peters did not testify during her trial, but in a rambling statement before sentencing, she used her time to lay out her belief that elections are being stolen as part of a vast national conspiracy. Her garbled defense sounded like the many presentations she had made on far-right, election-denier podcasts.
Barrett stopped her at one point telling her, “this is completely irrelevant.” He had told her four attorneys that numerous times during her trial when they tried to raise issues of voter fraud.
Barrett also called out Peters for lying when she demonstrated her infamous videotaped attempt to kick a police officer in 2022. That incident had nothing to do with her trial, but she included it in a litany of lies she said were part of the case against her.
She bent over and kicked a leg in the air to show how having her arm pulled had caused that involuntary movement. Barrett called that assertion “preposterous.” There was tittering throughout the courtroom over her demonstration.
Peters veered from trying to settle these old scores to making bids for sympathy by invoking the memory of her Navy Seal son who died in a parachute accident during a military demonstration when Peters was running for office. She spoke about her father dying while she was in jail and her 95-year-old mother needing her now. She accused 21st District Attorney Dan Rubinstein of stealing her late husband by convincing him to file for divorce. Rubinstein has denied having anything to do with her divorce.
Peters bid for leniency: “I have lived my life with faith and honesty”
At one point in her statement, Peters tearfully begged the judge for mercy.
“Your honor, I don’t deserve to go into a prison where other people have committed heinous crimes,” she said. “I’m not a criminal. I have lived my life with faith and honesty.”
Peters offered the possibility of going to a faith-based program in northern California where she would work to help people.
A minister from the Church of Glad Tidings who identified himself as Pastor Dave Bryan had spoken in her defense. He told Barrett that he could “take this big hairball” from Colorado by taking Peters out of the state to serve probation.
“It is my observation that a storm is just getting started with this trial,” he said. “Tina Peters has learned her lesson and will not be involved in Colorado politics anymore.” He made that statement before Peters said during her statement that officials have failed to understand that the election systems are fraudulent.
Peters told Judge Barrett that prison would be difficult for her because she needs to sleep on a magnetic mattress for health problems including fibromyalgia and a previous bout of lung cancer that left her short of breath at times.
Those who spoke in Peters’ defense included Douglas Frank, who identified himself as a Ph.D. physicist who has been “modeling elections” since he was a teenager.
Frank was at the crux of Peters’ criminal saga when it began in 2021. He came to Mesa County after she began questioning the results of a Grand Junction municipal election. Voters had rejected a slate of right-wing candidates, and Peters said at the time she didn’t think that was possible.
She agreed to a plan hatched with Frank and other national-level election fraud conspiracy theorists who wanted to try to show that Dominion Voting Systems ballot-counting equipment fraudulently tallied votes. They needed a county clerk who would give them access to a Dominion system and Peters accommodated them.
“They found an easy mark,” testified Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association who spoke for the prosecution Thursday.
Crane pointed out that Peters never bothered to finish her county clerk credentialing and she left a training session for new clerks early. He said he doesn’t believe she understood the system that she sought to undermine.
He said while her actions have caused other clerks and election officials around the state to receive death threats, “she has benefited from lies and willful ignorance.” He said her lies have been turned into a means of income for her as she shills for donations on right-wing podcasts.
“A tool rather than a victim”
Frank also participates in those podcasts. He came to Mesa County at the invitation of Peters and her friend, Sherronna Bishop, who was not an elected official and didn’t live in Mesa County. Bishop was a Silt makeup artist who had served as U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager before the two had a falling out.
Bishop then became involved with people who believe that elections are fraudulent.
Frank and Bishop offered Peters a way to prove, prior to the 2022 mid-term election, that Mesa County’s election system was capable of switching votes.
They hired Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer from California who Frank said during the sentencing was a “federally licensed, white-hat hacker.” Hayes traveled to Grand Junction to copy the voting system hard drive. Hayes’ assignment was to copy the confidential information before and after a standard upgrade to the system, called a trusted build. Trusted builds are carried out with the oversight of the Secretary of State’s Office prior to elections.
To get Hayes into the secure part of the clerk’s office and into the trusted build, Peters first had to carry out an elaborate scheme so he would have the necessary credentials.
Trial testimony had laid out the details of that scheme. Peters pretended to hire a local man, Gerald Wood, as a computer consultant for the elections office. Peters obtained credentials for Wood by skipping some of the steps normally taken for a new hire. She told different parties involved in the elections division that he was either a state employee, a contractor or a new employee in the motor vehicle division.
Wood’s badge was then used by Hayes to access the room where the “brains” of the voting system are located and where Peters had ordered security cameras to be turned off prior to the breach. Hayes made copies of the hard drive prior to the trusted build. He then attended the trusted build with representatives of Dominion and the Secretary of State’s Office who had been told he was a county employee.
Wood and his wife, Wendy Wood, spoke at the sentencing for the prosecution, laying out how Peters’ actions and lies had damaged their lives. Wendy Wood cried as she told the judge that Peters and her co-conspirators had viewed her husband as “a tool rather than a victim.”
Confidential info posted to websites trafficking in political conspiracy theories
The confidential information that Hayes obtained from the voting system was unveiled during an election-conspiracy conference in South Dakota put on by MyPillow CEO and election-denier Mike Lindell. Lindell had flown Peters and some of her fellow conspiracy theorists to the conference. He promised that he had proof of election fraud. No proof was presented.
But the information stolen from Mesa County’s voting system turned up on right-wing conspiracy websites where it set off alarm bells with state and county election officials. Peters asserted during her sentencing that she had not approved that release.
None of the information revealed in the breach was ever used to prove election fraud. But in the national election-conspiracy world it was held up as the Holy Grail that showed Dominion Voting Systems was monkeying with election results. That assertion was based on the fact that some files had been removed from the system — a standard method of doing an upgrade that includes installing new files, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
Mesa County — and the entire state — was in an uproar in the wake of Peters’ actions.
Jena Griswold, the Colorado Secretary of State, scrambled to put a substitute clerk in place to oversee the office and the upcoming election. Mesa County had to pay substitute clerk, former Secretary of State Wayne Williams, to run the Mesa County election while still having to pay the absent Peters. The county also had to replace its election equipment.
Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis, a Republican, addressed that in the sentencing. He said county workers have spent months trying to tally the financial cost of Peters’ crimes. He said they estimate it cost $1.4 million in attorney and staff time, hand counting ballots to prove the next election was fair, and trying to staff a clerk’s office that was in disarray.
“We had to hire designated election officials while Ms. Peters was gallivanting around the country,” he told Judge Barrett.
Peters was in hiding for more than a month after the Lindell conference. From her hiding place, which she revealed during the sentencing was in Texas, she continued to carry out clandestine plots and plans to cover up what she had done. In trial testimony, it was revealed that she asked an elections office employee to steal the election computer from the secure room. She had her fellow conspirators buy and use “burner” phones that couldn’t be tracked. She had them use encrypted message systems to communicate.
When Peters returned from hiding, she became an icon for the election-denier crowd — locally and across the nation. She became known as “Hero Tina” and “Clerk Peters,” labels that her social media followers still use. She unsuccessfully ran for Secretary of State.
A Lindell-produced documentary called “Selection Code” that focused on her election breach was released in 2022.
She appeared at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump. She spoke at conferences with Lindell and other conspiracy theorists. She was a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast before he was sentenced to prison for ignoring a congressional subpoena. She went on numerous right-wing podcasts asking for money for her defense — pleas that continued throughout her trial and sentencing.
Testimony in her trial showed that the tentacles of her crime reached into the top echelons and inner circles of the election-deniers close to Trump — former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Trump National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and Overstock.com founder and CEO Patrick Byrne.
Byrne was on the phone with Hayes gleefully celebrating the breach when Hayes was accessing the Mesa County system.
Former Mesa County Commissioner Scott McInnis, a Republican, addressed all that negative publicity when he said that Peters’ actions also sullied his county’s reputation.
He said the commissioners checked every allegation that Peters’ made and found that none were accurate. He called her “a disgrace” to the county.
Peters laughed audibly when McInnis, a former U.S. Congressman, said that. Judge Barrett took note of the disruption.
Peters lawyers tried to stop sentencing with an 11th hour filing
The FBI has been involved in the investigation related to Peters’ case, but neither Bishop nor Hayes have been charged in connection with the breach.
FBI spokesperson Vicki Migoya said she can’t confirm or deny any ongoing investigation that might lead to federal charges against Peters’ co-conspirators.
Two of Peters’ former employees have already been convicted for their parts in the breach. Belinda Knisley, Peters’ former deputy clerk, pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors in connection with the breach and was sentenced to two years of probation. Sandra Brown, a former elections manager, pleaded guilty to a felony and was sentenced to two months in jail. Both agreed to testify against their former boss.
In their testimony, they each referenced Peters saying “I am fucked,” and “I am going to jail” after authorities began digging into the breach.
Peters’ actions resulted in a tightening of state laws related to county clerks. It is now a felony to tamper with voting equipment or to knowingly publish confidential information about voting systems. Key card access and video surveillance is required for all voting systems. Crane pointed out that county clerks must also now be credentialed within six months of taking office or they can be removed from office.
One of Peters’ four attorneys, John Case, said after the hearing Thursday that he plans to file an appeal of Peters’ sentence by noon Friday.
Barrett had earlier turned down a defense request for a stay of sentence so that Peters could remain free while appeals move through the system.
He also turned down a motion filed by defense attorneys in the middle of the night before the sentencing asking that he delay the hearing based on new evidence that had come to light. Peters had been reported to authorities two weeks prior to her trial because she violated a term of her bail. She had taken a film crew to the clerk and recorder’s office and spoke to employees of the office in front of the building. She was restricted from doing that.
In denying the defense motion, Barrett pointed out that the information about the incident would not have helped Peters’ case.
Barrett commented at the end of the sentencing that he was incarcerating Peters immediately because “prison is where we send folks who are a danger to all of us.”
“You are a charlatan,” he said more than once. “You used your position to peddle snake oil.”
