2024-08-15 07:55:02
GRAND JUNCTION — A jury has found Tina Peters guilty of seven of 10 counts related to a 2021 breach of the Mesa County election system.
Twenty-first Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett read the verdicts at 5:15 p.m. Monday, after the jury had deliberated for roughly four hours. At least four Mesa County sheriff’s deputies were inside the courtroom to maintain order, and another four were in the hallway.
Peters, 68, was convicted 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.
Her sentencing is set for Oct. 3 at 9:30 a.m. She is eligible for probation but could face a lengthy prison sentence.
She faces up to six years in prison on each of her top three felony convictions, and up to 18 months for conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. Each of her three misdemeanor convictions carries up to 6 months in jail.
Peters, who had no visible reaction to the verdict, was not taken into custody Monday. Instead, the judge directed her to report to the county probation office by noon Tuesday. She left the courtroom flanked by grim-faced supporters, who pushed their way through a crowd as they made their exit.
The verdict capped a trial that started July 30 with jury selection and spanned eight days of testimony. Attorneys for Peters argued she was only following her duties as clerk. Her defense made frequent references to unproven election conspiracies that drove Peters and her accomplices.
The allegations turned Peters into an icon among election conspiracy theorists, embraced by national figures including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who told The Colorado Sun in April 2022 that he contributed up to $800,000 of his personal wealth toward her legal defense.
Jurors were forced to choose between clashing portraits of Peters, with prosecutors portraying her as a conniving, law-breaking, publicity-seeking conspiracy monger who jeopardized Colorado’s voting system. To the defense, she was a dedicated public servant who was only trying to protect sensitive election information for her constituents — until she was steamrolled by a vindictive big government juggernaut.
Trial was not about election fraud, judge’s rulings insisted
The trial was a display of contentious disagreements, loaded with objections and filled with judicial admonishments — most of them directed at Peters’ team of four attorneys.
For a trial that was not about election fraud, that topic continually came up, most blatantly in the closing argument presented by defense attorney John Case.
Case began his summation with a large photo of Peters projected on a screen. Beside her, was a photo of her Navy Seal son who died in a parachuting accident during an air show in 2017.
Case described Peters as a mother who was “forced to find a new purpose in life” after her son died. That purpose, he said, was to become the clerk and recorder for her county.
He said Peters has been targeted because of her selfless attempt to help her constituents and in the process, to protect a purported cyber expert she brought in through subterfuge to access her system.
“The government has charged Tina Peters for 10 crimes. Wow! Why?” Case pointedly asked the jurors after defending her secretive actions and outlining what the defense views as lies from those who testified against Peters.
Robert Shapiro, an attorney for the Colorado Attorney General’s office, who assisted the 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office in the prosecution of Peters, described the former clerk as a lawbreaker who devised a scheme to breach her county’s election system with “layer upon layer of deceit.”
He, too, had a photo of Peters from 2021 projected on the screen, but it was a vastly different image from the carefully coiffed and heavily made-up defendant in the courtroom.
Shapiro said Peters’ defense that she was trying to look into voting irregularities and to preserve confidential information from her voting equipment is not defensible.
“She is not conducting an investigation,” he said about her actions surrounding the breach of Mesa County’s equipment in the spring of 2021. “She is opening up her system to outsiders.”
The vision of innocent whistleblower versus criminal conspiracist, clashed most starkly on the prosecution’s detailing of Peters’ actions related to bringing in an outside person in to secretly access the system.
Prosecutors reminded the jurors that Peters had surveillance cameras turned off in the secure tabulation room before she brought in a former pro surfer named Conan Hayes to copy information from the hard drives on that system. She used an encrypted messaging system with her small band of co-conspirators. She had some of those conspirators start using burner phones so their conversations could not be monitored by law enforcement. She bragged about having a “hidey hole” in her house where she placed a phone that was initially overlooked by law officers who searched her house.
“She was not protecting the election integrity,” Janet Drake, another attorney from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, said in her rebuttal of the defense’s closing arguments. “The defendant was the fox guarding the henhouse. She used her power for her own advantage.”
The prosecution briefly projected a picture of a snarling fox to illustrate that view of Peters.
“Simple” trial with deep roots and national tendrils
Her case, Judge Barrett said many times during the trial, “should be simple.”
The charges against Peters didn’t rise near the level of the murders and abuse cases heard at other times in the same courtroom.
But the specter of election-fraud hiding in the wings of Peters’ trial, turned it into a matter of head-spinning, convoluted, tangled matters that continually crept into the case via the defense attorneys who were attempting to use the trial to prove election fraud to the country.
On any given day of the trial the sheer number of bench conferences, objections, overrulings and sustained arguments ate up as much time in court as witness testimony. The hiss of the judge’s voice-dampening machine was heard so often it became like a soundtrack to the trial.
While the jurors were charged with deliberating many of the dry details of what constituted Peters’ alleged crimes, they weren’t privy to the backstory that stretches back three years and all the way to the White House.
In 2021, following a Grand Junction municipal election to fill three seats on the city council, Peters often publicly said that she decided something must be amiss with a voting system she had earlier told the public was very sound.
A slate of three conservative candidates was defeated by three candidates on the more moderate end.
That was not a surprise to many residents of the Western Slope’s largest city because the city has been trending more blue. It has become an island of more progressive voters in a heavily red county.
According to testimony, Peters’ friend Sherronna Bishop helped convince Peters otherwise.
Bishop, a Silt makeup artist with no election experience, had vaulted into the conservative political arena when she served as U.S. 3rd Congressional District Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager. With Bishop’s behind-the-scenes help, Boebert blasted out of the obscurity of running a Rifle café into the halls of Congress.
With her willowy good looks, gift of gab, and success with promoting far-right candidates, Bishop caught the attention of former President Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” bunch.
Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, has his fingerprints all over the activities that led to Peters arrest and presence in a courtroom this week.
A self-described former “crackhead,” Lindell became a prominent advisor to Trump. He was one of those in the White House the night before the January 6 insurrection. He was one of those trying to persuade Trump to not accept the results of the election.
Lindell promoted the theory that Dominion Voting Systems were set up to conspire with foreign governments to rig the U.S. election.
Lindell has said in interviews and on his own Frank Speech podcasts that he has spent more than $30 million and hired more than 70 attorneys and cyber experts to help prove election fraud — something he has so far failed to do.
In what attorneys for Dominion have called “a highly orchestrated scheme,” Lindell and his cadre of election deniers needed a county clerk who might be a willing participant to allowing election-fraud promoters into a Dominion voting machine.
Bishop helped set that effort in motion in Mesa County by first bringing a high school math teacher, Douglas Frank, to Grand Junction to meet with Peters. Frank had been traveling the country promoting stolen election theories and was able to persuade Peters that her voting equipment harbored evidence of “phantom voters” — people who had died or didn’t exist who were being counted as voters.
She also put Peters in touch with a Trump attorney, Kurt Olsen, who allegedly helped set up the whole ruse.
With Frank’s encouragement, Peters, Bishop and two of Peter’s high-level employees took part in the scheme that involved persuading a Mesa County computer engineer to hire on as a part-time computer expert in the elections office.
Gerald Wood went through a background check, and was given a badge for access to secure elections rooms. But he never entered those rooms. His access pass was instead given to Conan Hayes who had begun working with the top tier of the stolen election bunch at the national level.
Hayes traveled to Grand Junction from his home in California in May of 2021 and made a forensic image of the information on Mesa County’s elections “brain”using Wood’s badge. Two days later, he attended a “trusted build” which is basically an upgrade of a computer system that resembles the upgrades cellphones periodically go through.
Peters was in that trusted build and introduced Hayes as Wood. The trusted build was also attended by representatives from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office and from Dominion. Dominion personnel don’t normally attend trusted builds, but the company had gotten wind of the possibility that a clerk might be going rogue.
While Hayes was making copies and videos of the Mesa County voting system, he had former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne on a Facetime chat.
Byrne later posted videos about that call on X. He called Hayes “a real badass” and laughed about how Hayes dressed up “like a little nerd” to carry off the ruse. Byrne guffaws in those videos about how the election officials were right there in the room with Hayes not knowing “he was one of ours.”
Peters knew who Hayes was but she introduced him to the other attendees variously as a county worker, a state employee or a temporary hire in the elections office.
In August, the materials taken from the Mesa County system turned up on a QAnon website.
That’s when Peters began telling her two underlings who were in cahoots that she was “f—cked” and that she was “going to jail.”
Sandra Brown, one of Peters’ elections officials, did go to jail for two months for her part in the scheme. Belinda Knisely received two years of probation. Both testified against Peters as a condition of their plea agreements.
Brown and Knisely were the only other people who have been prosecuted for their parts in the election breach.
Less of a celebrity circus than anticipated
Peters’ trial did not turn into the promised circus that she had been promoting on social media. She had urged supporters to come to the courthouse and march outside and in the halls saying prayers for her acquittal. Former child actor Ricky Schroder was the only person spotted praying outside the courtroom.
Two sign wavers showed up outside the courthouse briefly with posters saying that Judge Barrett was being unfair. A former Green Beret who would not give his name because he feared being “raided” like Peters, parked outside the justice center most days of the trial with a sign on the side of his pickup stating “God Bless You, Tina Peters!”
Barrett, who attorneys observing the trial say showed remarkable restraint, has had to be driven to and from the justice center by a Mesa County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team because of threats of violence. So did 21st Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein.
The justice center was guarded by a contingent of undercover officers.
Security was beefed up after Byrne and some of his followers said in the weeks before the trial that people would be coming for the judge and prosecutors with “piano wire” and “blow torches.”
