DENVER (AP) — Former Colorado Clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with security breaches as unsubstantiated conspiracy theories swirled after the 2020 election, was found guilty by a jury on most charges Monday.
Peters, a one-time hero to election deniers, is accused of using someone else’s security badge to give access to the Mesa County election system to an expert associated with My Billo chief executive Mike Lindell and to deceive other officials about the person’s identity.
Lindel is a prominent advertiser False allegations of voting machine tampering to steal Election From Donald Trump. His online broadcast site shows live coverage of Peters’ trial and sends daily email updates, sometimes asking for prayers for Peters and including statements from him.
Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting issues after interacting with people who questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The breach accused Peters of planning heightened concerns about potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from the inside.
Peters is charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit a criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, dereliction of duty and failure to comply with the Secretary of State.
She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation, in which Peters denied using the identity of a local man named Gerald Wood, the owner of a security badge, without his permission. .
Peters stood next to one of his attorneys at the defense table as the verdict was read in a quiet courtroom. Judge Matthew Barrett warned those in the courtroom.
She will be sentenced on October 3.
In a post on the social media site X after the ruling, Peters blamed Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, which created his district’s election system, as well as state election officials’ lawyers for stealing votes.
“I will continue to fight until the truth comes out that was not allowed to be brought up during this investigation. It is a sad day for our nation and the world. But in the end we will win,” he said.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who helped launch the investigation into Peters, said she now faces consequences for compromising her own campaign equipment “trying to prove Trump’s big lie.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the ruling sends a message.
“Today’s ruling is a warning to others that they will face severe consequences if they attempt to illegally disrupt our voting processes or election systems. I want to be clear—our elections are safe and fair,” he said in a statement.
The verdict came hours after prosecutors urged jurors to convict Peters on the grounds that he defrauded government employees so he could work with outsiders affiliated with Lindel.
In closing Investigation In arguments, attorney Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed someone posing as a county employee to take the election system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.
Drake said Peters noticed the update so he could be a “hero” and appeared at Lyndall’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a few months later.
“The defendant is the fox guarding the hen house. Her job was to protect the election equipment, which she operated and used her power to benefit herself,” said Drake, an attorney with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
Drake is working for the district attorney in Republican-majority Mesa County, near the Utah border.
Before jurors began deliberating Monday, the defense told them that Peters had pleaded not guilty and wanted to preserve election records after the county refused to allow one of its technicians to have one of its technicians involved in a software update.
Defense attorney John Case said Peters would need to preserve the records to access the voting system to find out things like whether someone from “China or Canada” accessed the machine while the votes were being counted.
“Thank God she did. Otherwise, we don’t know what happened,” he said.
Lindell, California, allowed Peters, a former surfer with Conan Hayes, to oversee the software update and use Wood’s security badge to make copies of the hard drive. Peters told visiting officers that Hayes, posing as Wood, had worked for him. But while prosecutors say Peters committed identity theft by taking Wood’s security badge to hide his identity and giving it to Hayes, the defense said Peters was not guilty of committing it because Wood was in on the scheme.
Wood denied that when he testified at trial.
Sharona Bishop, a political activist who helped introduce Peters to people working with Lindell, testified that Wood knew her identity would be used based on a signal chat between Wood and Peters. There is no agreement in the chat.
Bishop testified that the day after the first picture of the hard drive was taken, he posted the voice recording on the chat. The content of that recording was not included in the chat screenshots introduced by the security. The man, identified as Wood, responded to the anonymous message, saying, “I’m happy to help. As per the screenshots, I hope the effort pays off.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was not credible.
