Tina Peters, the Republican former county clerk and right-wing folk hero, was found guilty Monday on four of seven felony counts against her, and guilty of all three misdemeanor counts. The charges related to one of the most significant election security breaches in recent years.
Peters, who declined to testify at trial, is the former clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, which is home to Grand Junction and around 150,000 people. She became a cause célèbre for the nationwide election denial movement after she was indicted in relation to the security breach ― maintaining that the breach occurred while she was trying to investigate Dominion voting machines, and that her actions were legal.
After the 2020 election, Peters secretly brought a computer analyst aligned with the election denial movement into a protected software update meeting for Dominion election machines in her county, wary of state officials erasing election information. The analyst attended the update under a disguise, using the name and access badge of a local Mesa County resident.
Digital images from the software update soon leaked online ― published by Ron Watkins, a key QAnon figure ― and state officials quickly descended upon the Mesa County elections office to investigate.
Peters was indicted in 2022, and pleaded not guilty ahead of trial to three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and one count each of criminal impersonation, identity theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state. The first seven counts were felonies, the last three were misdemeanors.
Peters was found guilty Monday of all felony counts except one of the counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, criminal impersonation, and identity theft. She was found guilty of the three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one of the counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation.
The crux of the case against Peters was that she used the identity of Gerald “Jerry” Wood, a local resident, as cover for the computer analyst, Conan Hayes, who attended the software update, which is known as a “trusted build.” Peters, working with Hayes, a former pro surfer who co-founded the clothing brand RVCA, meant to deceive both county employees and employees from the Colorado secretary of state’s office, prosecutors argued; the office had previously denied Peters’ request to include members of the public in the trusted build.
Peters’ then-deputy in the county elections office, Belinda Knisley, also faced charges, but reached a plea deal with prosecutors, agreeing to testify against Peters in order to avoid prison time. Prosecutors alleged Peters had instructed Knisley to have security cameras turned off prior to the trusted build.
Another former Peters employee who testified against her as part of a plea deal, Sandra Brown, told the jury that Peters introduced her to a “new hire” ahead of the trusted build, but that she grew suspicious after she overheard “Jerry” talking about taking “forensic images” of voting systems in other states. Peters “lied to me,” Brown said. Both Brown and Knisley recalled Peters telling them, “I’m fucked,” after images of the software update were published online.
Despite ― or perhaps because of ― the charges against her, Peters became popular statewide among Republican Party faithful, earning the support of 61% of delegates at the Colorado GOP assembly to be the Republican nominee for secretary of state. Still, she later lost the actual statewide Republican primary ― then raised $250,000 for a recount, which confirmed the loss.
A National Network
Though elections in the United States are largely run on the local level, Peters’ trial showed the truly national scope of the election conspiracy theory movement, which Donald Trump supercharged four years ago when he denied the facts of his own 2020 reelection loss ― ultimately leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, an attempt by Trump supporters to overturn Joe Biden’s win.
For one thing, Sherronna Bishop, an ally of Peters’ and a key witness in the trial, is Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-Co.) former campaign manager. Bishop, a right-wing activist, introduced Peters to the national election conspiracy theory community ― among them Douglas Frank, a election conspiracy theorist who has toured the country claiming to have discovered mathematical proof of election rigging. In reality, as The Washington Post reported, Frank’s pitch involves “a bit of impressive-sounding chicanery that is light-years away from any proof of fraud.” It was Bishop who testified that Wood, the supposed victim of identity theft, had actually consented to the use of his Mesa County badge as part of the scheme ― a claim Wood and the prosecution denied.
Jurors in the Peters case heard a secretly-recorded meeting between Frank and Peters ― taped by a concerned member of Peters’ office ― in which Frank encouraged the then-county clerk to root out “phantom” ballots and acknowledged he was being paid by Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a major funder of the election denial movement. The same concerned staff member, Stephanie Wenholz, Mesa County’s front-end elections manager, said Peters had mandated that staff attend a presentation by Frank, hosted by Bishop, at a Grand Junction hotel. Wenholz said the mood at the event was “kind of like a revival” and said she felt her safety was in jeopardy at the event.
Lindell himself loomed large over the trial: The Mesa County story became national news as Peters spoke at a Lindell event, deemed the “Cyber Symposium,” in South Dakota. She reportedly traveled there via Lindell’s private jet. In 2022, Lindell claimed to have donated $800,000 to Peters’ defense fund. Lindell’s cell phone was seized by the FBI in 2022 (when he was in a Hardee’s drive-through) as part of a federal investigation of the Mesa County breach. Lindell sued, but the suit went nowhere, with the Supreme Court ultimately declining to hear an appeal.
Marc Piscotty via Getty Images
Just days before the trial began, Lindell and other national election conspiracy theorists, including David Clements and Joe Oltmann, attended a film screening in Mesa County, where at least one organizer urged potential jurists to “support Tina Peters.”
Oltmann (pictured above on the left with Peters in 2022) told the crowd, “I’m at that place where I want to hurt somebody,” and “They’re going to steal the election in November,” the Colorado Times Recorder reported. He added: “Let’s go get our guns; we have to have a target. The time is coming when good people will have to do bad things to bad people. There’s a sacrifice to be made.”
Closing Arguments
Throughout the trial, prosecutors attempted to steer jurors away from opinions about election security.
“This case was a simple case centered around the use of deceit to commit a fraud,” Robert Shapiro, first assistant attorney general for special prosecutions at the Colorado attorney general’s office, said at the start of closing arguments Monday. “It’s not about computers, it’s not about election records, it’s about using deceit to trick and manipulate others ― specifically public servants ― who are simply trying to do their job, despite the agenda and motives that the defendant had, in concert with like-minded people, mostly from outside Mesa County.”
Peters, in working with members of the national election conspiracy theory movement, “let the outsiders come into this secured world that she was supposed to be focusing on,” Shapiro said. He also argued that Peters, with outsiders and some within Mesa County, worked to deceive Colorado secretary of state’s office employees, as well as an employee from Mesa County.
Employees from the secretary of state’s office were instructed to leave the Mesa County trusted build if any unauthorized outsiders were present; in order for the election conspiracy theory movement to gain crucial access to a sensitive process on friendly turf ― that is, the Mesa County elections office ― their “cyber mercenary” technician, Hayes, needed to use a supposed local employees’ identity, prosecutors argued.
Peters’ attorneys argued essentially that the former clerk broke no laws in disguising Hayes as Gerald Wood and smuggling him into a sensitive software update ― noting that, even though the secretary of state’s office told Peters no outsiders were allowed at the trusted build, employees from that office didn’t check the identification of attendees. Defense attorney John Case, during his closing argument, compared giving Hayes Wood’s county ID badge to giving a friend your hotel room key.
“There was no harm. Misrepresenting Hayes’ identity didn’t hurt a computer, it didn’t hurt any software, it didn’t affect [Danny] Casias [the Colorado secretary of state’s senior voting system specialist], it didn’t interrupt the trusted build. No harm,” Case said.
Wood, Case argued, was dishonest when he claimed that he didn’t know what would happen with the ID badge Peters had made for him. The defense also argued that it was not illegal to share information about the software update, and that the images that did ultimately leak did not contain any truly sensitive information.
“It’s not unlawful to publish videos on the internet, thank God, because we live in a country that still values free speech ― unless you’re a target of the government, then your speech has no value,” Case said. He added, referring to the trusted build: “So what’s the harm with having the public in the room?”
Prior to the start of the trial, Colorado District Court Judge Matthew Barrett forbade Peters’ defense from mentioning any claim that Hayes was working for the federal government ― a would-be justification for concealing his identity. (There’s no proof of Hayes supposedly working with the government, and Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein told the court the FBI confirmed Hayes was never an informant.)
Case told the jury, rather, that “Clerk Peters made one decision: She made a decision to protect the identity of Conan Hayes, because he said he couldn’t do the work that needed to be done if his identity was revealed” ― a comment that drew an objection from the defense for assuming “facts not in evidence.” Later, Case wondered aloud why the prosecution hadn’t called Hayes as a witness. “Well, did the background check show that he was a CIA asset, or an NSA–.” The prosecution interjected with another objection.
Later, Case said that rather than evaluating the case based on who was “harmed” ― no one, he’d argued ― the jury should consider who Tina Peters’ actions had “threatened,” namely “Dominion and the secretary of state,” he said. Shapiro objected, saying it was an “improper argument.” Barrett sustained the objection.
There’s no evidence that Mesa County’s elections were ever corrupted by Dominion voting machines, or anything else. As a result of the breach in Mesa County, the Colorado secretary of state’s office decertified the existing machines, and county officials voted to replace them with new Dominion machines, at a higher cost, in 2021.
The prosecution concluded closing arguments with a rebuttal to the defense, painting Peters as the engine of a conspiracy that connected national election conspiracy theorists with collaborators in Mesa County.
“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse,” Janet Drake, a deputy attorney general in the Colorado attorney general’s office, told the jury. “It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it, and used her power for her own advantage.”