DENVER – Former Colorado official Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most counts Monday.
Peters, once a hero to election deniers, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system and deceiving others. authorities about that person’s identity.
Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were rigged to steal the election by Donald Trump. Its online streaming site has been showing a live stream of Peters’ trial and sending daily email updates, sometimes asking for prayers for Peters and including statements from her.
Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on election issues after engaging with those who questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The breach Peters was accused of orchestrating heightened concerns about potential insider threats, in which dishonest election workers and supporters of partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.
Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, breach of duty and contempt of office by Secretary of State.
She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and one count of criminal impersonation, all charges related to using the security badge without the owner’s permission.
Peters stood next to one of his lawyers at the defense table as the verdict was read in a silent courtroom. Judge Matthew Barrett warned those in the courtroom that he would not tolerate any outbursts.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whose office helped launch the investigation into Peters, said she will now face consequences for compromising her own election equipment “trying to prove Trump’s Big Lie.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the verdict sent a message.
“Today’s verdict is a warning to others that they will face serious consequences if they attempt to illegally interfere with 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 just hours after prosecutors urged jurors to convict Peters, saying she deceived government officials so she could work with outsiders affiliated with Lindell.
To close judgment arguments, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former employee allowed a man posing as a county employee to take images of the election system’s hard drive before and after a May 2021 software update.
Drake said Peters observed the update so she could become the “hero” and appear at Lindell’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a few months later.
“The defendant was a fox who guarded the henhouse. It was her job to protect election equipment, and she activated it and used its power for her own benefit,” said Drake, an attorney with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
Drake has been working for the district attorney of Mesa County, a predominantly Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Before jurors began deliberating Monday, the defense told them that Peters had committed no crime and only wanted to preserve voter records after the county wouldn’t allow her to have one of her technology experts present at the voter update. software.
Defense lawyer John Case said Peters had to preserve records to access the voting system to find out things like whether someone from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine while ballots were being counted.
“And thank God she did. Otherwise, we wouldn’t really know what happened,” he said.
Peters allowed a former Lindell-affiliated surfer, Conan Hayes, to observe the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of a local man, Gerald Wood, who Peters said worked for her. But while prosecutors say Peters committed identity theft by taking Wood’s security badge and giving it to Hayes to hide his identity, the defense says Wood was involved in the scheme, so Peters committed no crime by doing so.
Wood denied this when he testified during the trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped introduce Peters to people who work with Lindell, testified that Wood knew her identity would be used based on a conversation on Signal between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was made explicit in the chat.
The day after capturing the first image of the hard drive, Bishop testified that he posted a voice recording on the chat. The content of this recording was not included in the screenshots of the chat presented by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to this unknown message saying “I was happy to help. I hope the effort was fruitful,” according to the images.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was untrustworthy.
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