Tina Peters, former Mesa County, Colo., clerk, listens during her trial, March 3, 2023, in Grand Junction, Colo.
AP —
Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters has been found guilty by a jury on most charges in a breach of her county’s election computer system.
Peters 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. Prosecutors said she was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The case marked the first prosecution of a local election official over a suspected security breach amid the conspiracy theories that swirled around the 2020 election. It heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to 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, violation of duty and failing to comply with the 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.
The acquittal on the identity theft charge suggests jurors were influenced by the defense argument that Peters used the security badge with the consent of its owner.
Peters stood next to one of her attorneys at the defense table as the verdict was read in a quiet courtroom. Judge Matthew Barrett had warned those in the courtroom that he would not tolerate any outbursts.
The verdict came just hours after prosecutors urged jurors to convict Peters, saying she deceived government employees so she could work with outsiders affiliated with Lindell, one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.
In closing trial arguments, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed a man posing as a county employee to take images of the election system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.
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. Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump.
“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage,” said Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
Drake has been working for the district attorney in Mesa County, a largely Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Before jurors began deliberating Monday, the defense told them that Peters had not committed any crimes and only wanted to preserve election records after the county would not allow her to have one of its technology experts present at the software update.
Defense lawyer John Case said Peters had to preserve records to access the voting system to find out things like whether anyone from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine while ballots were being counted.
“And thank God she did. Otherwise we really wouldn’t know what happened,” he said.
Peters allowed a former surfer affiliated with Lindell, 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 conceal his identity, the defense says Wood was in on the scheme so Peters did not commit a crime by doing that.
Wood denied that when he testified during the trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped introduce Peters to people working with Lindell, testified that Wood knew his identity would be used based on a Signal chat between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was spelled out in the chat.
The day after the first image of the hard drive was taken, Bishop testified that she posted a voice recording in the chat. The content of that recording was not included in screenshots of the chat introduced by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to that unknown message by saying “I was glad to help out. I do hope the effort proved fruitful,” according to the screenshots.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was not credible.
