Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, has been discovered responsible in a breach of her county’s election pc system in a jury verdict returned Monday at trial.
Peters was accused of utilizing another person’s safety badge to provide an skilled affiliated with My Pillow chief government Mike Lindell entry to the Mesa county election system. Prosecutors stated she was in search of fame and have become “fixated” on voting issues after turning into concerned with those that had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election outcomes.
The case marked the primary prosecution of an area election official over a suspected safety breach amid the conspiracy theories that swirled across the 2020 election. It heightened issues over potential insider threats, during which rogue election staff sympathetic to partisan lies might use their entry and data to launch an assault from inside.
In closing arguments at Peters’ trial, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the previous clerk allowed a person posing as a county worker to take photos of the election system’s onerous drive earlier than and after a software program improve in Could 2021.
Drake stated Peters noticed the replace so she might develop into the “hero” and seem at Lindell’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a couple of months later. Lindell is a outstanding promoter of false claims that voting machines had been manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump.
“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to guard the election tools, and she or he turned on it and used her energy for her personal benefit,” stated Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado lawyer normal’s Workplace.
Drake has been working for the district lawyer in Mesa county, a largely Republican county close to the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Earlier than jurors started deliberations, the protection informed them that Peters had not dedicated any crimes and solely needed to protect election information after the county wouldn’t permit her to have certainly one of its know-how consultants current on the software program replace.
Protection lawyer John Case stated Peters needed to protect information to entry the voting system to search out out issues like whether or not anybody from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine whereas ballots had been being counted.
“And thank God she did. In any other case we actually wouldn’t know what occurred,” he stated.
Peters allowed a former surfer affiliated with Lindell, Conan Hayes, to look at the software program replace and make copies of the onerous drive utilizing the safety badge of an area man, Gerald Wooden, who Peters stated labored for her. However whereas prosecutors say Peters dedicated id theft by taking Wooden’s safety badge and giving it to Hayes to hide his id, the protection says Wooden was in on the scheme so Peters didn’t commit against the law by doing that.
Wooden denied that when he testified in the course of the trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped introduce Peters to folks working with Lindell, testified that Wooden knew his id could be used primarily based on a Sign chat between her, Wooden and Peters. No settlement was spelled out within the chat.
The day after the primary picture of the onerous drive was taken, Bishop testified that she posted a voice recording within the chat. The content material of that recording was not included in screenshots of the chat launched by the protection. The particular person recognized as Wooden responded to that unknown message by saying: “I used to be glad to assist out. I do hope the hassle proved fruitful,” in keeping with the screenshots.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro informed jurors that Bishop was not credible.
Peters is charged with three counts of making an attempt to affect a public servant, felony impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit felony impersonation, one rely of id theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of obligation and failing to adjust to the secretary of state.
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