Colorado clerk charged with 10 voting crimes: Lauren Boebert "encouraged me" to breach voting system

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Salon

A Colorado election clerk who was indicted on 10 criminal counts has said that Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., "encouraged" her to commit the alleged crimes.

In a report on Sunday, The New York Times recounted the "strange tale" of Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has fueled right-wing conspiracy theories claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

"Ms. Peters was indicted on 10 criminal counts related to the effort to copy voting equipment software, including attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, identity theft and first-degree official misconduct," the report explained.

On Friday, Peters deflected blame to Boebert, according to the report. She said Boebert "encouraged me to go forward with the imaging" of voting machines. But the lawmaker's spokesperson insisted that Peters' claim was false. Boebert has previously released a statement in support of Peters.

Read more: https://www.salon.com/2022/06/27/colorado-clerk-charged-with-10-voting-lauren-boebert-encouraged-me-to-breach-voting-system_partner/

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This is the woman who was apprehended in a restaurant and frog-marched out.

There was a LBN thread with video here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142866351

Article was also at Raw Story and references a NYT article (all the "under the radar" stuff going on) -

The Strange Tale of Tina Peters



By Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon
Published June 26, 2022 Updated June 27, 2022, 9:44 a.m. ET

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election — game day for vote-counting bureaucrats — Tina Peters was so proud of her operation at the Mesa County clerk’s office that she invited a film crew in to show it off. There’s no chance of mishap here, she boasted. “The Russians can’t hack into and start casting votes for someone,” she said, as a few in the office chuckled. By May 2021, it was Ms. Peters, not the Russians, who had helped engineer an audacious breach of voting machines, according to an indictment charging her with seven felonies. Ms. Peters arranged to copy sensitive election software from county voting machines in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to court records.

Prosecutors said she committed identity theft and criminal impersonation, and violated the duties of her office in the process. Ms. Peters has pleaded not guilty. The strange tale of Tina Peters — a once-ordinary public servant consumed by conspiracy theories and catapulted to minor stardom by believers — will take its next twist on Tuesday, when voters decide whether to make the indicted public official the Republican nominee for secretary of state, the top election official in Colorado. Polls are sparse in the primary race, but Ms. Peters is considered a contender. Ms. Peters did not just stumble into the world of election conspiracy theories.

A review of public statements and interviews with people involved in her case showed she was repeatedly assisted by a loose network of election deniers, some of whom worked alongside Donald J. Trump’s legal team to try to subvert the presidential election in 2020. They are still working to undermine confidence in elections today. That network’s involvement is just one of several bizarre plot points in Ms. Peters’s case. The Mesa County breach involved a former surfer who was dressed as a computer “nerd” and made a FaceTime call during the operation, reporting by The New York Times shows. Afterward, the crew shared their loot — images of voting machine data — at a conference streamed online, advertising the effort to thousands.

On Friday, Ms. Peters told The Times that her congresswoman, Representative Lauren Boebert, “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging.” A press officer for Ms. Boebert, a Republican, called the claim false. Through it all, Ms. Peters has parlayed the episode into a national political profile on the right, speaking at events across the country where she is celebrated as a hero. Influential election deniers have come to her aid: Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who supports a stable of lawyers and researchers promoting bogus theories, says he has funneled as much as $200,000 to Ms. Peters’s legal defense. Others, including Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock executive, have run ads attacking her primary opponent.

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/26/us/politics/tina-peters-election-conspiracy-theories.html

Some background - https://www.npr.org/2022/03/09/1085452644/colorado-clerk-indicted-on-13-counts-of-election-tampering-and-misconduct

The indictments are state charges. I expect that Dominion will be interested in the outcome too.

[C_U_L8R]

1. Let there be evidence

[lefthandedskyhook]

12. Agreed!

"I was just following orders" ...sounds familiar

[Blue Owl]

2. BimBoebert Alert!

[area51]

15. lol n/t

[Freethinker65]

3. Lordy I hope there are emails or records of communications

[IronLionZion]

4. People Are Strange

[TwilightZone]

5. The devil made me do it isn't a legitimate excuse.

That doesn't mean, of course, that Boebert won't face charges separately if there's evidence that she was involved.

[h2ebits]

6. Gena Griswold, Colorado Secretary of State is terrific. We need to re-elect her in November!!

Tina Peters was the first County Clerk and Recorder that Gena Griswold nailed. As time went by, she picked up two other ones.

Thanks for the update on the happenings in Colorado.

[sarcasmo]

7. Felony election tampering, come on down Boebert.

[Marcuse]

8. Further wrongdoing:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the nation’s highest profile peddlers of baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, said Tuesday that he’s donated as much as $800,000 to the legal defense fund of embattled Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.“I probably put in three, four or five, maybe $800,000, of my own money,” Lindell told reporters outside the Colorado Capitol.

Colorado’s Constitution prohibits elected officials from accepting a gift greater than $65, including for travel.

Lindell then called a Colorado Sun reporter, and his questions, “stupid.”
[link:https://coloradosun.com/2022/04/05/mike-lindell-tina-peters-ethics-complaints/|

[BumRushDaShow]

11. LOL

IOKIYAR

[Harker]

9. My friend Al encouraged me to hold up a gas station...

damn that Al.

[Marcuse]

10. A diminished mental capacity defense: "Trump made us do this!"

[YoshidaYui]

13. Charge her too

with Conspiracy...like a mob boss!

[Ford_Prefect]

14. ...And the hits just keep on coming!

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Patrick Byrne (boyfriend of Russian agent Maria Butina) employed the guy Peters gave false ID to

According to charging documents, Peters and her associate Belinda Knisley contacted a guy named Gerry Wood about doing some computer work for the county. They did a complete background check and issued him a badge, but then they took it back and didn't employ him after all. Instead, they deactivated security cameras, gave Wood's badge to someone else, passed the imposter off as a new employee recently transferred from the DMV, and allowed him to both copy data from the voting machines and attend a "trusted build" where Dominion Voting Systems updated the equipment.

The New York Times ran a piece on Peters this weekend, revealing that the imposter was a former surfer being paid by Patrick Byrne, the Overstock Dot Com weirdo who used to bump bits with Russian agent Maria Butina, and spent the past two years flogging lies about rigged elections and trying to get Trump to declare martial law.

Conan Hayes was a former pro surfer who had worked with Mr. Trump’s legal team as it challenged the 2020 results. In 2021, Mr. Byrne paid him around $200,000 to continue his work for a year, according to Mr. Byrne.

According to an account from Mr. Byrne, and confirmed by Mr. Hayes, he attended the trusted build on May 25, 2021. Mr. Hayes called Mr. Byrne from inside the Mesa County election offices, speaking in a hushed voice and explaining that he’d been invited to make backup copies of machines by a government official who thought that a cover-up was underway, Mr. Byrne said. When the two spoke over FaceTime, Mr. Byrne saw Mr. Hayes was dressed like a computer “nerd” and wearing someone else’s identification tag, Mr. Byrne said.

Hayes was also involved in the effort to prove Michigan's election was stolen, by spinning a clerical error in Antrim County into a grand plot to steal the state for Joe Biden. The data Hayes allegedly stole in Colorado proves nothing, but that hasn't stopped Lindell's crew from citing it as proof of shit they already believe for no other reason than that they really, really want it to be true.
...
Gerry Wood -- the guy the badge was supposed to be for -- and Peters both gave interviews to conservative radio host Jimmy Sengenberger, in which they accused each other of lying about the events in question. After Wood testified that he'd been at his kids' graduation party during the "trusted build" with Dominion, Peters said he'd "perjured himself on the stand."

https://www.wonkette.com/colorado-election-clerk-tina-peters-knows-the-election-was-stolen-and-she-don-t-need-no-stinkin-evidence

So, yeah, there's the possibility that Russians are involved in this. Sure, Butina was convicted and deported well before the election, but Byrne was still allowed into the Oval Office, despite the obvious security risk (being dumb, or knowing what he was doing) that he represented. We can't assume that Byrne learned his lesson.

[riversedge]

19. "Instead, they deactivated security cameras, gave Wood's badge to someone else, passed the imposter

Whow. Stupidity at its best.


...........According to charging documents, Peters and her associate Belinda Knisley contacted a guy named Gerry Wood about doing some computer work for the county. They did a complete background check and issued him a badge, but then they took it back and didn't employ him after all. Instead, they deactivated security cameras, gave Wood's badge to someone else, passed the imposter off as a new employee recently transferred from the DMV, and allowed him to both copy data fro

[NullTuples]

17. Just to point out, it was Dominion voting systems again.

As far as I can tell with only few exceptions, that's nearly always the system whose data they're after. And it would seem they're after not only the data candidates are allowed to have, but the other private half as well. Almost like they want to skip over needing Cambridge Analytics and Facebook having to correlate specific individuals and just take the data from the source.

[keithbvadu2]

18. Between T & L, I don't see either one as credible over the other.

Between T & L, I don't see either one as credible over the other.

[niyad]

20. Thank you for this excellent thread.