Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Colorado Public Radio reports:
Twelve Mesa County jurors found Tina Peters guilty of four felonies on Monday after a lengthy criminal trial, marking yet another conviction tied to post-2020 election conspiracy theories.
Peters faced a total of 10 criminal charges related to her role in helping a man gain unauthorized access to voting equipment during a secure software update in May 2021. The county’s voting machine’s passwords and copies of its hard drive were later posted online by people trying to undermine the validity of the election system.
The jury deliberated for around four and a half hours Monday afternoon before reaching their decision, which was read out to a packed courtroom just after 5 p.m.
The New York Times reports:
The conviction of Ms. Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Mr. Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Mr. Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.
After 2020, pro-Trump activists in cities across the country sought to gain access to Dominion voting machines, hoping to prove that they had been used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. All of those efforts failed, and local officials have in many cases opened investigations. More recently, concerns have been raised that officials loyal to Mr. Trump could seek to tamper with the results of the 2024 election.
The Washington Examiner reports:
Evidence offered by the prosecution included Peters telling staff members to purchase disposable phones with cash and to use the encrypted texting platform Signal, as well as a non-county email address.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro reminded jurors how Bishop, while attending a “cyber security” symposium in South Dakota in August 2021, around the time that AG Jena Griswold launched her investigation into the elections security breach, called Peters’ then-Chief Deputy Belinda Knisley in Grand Junction asking her to go to the elections office and remove the election computer server. Knisley refused.
When Peters learned election system data and passwords had been posted to an online conspiracy site, she repeatedly told Knisley “I’m f**ked, I’m going to jail,” Shapiro said. “Does that sound like someone who is doing right, doing something noble?” Shapiro said to the jurors.
Peters ran to jailbird Steve Bannon’s show today, where she said “until they either kill me or put me in prison, I’m going to keep speaking out.”
Mike Lindell associate and former CO elections official Tina Peters, who was convicted yesterday, says her trial was rigged by the Deep State because she wasn’t allowed to present evidence that people in Serbia rigged our 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/J0cd33Kd9l
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 13, 2024