Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was alleged by a defendant in an election crimes case in Colorado of encouraging her to commit the serious criminal activity of which she’s accused.
Tina Peters, who serves as clerk and recorder in Mesa County, Colorado, where the position means she’s ordinarily tasked with leading the handling of local elections, now stands accused of seven felony criminal offenses after having “arranged to copy sensitive election software from county voting machines in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was rigged,” The New York Times summarizes. Peters claimed to the Times last week that Boebert “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging,” which a press representative for the Congresswoman denies… although Boebert’s team obviously isn’t exactly the most trustworthy on a simply basic level. If Boebert refuses to even get the facts straight about something as well-documented as the 2020 presidential race, what else is she ignorantly or willfully lying about?
Peters has another connection to Boebert. After the 2020 presidential race, the county official got involved with a local group put together by an ex-campaign manager for the Congresswoman that “regularly” assembled to share no doubt nonsensical theories about what really went down during the 2020 presidential election, as the Times explains. Peters’s involvement in that group helped provide the springboard for the eventual copying of elections-related data that’s landed Peters with seven felony charges. Following a visit he made to the local group, Peters invited Douglas Frank, a high school teacher who’s been among those prominently pushing ludicrous theories about the last presidential race, to attend a software update session for elections equipment in Mesa County. Election deniers are suspicious of that process, which they’re apparently under the false impression eliminates key data tied to elections.
Frank didn’t head out to Mesa County to make good on Peters’s invitation, but another individual involved in their circles, former professional surfer Conan Hayes, did attend on May 25, 2021. Hayes attended that software update session — where members of the public aren’t permitted to just stop by — under false pretenses. Hayes wore ID belonging to local information technology consultant Gerald Wood, seemingly leading to some of the criminal allegations against Peters, whose charges include criminal impersonation, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and identity theft. Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com and another of the seemingly random group of fringe-dwelling individuals supporting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, told the Times that Hayes called him while in Mesa County’s elections headquarters. Hayes was “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,” according to the Times recap.
After the original May 2021 breach, Peters appeared onstage at an event put on by MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, where the pillow hawker touted he’d supposedly provide evidence of the kind of systematic fraud Trump believes cost him the election. A series of three reports was also put together chronicling supposed malfeasance in Mesa County. The reports are baseless: two of them falsely characterize the vulnerability of machines used in the electoral process and a third uses issues caused by human error to make more expansive rhetorical gesticulations. The Mesa County District Attorney’s office investigated matters raised by the third report, the Times indicates. All three were put together for Peters’s legal team. Peters is now running for the Republican nomination for the Secretary of State position in Colorado, where she’d be in a position to exert control over the entire state’s electoral process.
Lindell, meanwhile, doesn’t sound like he’s taking recent developments well. Discussing a two-day premiere event planned for a movie that’ll supposedly show fraud evidence (it won’t), he said: “You know what, after those two days, if there’s any politician left in the United States that says there was no election crime, and that they really are in love with those machines, they can sit behind those melted down prison bars made from those machines… We can build a whole big old new prison for all the people that were part of the election crime of 2020!”
