Donald Trump was right, that there was fraud in the 2020 election. That the fraud was committed by one of his most vocal election-denying supporters, Tina Peters, the now-former county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, is the funny part to this story.
Peters was handed a nine-year prison sentence on Thursday, and got a scolding from the presiding judge, Matthew D. Barrett, who told Peters from the bench that “you are no hero, you abused your position, and you are a charlatan,” with the judge adding: “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”
Peters, convicted on seven felony election-tampering counts by a jury in August, had sought a sentence of just probation, with no jail time, but she didn’t help her case at her sentencing hearing, using her time in court to relitigate her claims that Dominion voting machines had been used to cheat Trump out of a victory.
Peters was indicted in 2022 on charges that she had helped a former professional surfer-turned-technology guru Conan Hayes, an affiliate of election-denier Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s voting machines in 2021.
Hayes used the breach to get access to proprietary software from Dominion that was later used by Lindell and by QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins to try to advance their debunked election-fraud claims.
The prosecutor who handled the Peters case, Daniel Rubenstein, said in court on Thursday that Peters “has demonstrated repeatedly that she does not think she did anything wrong.”
“She submitted a statement to the court in the pre-sentence investigation report, giving excuses, giving justifications, but never once acknowledging that she did something wrong, that this was not the way to handle this,” Rubenstein said.
“What does every 12-step program start with? It starts with acknowledging you have a problem, and she has not done that, and there’s no purpose in rehabilitation for somebody who does not think they did anything wrong,” Rubenstein said.
As Peters tried in court to explain her continued objections to the conduct of the 2020 election, Barrett, the judge, cut her off, telling her, “You’re as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen.”
The nine-year sentence for Peters is the first for a local election official related to the efforts of Trump supporters to gain illegal access to voting machines in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Peters was indicted in March 2022, but, undaunted, she ran for the Republican nomination for secretary of state in Colorado that spring, coming in second in a three-way race, and of course, upon losing, she accused voting officials of election fraud, raising $256,000 for a manual recount that netted her an additional 13 votes, but did not change the results.
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Chris Graham
