DENVER (AP) — Prosecutors asked jurors Monday to convict former Colorado clerk Tina Peters of a security breach in her county election computer system, arguing that she deceived government employees to gain notoriety by working with outsiders close to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the country’s most well-known election conspiracy theorists.
In her closing argument in Tina Peters’ trial, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed a man disguised as a county employee to take pictures of the voting system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.
Drake said Peters watched the update so she could become a “hero” and appear at Lindell’s 2020 presidential election symposium a few months later. Lindell is a prominent proponent of false claims that voting machines were rigged to steal the election from Donald Trump.
“The defendant was like a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she went against that and abused her power for her own benefit,” said Drake, an attorney with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
Drake worked with the district attorney of Mesa County, a predominantly Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Before jurors began deliberating, the defense told them that Peters had committed no crime and was simply trying to secure the election records after the county refused to allow her to have one of its technology experts present during the software update.
Defense attorney John Case said Peters was required to keep records of access to the voting system, for example to find out whether someone from “China or Canada” accessed the machine during vote counting.
“And thank God she did. Otherwise we really wouldn’t know what happened,” he said.
Peters allowed a former surfer associated with Lindell, Conan Hayes, to observe the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of a local man named Gerald Wood, who Peters said worked for her. However, while the prosecution claims Peters committed identity theft by taking Wood’s security badge and giving it to Hayes to conceal his identity, the defense says Wood was in on the plot, so Peters did not commit a crime.
Wood denied this when he testified during the trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who introduced Peters to people working with Lindell, testified that Wood knew his identity would be used because of a Signal chat between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was made in the chat.
The day after the first image of the hard drive was taken, Bishop testified that she posted a voice recording in the chat. The contents of that recording were not included in the screenshots of the chat presented by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to that unknown message by saying, “I was happy to help. I really hope the effort proved fruitful,” according to the screenshots.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was not credible.
Peters is charged with three counts of attempted interference with a public official, identity fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit identity fraud, identity theft, first-degree abuse of office, dereliction of duty and failure to cooperate with the Secretary of State.
Peters’ case was the first in the 2020 conspiracy theories to charge a local election official with an alleged election systems security breach. It heightened concerns nationwide about the potential for insider threats, in which rogue poll workers interested in lying about the 2020 election could use their access to voting machines and knowledge gained from the security breaches to launch an attack from within.
Colleen Slevin, Associated Press
