May 25, 2022 12:48 PM UTC

Misinformation, Necessarily Unto The Grave

• 2 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

The Grand Junction Sentinel brings us the latest in the back-and-forth ahead of Republican Secretary of State candidate Tina Peters’ upcoming trial on multiple felony counts related to the breach of Mesa County election computer systems, and subsequent leak of propriety data to conspiracy theorists in a failed attempt to provide evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Last week, readers will recall, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein released results of their due-diligence investigation into the claims by Clerk Peters and her crackpot defenders that such evidence did exist, comprehensively refuting all of her contentions just like every non-crackpot examination of the data always has.

And as the Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reports, that makes Tina Peters very sad:

Peters, who faces multiple felony and misdemeanor charges on allegations that she and others tampered with that equipment, said an investigation done by Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein last week of a third report commissioned by Peters was “shoddy” at best…

“DA Dan Rubinstein’s so-called conclusive report demonstrated there was in fact an entirely new database created internally within the voting machine without consent or knowledge by our elections department,” Peters said in a statement released two days after Rubinstein revealed his findings last week. “By his own words, DA Rubinstein chose not to investigate that extraordinary event.”

That’s because the “extraordinary event” was carried out by one of Peters’ own employees:

Actually, those databases were the central focus of his office’s investigation, which found that they were created when one of Peters’ election manager, Sandra Brown, purposely deleted and re-entered entire batches of ballot images during both elections because of a problem sending them to be adjudicated, a process of bipartisan teams of election judges who review and rule on potential anomalies.

Getting such an essential fact wrong is a signal that Peters is completely disconnected from reality in terms of her actions and the gravity of the criminal case against her–and despite the conclusions of actual experts who have now examined every part of this security breach in painstaking forensic detail, Peters is simply going to repeat the false information she’s been given.

Despite numerous election officials, Rubinstein and Struwe saying that no election files where deleted and the machines were not connected to the internet, Peters continues to profess that is true.

“I was told the trusted build update did not delete election files. That was not true,” Peters said in her statement. “I was told these voting machines could not connect to the internet as prohibited by Colorado state law. That was not true. Those who are in positions of trust should not be pushing out false information on matters that go to the heart of our elections.” [Pols emphasis]

At some level you just have to admire the chutzpah of the defendant at the heart of this case, founded upon the “Big Lie” that Donald Trump should still be President, and reinforced by made-up fairy tales about Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems from a local militia figure now facing a billion-dollar defamation suit, lecturing anyone on this planet about “pushing out false information.” But at this point, short of Trump himself telling Peters he lost fair and square, which is never going to happen, Peters will most likely go to her grave convinced that she was completely justified committing multiple felonies. To concede that any part of the “Big Lie” is false would endanger Peters’ self-image as a martyr to the cause, so it’s just not going to happen.

If anything, Peters’ feigned or pathological obliviousness could actually provoke sympathy from the judge at sentencing time. It’s not a defense so much as…a mitigator? Peters didn’t invent this plot on her own, it was in the service of a political movement determined to only accept the results of elections they win. Peters is accused of crimes willfully committed, but there are others much higher on the political food chain who share responsibility for what she did.

Maybe a felony conviction is what it will take for Peters to realize she’s Trump’s collateral damage.