July 30, 2024 10:24 AM UTC

Overstock.com Guy Makes Gruesome Threats Against Tina Peters' Prosecutor

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Washington Post reported Friday evening and 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark took note of last night (video above), an ally of indicted ex-Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, whose trial in Mesa County on multiple felony charges stemming from the unauthorized access to voting equipment she allegedly allowed in a failed attempt to obtain evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump begins this week, overtly threatened prosecutors in the case with physical violence in the form of (pardon us) “a piano wire and a blowtorch” if the case against Peters isn’t dropped:

Patrick Byrne, who has funded efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election, said in an online forum Thursday that law enforcement would face “a piano wire and a blowtorch” if they did not drop a case against an ally…

“If you have any brains at all, which I’m not sure they do, they should be throwing in the towel and just surrendering and dropping this case against Tina because those who don’t are going to end up facing a piano wire and a blowtorch before this is over if I have anything to do with it,” [Pols emphasis] Byrne said. “So I know that’s probably another felony, but f— it — threatening them like that — but there we are.”

So, the first thing to note here as we have many times is that the prosecutor, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, is a Republican with absolutely no political motive whatsoever in bringing this case. Even Rep. Lauren Boebert, a once but now decidedly former friend of Tina Peters, has vouched for the integrity of Rubinstein’s handling of the case against Peters. In deep-red conservative Mesa County, it is fellow Republican elected officials who have suffered the most attempting to manage the circus Peters and her allies created, subjected to threats of their own by constituents enraged that they weren’t “standing with” Peters. The reality, of course, is that those officials understood the allegations against Peters well enough to know better.

The MAGA world’s sympathetic view of Peters as a “whistleblower” has been on a collision course with her criminal prosecution for the whole time that Peters has employed every conceivable delay tactic to forestall her day in court. During that time, Peters became a small-time celebrity in the MAGA election conspiracy theory crowd, with trips to Mar-a-Lago and as many related conferences as the court would allow. In a community where everyone believes that the 2020 election was stolen and works backward from there, and where unqualified crackpots are given the same respect as actual experts, Peters’ actions are considered heroic even though no evidence to support the Dominion Voting Systems conspiracy theory emerged from the data she allegedly allowed to be stolen.

And that is how a Republican prosecutor gets threatened with “a piano wire and a blowtorch” by a fellow Republican.

In the hours following this Thursday interview, it appears that somebody explained to Byrne that he may have made a legally actionable threat against a public official. After which the backpedaling began:

Got that? When Patrick Byrne says that prosecutors “are going to end up facing a piano wire and a blowtorch before this is over if I have anything to do with it,” he doesn’t mean a literal piano wire and a literal blowtorch. It’s just a “colorful phrase!” Then in the very next Tweet Byrne issues another coded threat of violence.

This morning, Byrne appears to be doubling down on his attacks on Mesa County DA Rubinstein:

Here in Colorado, we’re unfortunately well accustomed to far-right talking heads toeing right up to the line of criminally threatening public officials, carefully phrasing their unambiguous death threats to ensure they don’t completely cross it. Fellow election conspiracy theorist Joe Oltmann has repeatedly threatened to hang Colorado public officials including Gov. Jared Polis, though without enough specifics to the threat to make it a crime.

So where does Byrne’s threat to break out the piano wire and a blowtorch on the Republican prosecuting Tina Peters land on that scale?

Before today’s combustible political environment, the phrases Byrne used might have prompted outreach by authorities to advise against using such language, said Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush. These days, state and federal officials tend to take such talk more seriously. Byrne’s language, he said, “sounds not only like a threat but a confession and an acknowledgment that it could be a felony to make such a threat.” [Pols emphasis]

…Byrne’s repeated references to the Peters trial — and the prosecutors involved in it — are important aspects of his overall comments, said Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California who was also appointed by Bush.

“Because he references a specific trial and he’s talking about the people who are bringing the case, that should be very troubling to law enforcement,” she said. Even if he said he was speaking metaphorically, she added, “What does that matter if someone went out and bought piano wire at his suggestion?”

At this point, we have to consider the possibility that unhinged people like Patrick Byrne are the reason that Tina Peters has refused to discuss a plea agreement despite the damning case against her and her subordinates lined up to testify against her. It’s difficult to imagine anyone willing to make these grossly irresponsible threats against fellow Republicans giving Peters good legal advice. Even Donald Trump lacks the power to pardon Peters on these state charges.

We can’t tell you what Peters’ strategy is now that the trial she spent years kicking down the road is finally happening.

We can only hope that it doesn’t actually involve piano wire and a blowtorch.