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August 08, 2024 12:08 PM UTC

Ex-Mesa County Elections Manager Further Devastates Tina Peters' Defense

  • 1 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Former Mesa County elections manager Sandra Brown.

As Colorado Public Radio reports, following up the testimony of former Mesa County deputy clerk Belinda Knisley against indicted ex-Clerk Tina Peters in her trial on felony identity theft and official misconduct charges, another former subordinate of Peters’ who like Knisley took a plea bargain for reduced charges in exchange for testifying against her former boss, Sandra Brown, took the stand to further elaborate on the details of Peters’ criminal plot to allow an unauthorized person access to Dominion Voting Systems equipment, as well as Peters’ incriminating reaction when she realized that the proprietary data and secure passwords she had allowed to be copied were posted online by Peters’ so-called friends in the QAnon conspiracy world:

Brown is the first county staffer to testify about what exactly happened during a secure software update of the county’s voting machines in 2021. Months later, pictures taken secretly during that process were posted online, setting off a years-long investigation. Brown was in the room for the update, and in the clerk’s office two days earlier when someone not employed by the clerk’s office copied the machines’ hard drives…

Prosecutors are building the case that the man Brown met was actually Conan Hayes, a self-described data expert from California who they say gained access to county equipment with Peters’ help and while using Wood’s stolen identity.

Peters “lied to me,” Brown told the court… [Pols emphasis]

Sandra Brown testified that by this time, she already had suspicions that the man using the county-issued ID badge assigned to “Gerald Wood” was not the right man. And when “Gerald” opted to do something Brown knew was wrong, it made her uncomfortable–though not enough to sound the alarm, which is part of why Brown drew criminal charges of her own:

Brown said when the man went to his car to get an external harddrive and a device to connect to the machine and capture an image, she started to get a little “leery” about what was happening.

“Because I knew that by doing that, he was breaking our contract with Dominion Voting Systems. If everything’s not followed to a T and you plug foreign stuff into the server, it voids the trusted build and breaks the contract on the equipment,” she explained.

Brown also corroborated the testimony from Belinda Knisley that Peters’ friend, far-right political activist, and unindicted co-conspirator in the case Sherronna Bishop, who had no formal role with the Mesa County Clerk’s office, “ordered” them to remove a Dominion Voting Systems server computer before it could be inspected by law enforcement. Knisley and Brown both refused to do so, likely sparing themselves additional criminal charges:

Peters’ then deputy Belinda Knisley was in the room with Brown, listening to the call with Bishop on speaker phone.

“I muted the phone and I told her, ‘you’re not touching that stuff. If you do, you’re going to catch a felony,’” Brown recalled. [Pols emphasis]

Along with Knisley’s testimony, Sandra Brown has demonstrated that all of the conspirators in this plot were fully aware that what they were doing was illegal, and the elaborate subterfuge by which a false ID was issued to an unvetted outside person who proceeded to steal data from these machines while the security cameras were literally turned off in the secure area the voting equipment was stored in cannot be excused as a “whistle-blowing” exercise. Although Peters was operating based on a misguided assumption that she didn’t herself invent, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, her willingness to facilitate this hare-brained scheme involving identity theft, which failed to provide any evidence to support her motivation, is why official misconduct laws exist.

Did Peters get burned by conspiracy theorists who apparently promised her the stolen data would be kept under wraps? Possibly. The last thing we would ever do is put our reputation and quite possibly freedom in such hands.

But officials take oaths, and are therefore necessarily the ones who take the fall.

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One thought on “Ex-Mesa County Elections Manager Further Devastates Tina Peters’ Defense”

  1. I see two classes in how they knew the criminality but… trump, and the other:

    you’re going to catch a felony

    A bunch of sweet Kids in The Hall looking Aunt nutzies talking like they are on HBO’s The Wire. They clearly were able to discern that there was no evidence and the action was criminal given the information. There had to be a relationship with Tina Peters and its sad that it was abused in this. Thankfully they didn’t have a problem drawing a line regarding Ms Bishop’s order.

    I believe that Tina Peters and Sherronna Bishop knowingly coordinated in an effort to propagate false narratives. Otherwise the response at a number of these junctures would have been “so what if we have committed a crime the evidence or chance to unearth this is enough to go to the FBI right now”. They continued to pursue extra-legal paths which only soiled the evidence if they believed it to exist. Rather I believe it was a game to continue a false narrative that could be used in propaganda.

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