August 14, 2024 12:46 PM UTC

Tina Peters Not Going Quietly Into That Good Night

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

After ex-Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ long-anticipated conviction late Monday on 7 of 10 criminal counts against her stemming from her failed attempt to supply evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, Peters announced that evening she would be “taking the day off” to contemplate events, which is something we generally recommend after being found guilty on multiple felony counts:

But as Mediaite reports, newly convicted felon Peters didn’t end up taking her own good advice to stop talking for a day:

Peters was on Steve Bannon’s War Room on Tuesday and did not back down from her claims of election fraud, which have been widely debunked by election audits and failed court challenges.

“It’s hard to predict what they’ll do. I am a big threat to them. And, so the things that were done in this trial that people can go back and watch on Frank Speech (Mike Lindell’s platform) was just atrocious,” Peters raged.

She added, “I mean, we’re going to continue to fight this in the law. And in the meantime, until they either kill me or put me in prison. You know, I’m going to keep speaking out about the injustice, about what’s going on in these big multinational global corporations that are that have these vote flipping software, that is basically, is in Serbia. We’ve already shown that people in my, that I’m accused of influencing, there’s emails between them and Serbia and Serbia Dominion employees.”

We’ll admit that we haven’t kept precise track of the blinkered details of the thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election and Dominion Voting Systems, but it was our understanding that the nefarious foreign actor in the plot was socialist Venezuela, not Serbia. The current iteration of the conspiracy theory Peters is regurgitating doesn’t matter, though, what matters is that Peters is showing absolutely no remorse whatsoever for the crimes she was convicted of Monday afternoon. That lack of remorse, supported though it may be by a whole culture of 2020 election denialists and egged on by the former President himself, could well factor into the sentence Peters will receive in October.

9NEWS’ Marshall Zelinger calculated the sentencing range for the crimes Peters was convicted of between 7.75 and 22.5 years, so we’re talking about a significant portion of Peters’ remaining natural life depending on the prison term she receives. For years as readers know, Peters has been a minor celebrity in the election conspiracy crowd, and a false mythology surrounding her actions–along with pure fiction about what was supposedly found–has been canonized within that movement. These same reality-detached individuals are now encouraging Peters to invite a harsher sentence at no risk to themselves.

Because Peters was not the originator of the false conspiracy theory that motivated her crimes, her conviction leaves in its wake a sense of necessary but incomplete justice delivered. Peters carried out this plot with the help of numerous unindicted co-conspirators, and Peters’ costly but ineffective legal defense was funded by wealthy election deniers like Mike “MyPillow Guy” Lindell and Patrick Byrne who in addition to paying for Peters’ lawyers provided moral support–and encouragement to stay true to the conspiracy theories that commonly motivated them. Since it was someone up the crackpot food chain who released the stolen data to the public precipitating the criminal investigation of Tina Peters, it’s not unreasonable to think these wealthy donors felt some guilt for compromising their source.

The real way to help Peters of course would be for Tina Peters’ allies to persuade her to drop the discredited conspiracy theories she is clinging to in order to justify her actions and show some authentic remorse ahead of her sentencing. Lindell, Byrne, and Donald Trump may lose face, but for Tina Peters it could make the difference between eventual freedom and a de facto life sentence.

If you really care about Tina Peters, that’s not something you should want on your conscience.