October 07, 2024 12:20 PM UTC

Threats From The Right, Relief From Clerks After Tina Peters Goes To Jail

• 2 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

The sentencing last Thursday of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to a total of nine years of orange as the new black for her official misconduct and conspiracy to tamper with election equipment in her custody as part of a half-baked plot directed by nationally-known election deniers to prove the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump has, as could have been expected from the violent threats against the judge and prosecution in the case before the verdict, has resulted in a wave of such threats and heightened security for Mesa County officials. As the Colorado Sun’s Olivia Prentzel reports:

“We are receiving threats and compliments regarding Judge Barrett’s sentencing of Tina Peters,” Will Sightler, court executive for the 21st Judicial District said in a statement Friday afternoon.

“We are currently reviewing and taking appropriate action as necessary.”

Court administrators declined to provide additional details on the threats. The court will be closed Monday for Cabrini Day, a state-recognized holiday.

As Andrew Kiser reports for KREX-TV in Grand Junction, “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell is on full-throated offense after the verdict:

Speaking in an article for the Lindell Offense Fund, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said, “This is one of the biggest injustices this country has ever seen! Tina Peters is a hero, and she will be vindicated! God bless Tina and my prayers are with her!”

On Peters’ X account, a post following the sentencing read, “Today, Tina was strong for you, just like for the past (four years), demonstrating strength and perseverance for your freedom.”

In the same post, Peters maintained that she “faithfully performed her duties” and discovered evidence of election manipulation.

A jury of her peers did not agree…

Former Colorado Sen. Kevin Lundberg, a longtime conspiracy theory generalist who has fully embraced Trump’s undermining of elections he does not win, says Peters is now “Colorado’s Political Prisoner.”

I was shocked when I heard the sentence Tina Peters received this week. I knew the judge had conducted her trial with significant animus and disregard for a fair and unbiased trial, but after his reckless conduct during the trial I didn’t expect him to literally throw the book at her for the sentence. After what I call a show trial and a nine year prison sentence Tina Peters has now become Colorado’s political prisoner. This is a shameful abuse of our judicial system…

I will not relitigate Tina’s prosecution here, but I assure the reader that I have been following Tina’s situation very closely since 2021 and I am convinced she has been in the right since she first became aware of serious potential problems with Colorado’s election systems. The Secretary of State, Mesa County district attorney, Colorado attorney general and I suspect the entire electronic voting industry have been trying to silence her and make her a sacrificial lamb to prop up an election system that has served them well. This is a dark day for Colorado’s judicial system and a bad omen for what we might expect from Colorado’s election system in the next few weeks.

Never mind apparently that the Mesa County DA is a Republican, as were the Mesa County commissioners who asked the judge for a harsh penalty citing the continuing costs of Peters’ actions. We’re never sure how deep we are supposed to assume these conspiracy theories go, but this one is bipartisan enough to leave anyone who accepts it at face value with very few people left they can trust.

As for former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who threatened those involved with Peters’ prosecution with “piano wire and a blowtorch” before her conviction in August? Nothing public yet except meekly-worded hope that Peters’ appeal, which we assume Byrne will continue to fund, will be successful. Likewise, the Colorado Republican Party, who as recently as August claimed that Peters was being “persecuted and prosecuted by a weaponized judicial system” has remained publicly silent since her sentencing.

Meanwhile, Mesa County is being hit with a wave of threats, forced to spend even more money in the aftermath of the county’s most costly civil servant ever. The one upshot to the mess left behind by Tina Peters, says (Republican) Matt Crane of the Colorado County Clerks Association in an interview with Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner, is that the strong sentence handed down in this case will deter future attempts to compromise election security in amateur pursuit of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories:

WARNER: You spoke of the impacts to clerks and clearly to a deterrence as well here. So do you think there’s a deterrent effect?

CRANE: Well, I certainly hope so. I mean, I think that some of that’s to be born out in the future here, but I certainly hope so. I mean, it’s very clear that if you break the law in this way and if you undermine our election systems, and let’s be clear, this wasn’t just a Colorado issue. Tina by letting her voting system image get on the internet, allows bad actors anywhere in the world to look at that voting system image, try to find pathways, a roadmap to be able to do nefarious things, and then if they ever got physical access to these components, they could try to do something nefarious. So it’s not just a Mesa issue or a Colorado issue, it’s a national issue of election security that Tina violated here. So my hope is that with this strong penalty, that it will deter people.

Because Tina Peters’ case is part of the broader MAGA election conspiracy narrative that Trump is currently campaigning on for election to a second term, there are a large number of Republicans who cannot for political reasons respect the judgment of the court–at least not until the election. If Trump loses the November 5th election by a large enough margin that it cannot be reasonably questioned, the whole years-long campaign to baselessly undermine confidence in American elections loses with him.

Otherwise, the days of Tina Peters’ fake martyrdom may not be over.