Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., had tried to prove that the machines had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.
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Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was scolded by the judge for repeatedly advancing false claims about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was sentenced on Thursday to nine years in prison after being found guilty in August of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.
At a hearing in Grand Junction, Colo., Judge Matthew D. Barrett scolded Ms. Peters sternly from the bench, telling her he had imposed the severe penalty because she had repeatedly advanced false claims about Mr. Trump’s defeat and in so doing become a celebrity among those who denied that he lost the race.
“But you are no hero, you abused your position and you are a charlatan,” Judge Barrett said, adding, “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”
The sentence was the first to be handed down against a local election official found liable for security breaches of voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. After Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr., pro-Trump activists across the country sought to gain access to Dominion machines, hoping to prove they had been used in a plot to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.
But all of those efforts failed, and local officials in many cases opened investigations like the one into Ms. Peters.
Before Judge Barrett imposed her sentence, Ms. Peters apologized for the seven criminal charges that a jury found her guilty of but also sought to press her case that Dominion’s machines had been used to cheat Mr. Trump out of a victory.
She then went on a muddled tangent about how the district attorney who had filed the charges against her was somehow implicated in a plot to get her ailing husband to divorce her before Judge Barrett, in a burst of annoyance, cut her off.
“I’m convinced you would do it again if you could,” Judge Barrett told her at one point. “You’re as defiant a defendant as I’ve ever seen.”
At trial, Ms. Peters was convicted of helping an outsider — Conan Hayes, a former professional surfer turned technology wizard — to gain unauthorized access to one of Mesa County’s Dominion machines in May 2021.
Once Mr. Hayes got into the machine, he was able to capture county passwords and sensitive data about Dominion’s proprietary software that showed up three months later at an event questioning the results of the election hosted by Mike Lindell, the founder of the bedding company MyPillow, who is a prolific purveyor of election lies.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. More about Alan Feuer
See more on: Tina Peters, Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, Dominion Voting Systems Corp
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Source: nytimes.com
