September 17, 2021 08:47 AM UTC

Clerk Tina Peters Comes Home--Perp Walk Countdown Begins?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Tom Hesse reports–embattled Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has been in hiding since mid-August as a criminal investigation began into the breach of election system security in her office that resulted in proprietary Dominion Voting Systems data being leaked to far-right conspiracy theorists, made a triumphant (at least for now) return to Grand Junction last night at an event in her honor:

“I’m so happy to be home. This is where my heart is and this is where we’re going to take back America,” Peters told a crowd gathered at Appleton Christian Church.

The event, which was livestreamed on the Stand For The Constitution Grand Junction Facebook Page, was billed as a “Stand With Tina” rally and featured a handful of speakers. It was Peters’ first public appearance in Grand Junction after an investigation into her office was announced in August.

“It’s places like Mesa County that can be the catalyst to take back our country. And we need your help,” Peters told the crowd. “And it starts today.”

That’s pretty close to what Clerk Peters’ benefactor over the last month, “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell, said at the beginning of his so-called “Cyber Symposium” last month devoted to exposing once and for all the “absolute proof” that the 2020 elections were stolen from Donald Trump. They’re going to “take back our country” with…revelations of vote fraud…

That never materialized.

Here we arrive at the disconnect. Not even Peters’ closest supporters, like Rep. Ron Hanks who was present last night in Grand Junction or Lauren Boebert’s former campaign manager Sherronna Bishop, can substantiate any specific allegation of fraud based on the data that was stolen in Mesa County on Clerk Peters’ watch. They tried. And when they couldn’t find any proof, Bishop marched into the all-GOP Mesa County Board of Commissioners to demand they find it.

Keep this in mind as Clerk Peters publicly confesses to the crime she’s under investigation for:

Peters said after the 2020 election, she received calls and emails from hundreds of residents who believed the election was illegitimate, and she began investigating those claims on their behalf. [Pols emphasis]

Peters and her deputy, Belinda Knisley, are both the subject of local, state and federal investigations into possible criminal violations that involved revealing secure passwords and hard drives to Dominion voting machines with voter fraud conspiracy theorists. As a result, both also have been temporarily prohibited from conducting this fall’s elections and Secretary of State Jena Griswold is taking action to have Peters removed from election duties…

Again, this is Clerk Tina Peters freely admitting at least some involvement in the theft of this data as part of her “investigation” of concerns expressed about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections. The security of the compromised voting machines in question was Peters’ responsibility. The only way this becomes in some way justifiable, and even then not really since there are official channels to investigate non-fantasy problems, would be if there was actually some game-changing proof in the stolen data to substantiate the “Big Lie” as alleged by dead-end supporters of Donald Trump. But as we know now, that doesn’t exist. The only “security risk” that emerged from this breach of security is the one Clerk Peters created.

As surely as the “QAnon Shaman” had to face the music, there’s a day of reckoning coming in Clerk Tina Peters’ case too. All of this nonsense stops cold once this moves to a criminal courtroom. The criminal justice system has a remarkable way of cutting through unfounded bullshit, as hundreds of January 6th insurrectionists are discovering in federal courtrooms as we write this.

Let Clerk Peters explain the plan to “take back America” to a judge.