The FBI searched four homes including those of Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and former Lauren Boebert campaign manager Sherronna Bishop in an early morning raid on Tuesday...
Colorado Politics
Federal, state and local authorities searched the homes of Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and three of her associates on Tuesday as part of an investigation into accusations the elected official was involved in voting machine security breaches, according to an official who helped conduct the searches.
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"We executed four federally court-authorized operations today to gather evidence in connection with the investigation into the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder's Office," District Attorney Dan Rubinstein told Colorado Politics. "We did so with assistance from the DA's office from the 21st Judicial District, the Attorney General’s Office and the FBI."
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"The FBI raided my home at 6 a.m. this morning, accusing me of committing a crime," Peters said on the Lindell channel. "And they raided the homes of my friends, mostly older women. I was terrified."
She added that authorities "used a battering ram," destroying the front door of one of her friends' homes.
Why didn’t your friend just open the fucking door Tina?
The right keeps telling themselves this investigation is proof of some deep state cover up…
Washington Post
“Right now these people who’ve done this are covering their tracks, and they’re doing it in a very quick manner,” Sherronna Bishop, a Peters ally, told fellow activists during a June video conference call in which they discussed pressuring county clerks across the state to delay their software updates. The Post obtained a recording of the call.
In response to a request for an interview, Bishop, a former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), asked for a list of questions to which she then did not respond.
There’s no evidence to support their claims...
NBC11 News
David Levine, Elections Integrity Fellow with the nonpartisan German-Marshall Fund, is responding to allegations raised by Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters (R) concerning the integrity of the 2020 election in Mesa Co.
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Levine is saying there is no evidence that there are any discrepancies with 2020 election results in the county, and that the results can be trusted. He argued that, “Is there anything to suggest that the voting equipment had any issues which would have led to ballots being cast and tabulated in a different manner than votes were intended to be cast? And again I don’t see anything in the report that shows that.”
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21st Judicial District Court Judge Valerie J. Robison did find that Peters and Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley acted improperly in a civil case related to investigations into the Clerk and Recorders office. Investigations being conducted by 21st Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein (R) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the matter are ongoing.
Clerk Peters is also facing a legal action related to allegedly taking campaign donations above allowable limits and not officially declaring her 2022 candidacy, among other charges. The Colo. Attorney General’s Office is serving as the Sec. of State’s counsel in that lawsuit.
It’s just more projection and deflection...
The Daily Sentinel
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and two others entered a secure area of the Election Division in the dark of night days before a scheduled upgrade of the system in May and made two copies of a main computer hard drive in violation of security protocols, the Secretary of State’s Office announced Monday.
Peters, the mysterious Gerald Wood, and a high-ranking Election Division staff worker whose name is not being revealed by The Daily Sentinel at this time, entered that secure area late at night on Sunday, May 23, when no one else was in the office, the Secretary of State’s Office says.
While there, the three allegedly made copies of the hard drive, including copies of election management software. That information later was displayed at a voter-fraud symposium hosted by the My Pillow guy Mike Lindell in South Dakota last week in an attempt to prove that Dominion Voting Systems election equipment can be hacked or tampered with.
So, who is Gerald Wood?
Washington Post
A Gerald Wood who lives near Grand Junction also did not respond to several messages left on his home phone. Investigators have not disclosed whether they believe Wood is the person who accessed the elections offices. His Facebook account shows he has liked one page: Bishop’s.
The U.S. Election Integrity Plan, a group that has served as a key engine for election-fraud claims in Colorado, posted online copies of what it said were court documents related to the investigation. The records detailed a search during that same period of the home near Grand Junction where Gerald Wood lives. Investigators seized cellphones and other electronics, according to the document.
In a statement to The Post, the district attorney’s office said: “We suspect the document you saw online is of the search warrant inventory but cannot confirm its authenticity as the case is sealed.”
Inquiring minds want to know...
Left Coast Right Watch
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters went into a secure room with a currently unknown man who took photos and video of voting machine passwords. Peters then handed the information to conspiracy theory promoter and former 8Chan/8Kun operator Ron Watkins. Watkins used video of the machines to promote Trump’s claims the 2020 election was stolen from him. He claimed the video showed a “whistleblower” from Dominion Voting Systems talking to another Dominion employee talking about how to remotely access the machines. But audio analysis of the video appears to show it’s actually Watkins and Peters talking on camera, which would mean Watkins participated in the breach of the voting machines.
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...An anonymous source who claims to be an audio engineer sent LCRW audio and video files and an analysis of the source files. His analysis concludes that the people talking in Watkins’s “leaked” video are in fact Watkins himself and Peters with their voices pitch-shifted.
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Will Smith, an independent mastering engineer trained at Grammy Award-winning studio Masterdisk, who’s previously worked with the likes of Orville Peck and Shabazz Palaces, analyzed the audio for LCRW in order to assess the anonymous source’s findings. The anonymous source analyzed the audio through the free open-source audio editing program Audacity, which Smith said “has very crude pitch algorithms” and therefore isn’t ideal for this kind of analysis. Smith used Izotope RX7 Editor instead for his own analysis.
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“I can confirm the conclusions of your engineer. Watkins is harder to identify but it appears to be the same person to my ears and visually in my analysis software,” Smith concluded.
Watkins is currently running for Congress in Arizona...
CBS News
Ron Watkins, long-suspected of being "Q", the mysterious figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory and one of the leading purveyors of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump, announced his candidacy for Congress in Arizona this week.
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Arizona's 1st Congressional District includes parts of Maricopa County, which was critical to President Biden's slim victory in the state. Afterward, supporters of Mr. Trump made baseless claims about election fraud, which were disproven by subsequent audits. The county was also the site of a controversial GOP state Senate-ordered 2020 ballot review that was widely criticized for its handling of the ballots and voting equipment and general lack of expertise in election audits.
Watkins is a newcomer to the district he hopes to represent — he told CBS News that he moved to Arizona in the last three weeks.
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Watkins has announced his support for other Republicans running for office in Arizona, recently meeting with Trump-endorsed Kari Lake, a former news anchor now campaigning for Arizona governor.
Likely getting his new door kicked in next...
Denver Post
An ethics complaint about Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters can move forward, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission ruled Tuesday.
Mesa County activist and politics blogger Anne Landman filed the grievance about Peters, alleging that the Republican clerk violated the state constitution by soliciting and accepting gifts over the $50 annual limit, including from Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and 2020 election conspiracy theorist.
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The actions of Peter and others in her office, including Deputy Director Belinda Knisley — who is on leave and facing criminal charges in another case — are under investigation by state and federal authorities in connection to a potential election security breach. A lawsuit from the secretary of state’s office in August resulted in a judge barring Peters and Knisley from overseeing the Nov. 2 election in Mesa County, but the case is ongoing after counterclaims that Peters and her team filed. The secretary of state’s office filed a second lawsuit against Peters this month related to alleged campaign finance and contribution violations.
See y’all in court...