A man who was convicted of pointing a gun at Burger King drive-thru worker who wouldn’t accept drugs for payment and later shooting at other people elsewhere the same night has been sentenced to 143 years in prison.

Prosecutors who announced the sentence Thursday said the drive-thru incident was the beginning of a series of crimes Eugene Robertson carried out in the Denver suburb of Aurora on Oct. 17, 2022. No one was wounded.

In April, a jury found Robertson guilty of 17 crimes, including eight counts of attempted murder. The sentences for many of the crimes were stacked on top of each other, leading to a long sentence. Robertson had faced a maximum sentence of more than 400 years when he was sentenced Aug. 9.

“I hope this century-long prison sentence serves as a warning that my prosecutors and I will not tolerate violent crime in our community,” 18th Judicial District Attorney John Kellner said in a statement.

After Robertson pointed the gun at the drive-thru worker, prosecutors said he walked into a convenience store across the street and pointed a gun at the head of a clerk. When Robertson saw there was a surveillance video camera system there, he shot at the screen and left, then shot toward two people outside in the parking lot, Kellner’s office said.

The Sentinel Colorado in Aurora previously reported that a witness at the convenience store store told police there seemed to be “something off” about Robertson and that he was “talking about God” and carrying a Bible with a purple cover.

Later that night, a woman who was friends with Robertson called 911 to report that he had fired shots after she refused to open the door of her apartment, where she was with several people, prosecutors said.

Police spotted Robertson at the woman’s apartment complex. He hid behind some bushes before being arrested, prosecutors said.

LOVELAND — A Colorado man has been charged with strangulation and child abuse after allegedly grabbing a teen by the neck and throwing him on the floor of an In-N-Out Burger as the teen was apologizing for splashing water on a woman.

The 55-year-old Loveland man surrendered to police on Tuesday, the day a warrant was issued for his arrest, police said. His bail was set at $75,000 and his next court appearance is Aug. 23, court records said.

He has not yet entered a plea.

Officers were called to the restaurant in Loveland at about 1 a.m. on Aug. 4. A 15-year-old boy told officers he and two friends were splashing water on one another when a woman was accidentally splashed.

The teen approached her table to apologize when the man assaulted him, police said.

The man and woman had left the restaurant by the time officers arrived.

Officers reviewed videos of the incident and witnesses identified the suspect, police said.

GRAND JUNCTION — A jury has found Tina Peters guilty of seven of 10 counts related to a 2021 breach of the Mesa County election system. 

Twenty-first Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett read the verdicts at 5:15 p.m. Monday, after the jury had deliberated for roughly four hours. At least four Mesa County sheriff’s deputies were inside the courtroom to maintain order, and another four were in the hallway.

Peters, 68, was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public official; conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation; official misconduct; violation of duty; and failure to comply with an order of the Secretary of State.

The jury acquitted Peters of three counts: conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, criminal impersonation and identity theft.

Her sentencing is set for Oct. 3 at 9:30 a.m. She is eligible for probation but could face a lengthy prison sentence.

She faces up to six years in prison on each of her top three felony convictions, and up to 18 months for conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. Each of her three misdemeanor convictions carries up to 6 months in jail.

Peters, who had no visible reaction to the verdict, was not taken into custody Monday. Instead, the judge directed her to report to the county probation office by noon Tuesday. She left the courtroom flanked by grim-faced supporters, who pushed their way through a crowd as they made their exit.

The verdict capped a trial that started July 30 with jury selection and spanned eight days of testimony. Attorneys for Peters argued she was only following her duties as clerk. Her defense made frequent references to unproven election conspiracies that drove Peters and her accomplices.

The allegations turned Peters into an icon among election conspiracy theorists, embraced by national figures including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who told The Colorado Sun in April 2022 that he contributed up to $800,000 of his personal wealth toward her legal defense.

Jurors were forced to choose between clashing portraits of Peters, with prosecutors portraying her as a conniving, law-breaking, publicity-seeking conspiracy monger who jeopardized Colorado’s voting system. To the defense, she was a dedicated public servant who was only trying to protect sensitive election information for her constituents — until she was steamrolled by a vindictive big government juggernaut.

Trial was not about election fraud, judge’s rulings insisted

The trial was a display of contentious disagreements, loaded with objections and filled with judicial admonishments — most of them directed at Peters’ team of four attorneys.

For a trial that was not about election fraud, that topic continually came up, most blatantly in the closing argument presented by defense attorney John Case.

Case began his summation with a large photo of Peters projected on a screen. Beside her, was a photo of her Navy Seal son who died in a parachuting accident during an air show in 2017.

Case described Peters as a mother who was “forced to find a new purpose in life” after her son died. That purpose, he said, was to become the clerk and recorder for her county.

He said Peters has been targeted because of her selfless attempt to help her constituents and in the process, to protect a purported cyber expert she brought in through subterfuge to access her system. 

“The government has charged Tina Peters for 10 crimes. Wow! Why?” Case pointedly asked the jurors after defending her secretive actions and outlining what the defense views as lies from those who testified against Peters.

Robert Shapiro, an attorney for the Colorado Attorney General’s office, who assisted the 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office in the prosecution of Peters, described the former clerk as a lawbreaker who devised a scheme to breach her county’s election system with “layer upon layer of deceit.”

He, too, had a photo of Peters from 2021 projected on the screen, but it was a vastly different image from the carefully coiffed and heavily made-up defendant in the courtroom.

Shapiro said Peters’ defense that she was trying to look into voting irregularities and to preserve confidential information from her voting equipment is not defensible.

“She is not conducting an investigation,” he said about her actions surrounding the breach of Mesa County’s equipment in the spring of 2021. “She is opening up her system to outsiders.”

The vision of innocent whistleblower versus criminal conspiracist, clashed most starkly on the prosecution’s detailing of Peters’ actions related to bringing in an outside person in to secretly access the system.

Prosecutors reminded the jurors that Peters had surveillance cameras turned off in the secure tabulation room before she brought in a former pro surfer named Conan Hayes to copy information from the hard drives on that system. She used an encrypted messaging system with her small band of co-conspirators. She had some of those conspirators start using burner phones so their conversations could not be monitored by law enforcement. She bragged about having a “hidey hole” in her house where she placed a phone that was initially overlooked by law officers who searched her house.

“She was not protecting the election integrity,” Janet Drake, another attorney from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, said in her rebuttal of the defense’s closing arguments. “The defendant was the fox guarding the henhouse. She used her power for her own advantage.”

The prosecution briefly projected a picture of a snarling fox to illustrate that view of Peters.

“Simple” trial with deep roots and national tendrils

Her case, Judge Barrett said many times during the trial, “should be simple.”

The charges against Peters didn’t rise near the level of the murders and abuse cases heard at other times in the same courtroom.

But the specter of election-fraud hiding in the wings of Peters’ trial, turned it into a matter of head-spinning, convoluted, tangled matters that continually crept into the case via the defense attorneys who were attempting to use the trial to prove election fraud to the country.

On any given day of the trial the sheer number of bench conferences, objections, overrulings and sustained arguments ate up as much time in court as witness testimony. The hiss of the judge’s voice-dampening machine was heard so often it became like a soundtrack to the trial. 

While the jurors were charged with deliberating many of the dry details of what constituted Peters’ alleged crimes, they weren’t privy to the backstory that stretches back three years and all the way to the White House.

In 2021, following a Grand Junction municipal election to fill three seats on the city council, Peters often publicly said that she decided something must be amiss with a voting system she had earlier told the public was very sound.

A slate of three conservative candidates was defeated by three candidates on the more moderate end.

That was not a surprise to many residents of the Western Slope’s largest city because the city has been trending more blue. It has become an island of more progressive voters in a heavily red county.

According to testimony, Peters’ friend Sherronna Bishop helped convince Peters otherwise.

Bishop, a Silt makeup artist with no election experience, had vaulted into the conservative political arena when she served as U.S. 3rd Congressional District Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager. With Bishop’s behind-the-scenes help, Boebert blasted out of the obscurity of running a Rifle café into the halls of Congress.

With her willowy good looks, gift of gab, and success with promoting far-right candidates, Bishop caught the attention of former President Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” bunch.

Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, has his fingerprints all over the activities that led to Peters arrest and presence in a courtroom this week.

A self-described former “crackhead,” Lindell became a prominent advisor to Trump. He was one of those in the White House the night before the January 6 insurrection. He was one of those trying to persuade Trump to not accept the results of the election.

Lindell promoted the theory that Dominion Voting Systems were set up to conspire with foreign governments to rig the U.S. election.

Lindell has said in interviews and on his own Frank Speech podcasts that he has spent more than $30 million and hired more than 70 attorneys and cyber experts to help prove election fraud — something he has so far failed to do.

In what attorneys for Dominion have called “a highly orchestrated scheme,” Lindell and his cadre of election deniers needed a county clerk who might be a willing participant to allowing election-fraud promoters into a Dominion voting machine.  

Bishop helped set that effort in motion in Mesa County by first bringing a high school math teacher, Douglas Frank, to Grand Junction to meet with Peters. Frank had been traveling the country promoting stolen election theories and was able to persuade Peters that her voting equipment harbored evidence of “phantom voters”  — people who had died or didn’t exist who were being counted as voters.

She also put Peters in touch with a Trump attorney, Kurt Olsen, who allegedly helped set up the whole ruse. 

With Frank’s encouragement, Peters, Bishop and two of Peter’s high-level employees took part in the scheme that involved persuading a Mesa County computer engineer to hire on as a part-time computer expert in the elections office.

Gerald Wood went through a background check,  and was given a badge for access to secure elections rooms. But he never entered those rooms. His access pass was instead given to Conan Hayes who had begun working with the top tier of the stolen election bunch at the national level.

Hayes traveled to Grand Junction from his home in California in May of 2021 and made a forensic image of the information on Mesa County’s elections “brain”using Wood’s badge. Two days later, he attended a “trusted build” which is basically an upgrade of a computer system that resembles the upgrades cellphones periodically go through.

Peters was in that trusted build and introduced Hayes as Wood. The trusted build was also attended by representatives from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office and from Dominion. Dominion personnel don’t normally attend trusted builds, but the company had gotten wind of the possibility that a clerk might be going rogue. 

While Hayes was making copies and videos of the Mesa County voting system, he had former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne on a Facetime chat.

Byrne later posted videos about that call on X. He called Hayes “a real badass” and laughed about how Hayes dressed up “like a little nerd” to carry off the ruse. Byrne guffaws in those videos about how the election officials were right there in the room with Hayes not knowing “he was one of ours.”

Peters knew who Hayes was but she introduced him to the other attendees variously as a county worker, a state employee or a temporary hire in the elections office.

In August, the materials taken from the Mesa County system turned up on a QAnon website. 

That’s when Peters began telling her two underlings who were in cahoots that she was “f—cked” and that she was “going to jail.”

Sandra Brown, one of Peters’ elections officials, did go to jail for two months for her part in the scheme. Belinda Knisely received two years of probation. Both testified against Peters as a condition of their plea agreements. 

Brown and Knisely were the only other people who have been prosecuted for their parts in the election breach. 

Less of a celebrity circus than anticipated

Peters’ trial did not turn into the promised circus that she had been promoting on social media. She had urged supporters to come to the courthouse and march outside and in the halls saying prayers for her acquittal. Former child actor Ricky Schroder was the only person spotted praying outside the courtroom. 

Two sign wavers showed up outside the courthouse briefly with posters saying that Judge Barrett was being unfair. A former Green Beret who would not give his name because he feared being “raided” like Peters, parked outside the justice center most days of the trial with a sign on the side of his pickup stating “God Bless You, Tina Peters!”

Barrett, who attorneys observing the trial say showed remarkable restraint, has had to be driven to and from the justice center by a Mesa County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team because of threats of violence. So did 21st Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein.

The justice center was guarded by a contingent of undercover officers.

Security was beefed up after Byrne and some of his followers said in the weeks before the trial that people would be coming for the judge and prosecutors with “piano wire” and “blow torches.”   

A Falcon woman convicted of breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, during the riot to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election was sentenced Monday to one year of probation.

Rebecca Lavrenz, known as “J6 Praying Grandma” on social media, will also be required to pay a $103,000 fine and $500 in restitution, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., said. She was convicted of four misdemeanor counts for entering the Capitol and conducting disorderly conduct inside. 

In a Facebook post before the ruling, the 72-year-old great-grandmother, who operates a bed and breakfast northeast of Colorado Springs, offered no apologies for her crimes and said she felt the judge’s decision was in God’s hands.

“I am confident that his sentence will be what God, the Highest Judge, thinks is best to wake up our country,” Lavrenz wrote Monday morning. “Trusting and obeying God is my assignment for today.”

Lavrenz’s defense attorneys requested a one-year probation, no fine and no restitution, in court documents filed last week. They argued that she was a retired, first-time offender with “countless ties” to her community and commitments to her extended family.

Her attorneys said that Lavrenz’s conduct Jan. 6 was peaceful and nonviolent, that she caused no property damage and that she complied with the conditions of her release over the past two years after she was arrested in 2022, according to court documents. 

Federal prosecutors requested the judge order Lavrenz to serve 10 months in prison, followed by a year of supervised release and 60 hours of community service. The sentence was justified, prosecutors wrote in a letter to the judge filed last week, because Lavrenz has been “one of the loudest public voices calling the prosecution of January 6 riots a corrupt exercise.”

“Although Lavrenz certainly has a First Amendment right to publicly espouse her views, her unrepentant promotion of the riot is powerful evidence that she continues to pose a threat to future acts of political violence like that which engulfed the nation on January 6,” they continued. 

Prosecutors also asked the judge to impose a “substantial fine,” citing Lavrenz’s fundraising efforts after her trial. 

Lavrenz used her participation in the Jan. 6 riot and her convictions to raise more than $230,000 through online fundraising accounts and sought celebrity status based on her criminal conduct, prosecutors wrote. She also gave at least two dozen media interviews, where she continued her fundraising, questioned the fairness of her trial and showed no remorse for her criminal conduct. 

Her lawyers argued Lavrenz was not profiting from her crime and that all profits were going toward her legal defense, which have already exceeded six figures and her appeal will cost “additional tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars” over the next year, court documents said. 

Lavrenz was arrested Dec. 19, 2022, in Denver after tipsters alerted the FBI she was part of the crowd who breached the Capitol. She told federal authorities that she spent 10 minutes inside the Capitol, according to court documents. 

Investigators confirmed her account by reviewing surveillance footage that shows Lavrenz in a red scarf and white hat among the crowd of hundreds of rioters illegally entering and picketing inside the building. 

People convicted of felonies who have served their entire sentences can vote in Colorado. So can people on probation and parole.

Those convicted of felonies who are imprisoned or confined to detention as part of their sentence cannot vote. They regain their voting eligibility after they have completed their “full term of imprisonment,” according to the Colorado Secretary of State.

“The day you are released from detention or incarceration is the day your eligibility to register to vote is restored,” the office stated on its website.

Defendants facing criminal charges in jail who are pretrial detainees or out on bond awaiting trial can vote. In May 2024, the General Assembly passed a law requiring county clerks to work with county sheriffs to allow voting in jail for at least one day, give detainees information on voting eligibility and provide them with instructions on how they can verify or change voter registration. 

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

See full source list below.

GRAND JUNCTION — Tina Peters opted Friday not to testify in her defense — but not before expressing dissatisfaction with the fairness of her trial.

“I just feel like I have been prevented from providing a defense for myself,” she told 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett. “The court has excluded that and therefore I decline.”

On the eighth day of her trial, Peters had dangled the possibility she would testify, but only if the judge agreed to put guardrails on the questions she might be asked.

“I don’t want prosecutors to come in and bully me around like I have seen them do to others,” Peters told Barrett while the jury was out of the courtroom.

Barrett told Peters several times that he could not give legal advice to a defendant about whether she should testify, or not.

She persisted.

“I just ask that you restrain them and rein them in,” she said. “This will affect my decision whether to testify.”

“This is exceedingly unusual,” Barrett said about Peters’ request. He instructed her to consult with her attorneys.

Peters did that over a break and ultimately said she would not testify.

Defense lawyers rested their case after that, putting the trial on track to be wrapped up on Monday on schedule.

Four witnesses were called to defend Peters, but one was not allowed to testify

Peters’ lawyers called four witnesses to defend her actions when she and a cadre of election deniers breached the Mesa County elections system in May 2021.

Several cyber security experts testified briefly about blurred passwords in images released on a QAnon website in August 2021 — ostensibly to show that what Peters took from the elections system was not a thing of value.

The defense called a fellow former Colorado clerk, Dallas Schroeder, to testify. But Schroeder, who is now an Elbert County commissioner, was asked only three brief questions before the defense ended his testimony following a lengthy attorneys conference at the judge’s bench.

Schroeder said outside the courtroom that he had traveled to Colorado from a family vacation in Tennessee to testify.

Earlier, another hoped-for Peters’ witness — an election denier named David Clements — was not allowed to take the stand after more private attorney arguments.

Clements recently made a conspiracy-theory documentary that was shown in a Grand Junction church two weeks before the Peters’ trial began. Speakers at that event threatened violence against those trying to prosecute Peters and others trying to expose voter fraud.

No reason was given in open court for Clements not being allowed to take the stand. But the judge has repeatedly admonished the defense attorneys over the past week that the case before him is not about election fraud.

The defense’s star witness, Sherronna Bishop, a far-right activist and friend of Peters, was on the stand for a second day Friday for cross-examination by the defense.

When asked why she helped organize and took part in Peters’ breach of the election system, she answered “I was there as a voter and a concerned citizen.”

Bishop admitted she organized meetings with national-level election deniers, she set up encrypted chat sessions with those involved in the Mesa County breach, and she communicated regularly with Peters about the details of carrying out the breach. Those communications often occurred in the middle of the night.

Bishop’s memory of the details of the election deniers’ actions three years ago was sharp under defense questioning. She repeatedly answered, “I don’t recall” under questioning from the prosecution.

Once the defense rested its case and the jury was sent home, defense attorney Daniel Hartman asked Judge Barrett to throw out two of the charges against Peters — identity theft and official misconduct. Barrett declined.

Peters is charged with 10 felony and misdemeanor counts, including attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, identity theft, violation of duty and failure to comply with an order from the Colorado Secretary of State.

She faces the possibility of more than 20 years in prison if the jury finds her guilty.

The jury is expected to begin deliberations Monday after closing arguments.

The plot to breach Mesa County’s voting system and then hide that hack was brought into sharp focus Thursday afternoon during the criminal trial of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. The scheme was laid out by Peters’ friend and conspiracy partner who took the stand for the defense in the seventh day of Peters’ criminal trial.

Sherronna Bishop, a far-right activist who calls herself America’s Mom, testified as the defense team’s first witness that she and Peters decided they needed to show that Dominion Voting Systems computer programs are set up for fraud.  

A trial that was supposed to avoid references to election fraud has wandered repeatedly into the weeds of national election-fraud beliefs. 

Bishop played up the conspiracy element Thursday by confidently describing the scheme she engaged in with Peters and the help they had at both the national and local level.

Bishop began by poking holes in testimony from prosecution witness Gerald Wood, a local software engineer. Wood testified last week that he was duped into having his identity and his security credentials used by someone else so Peters could access the county’s election system — actions that would supposedly help to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent and votes were manipulated.

Bishop verified chats on the encrypted messaging system Signal that included Wood and showed he was aware of the scheme. Wood had testified he was unaware of Peters and Bishop’s plan.

Bishop had been the elephant in the courtroom in the first week of the trial as her name came up repeatedly with witnesses describing her part in hatching and carrying out the plan to breach the elections system.

Bishop did not deny that she had a major part in directing it, even though she was not an employee of the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s office. She placed Peters in the middle of it as a willing participant who appeared to be following Bishop’s directions.

Key witness details how plot took shape

Bishop testified about conspiring with Peters, Wood and two other Mesa County elections officials to set up a secure account for access to the Mesa County voting system. The plan Bishop described had Wood agreeing to allow his identity to be used so that a self-described computer expert named Conan Hayes could pretend to be Wood to access confidential voting equipment.

Bishop made the arrangements to bring Hayes from California to Grand Junction to make a “forensic image” of the election system.

She said she later apologized to Wood because he wouldn’t be getting the credit he deserved for helping to expose election fraud. 

That proof of fraud was promised but never delivered. 

Bishop also admitted bringing in national election-fraud promoters to plan the scheme. She hosted an event with high-profile 2020 election denier, mathematician Douglas Frank. Mesa County election officials were ordered to attend Frank’s talk that described how “phantom voters” could be found on the voting system database if they only had access to inner workings.

Bishop said Frank, Peters, and their collaborators in Mesa County feared the Colorado Secretary of State’s office was going to delete files and voting records during what is called a “trusted build.” The trusted build is a regular upgrade of software in Colorado counties’ Dominion voting machines. 

During attorney conferences at the judge’s bench, Bishop, wearing a sleeveless, cream-colored dress and matching high heels, winked and smiled at jurors from her witness seat. Several jurors appeared to briefly smile back.

Bishop’s name had come up so often in the first seven days of the trial that it prompted multiple questions from jurors prior to her appearance. 

“Why did you take direction from Bishop?” a juror asked of Peters’ former deputy clerk Belinda Knisley, who previously pleaded guilty to trespassing, official misconduct and violation of duty for her part in the election equipment tampering. 

“Why was she (Bishop) invited to meetings?”

“Was Bishop always involved in happenings in the office?” 

For a time in the spring and summer of 2021, witness testimony, including Bishop’s, made it clear that Bishop was very involved in the operation of the clerk’s office.

She used the term “we” when she talked in messages about what clerks could do to investigate their systems.

Bishop could still face charges, judge warns

Before her testimony, Bishop was advised by 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett that she still faces criminal exposure for her testimony in a case that she has not been charged in. The court has listed her as an unindicted co-conspirator for her part in the election breach.

Peters, 68, is being tried on seven felonies and three misdemeanors alleging she participated in identity theft, criminal impersonation, official misconduct and violating her duties as a county clerk when she carried out the clandestine election-equipment scheme three years ago. 

Peters has denied she committed any crimes.

Bishop’s appearance Thursday created a stir of excitement in a courtroom that otherwise involved lengthy spells of dry legal details, disputes over witnesses and arguments over evidence this week. Barrett had advised jurors Wednesday that the trial was running a day and a half behind schedule because attorneys on both sides were taking too much time on tangential arguments.

“This should be a simple case,” Barrett said.

Multiple witnesses have been testifying to the same elements of the case. They have laid out how Bishop and Peters, working in lockstep, engineered a plot that unraveled and then exploded into public view in the spring and summer of 2021. 

The case has been complicated by the fact that Peters has a team of four attorneys who have a squad of consultants, clerks and other helpers who tote piles of cardboard boxes, plastic bins, metal trunks and shelves of binders into and out of the courtroom each day.

The defense team began delving into some of those containers and laying out their case with Bishop after about four days of prosecution witnesses.

Bishop had worked as a makeup artist prior to making her mark in the political world by serving as Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager during Boebert’s first run for her 3rd Congressional District seat. She moved into the national right-wing conspiracy political arena after a falling out with Boebert.

Bishop gained national standing as an election fraud promoter. She started a conservative organization called America’s Mom and lately has been hosting a regular conspiracy-promoting podcast with her husband called America’s Mom & The Mr. 

She has made regular appearances on shows hosted by election-deniers including Steve Bannon, Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn. She has been pictured on social media rubbing shoulders with former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

 Even though Bishop has never been an employee of the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office, witnesses described her issuing orders to elections workers. Former elections manager Sandra Brown was advised by Bishop to take the computer tower from the secure voting room after the Colorado Secretary of State’s office publicly revealed in August 2021 that the Mesa County office was under investigation.

Peters warns accomplices to keep quiet

Bishop was on some calls with Peters when Peters instructed elections employees that they should keep quiet if law enforcement tried to question them.

Bishop moved to Texas from Rifle in 2022 after local, state and federal law enforcement officers searched her home looking for items related to the Mesa County election system breach.

She loudly described officers breaking down the door to her home, taking all her electronic equipment and “manhandling” one of her four children. That account was cut off by the prosecution objection. 

Bishop said she still maintains partial residency in Colorado and has continued to do political organizing here, including fomenting controversies in school district matters. 

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Bishop organized rallies and other events in Peters’ defense. She was front and center every time a crowd gathered to support Peters.

Two former Peters employees gave similar detailed accounts of the turmoil in the office after Peters learned information taken from her county’s system had been released on the internet.

In Wednesday’s testimony, former elections manager and prosecution witness Sandra Brown testified that Peters was panicked.

Brown said Peters called her into her office and repeated what former assistant clerk Belinda Knisley told the jury Tuesday.

“I’m f—ked,” Brown said Peters told her. “I am going to jail.”

Peters disappeared for about five weeks after that information was released, but the employees said a web of election-deniers and attorneys went into action in an attempt to offset the damage.

“A bunch of malarkey”

It was during that time that Brown said Bishop called her and told her to get the server and remove it from the secure tabulation room.

“Did you get the server?” prosecuting attorney Janet Drake asked.

“No,” Brown answered. “Why not?” Drake asked.

“Because that would be stupid,” Brown replied.

Brown called the idea that the server contained proof of dead people who had voted — phantom voters — “a bunch of malarkey.”

Brown spent two months in jail for her part in the voting-system breach.

Brown also testified that the revelation of the stolen election materials prompted a cloak-and-dagger scramble in the clerk’s office. She testified that Peters instructed her, Knisley and Bishop to buy “burner” phones that wouldn’t be recorded by investigators.

She said Bishop told her many times “don’t say anything,” to investigators.

Half of one day of the trial this week was taken up by the prosecution arguing to quash a subpoena. The defense had sought to have Dominion Elections System chief counsel testify but Barrett ruled against it.

“That is a rabbit hole we are not going to go down,” Barrett said while explaining — as he has so often during the trial — that the functionality of the Dominion voting equipment was not part of the charges against Peters.

GRAND JUNCTION — When former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters decided to use Mesa County’s voting system to try to do the bidding of national stolen-election conspiracists, she had inside help.

Tuesday, her chief aide, former deputy clerk Belinda Knisley, helped those prosecuting Peters.

Knisley calmly testified about Peters’ actions and about her own part in the breach of the county’s election system in May 2021 — a role Knisley said she took on at the direction of Peters.

Knisley detailed how Peters brought in a “mystery man” to make copies of the hard drive and passwords in the county’s election system. Knisley said Peters told her she needed to save the confidential materials because she was afraid the Colorado Secretary of State’s office was going to remove them.

Peters told Knisley she believed there might be proof of “phantom voters” in the computer files.

Peters doubled down on her legal jeopardy when she had copies of the election-system files and hardware sent to the mystery man, who has been identified several times during the trial as Conan Hayes. Hayes, a former professional surfer, had been recommended by national level stolen-election conspiracy theorists as “the best in the country” for hacking into a voting system. Knisley said Peters told her Hayes was a highly qualified consultant.

The effort to copy election materials and make Mesa County an example of stopping voter fraud collapsed into a saga that included a criminal investigation, national headlines, and a missing clerk after Hayes — or someone he was associated with — released Mesa County’s information on a website that trafficks in right-wing conspiracy theories.

All that broke open in August 2021 when Peters flew to a South Dakota cybersecurity symposium put on by MyPillow CEO and election denier Mike Lindell. When Peters learned the Mesa County information was on the internet, she phoned Knisley, who was running the office in Peters’ absence, and said she was in big trouble.

“I’m f—ked,” Knisley said Peters told her.

She said Peters repeatedly told her over the following weeks that she was going to go to jail for what she had done.

A Mesa County grand jury agreed that Peters had committed suspected crimes. She was indicted on seven felony and three misdemeanor counts that allege she participated in identity theft, criminal impersonation, official misconduct, and violating her duties as a county clerk.

After several years of delayed trials, Peters, 68, now faces the possibility of decades in prison if she is found guilty of all the charges.

A stickler for details who followed protocol

Knisley’s damning insider information about Peters’ actions in the spring and summer of 2021 was tempered with compliments for her former boss.

Under cross examination by defense attorney Michael Edminster, Knisley called Peters “a faithful public servant.”

She described her as a stickler for detail and a clerk who followed protocol.  

Knisley testified that in 2021, Peters told her she had no recourse but to use outside help to protect her election system — a scheme that has been detailed by prosecution witnesses in a jury trial that entered its fifth day Tuesday.

Knisley followed her boss’s instructions to put her plan into motion. She helped with the scheme to acquire an access badge for a local software engineer named Gerald Wood.

Different witnesses in the trial testified that Peters told differing accounts about Wood’s role in the county elections office — stories that were used to obtain an access badge and credentials in his name. Witnesses said Peters told some of them that he was a temporary hire, others that he was a state employee, and some that he was an employee of the motor vehicle division who was transitioning to elections.

Wood never served in any role once he had passed the background check and obtained the badge that would provide access to the secure election tabulation room.

Wood testified last week that he turned over that badge to Knisley at her request and did not hear from Peters or Knisley again. He testified that he did not know what had happened with his badge until he heard the news about the stolen election files.

Knisley also was indicted in the case. She pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charges against her in August 2022 and agreed to testify against Peters. She was sentenced to two years of unsupervised probation and the felony charges she faced were dropped.

Stolen-election conspiracy theorists invited into the office

In between hours of dry, detailed information about how elections and election equipment work, another former employee of Peters’ — elections manager Stephanie Wenholz — brought emotion into the courtroom Monday

She broke down in tears when prosecutor Robert Shapiro with the Colorado Attorney General’s office, asked her what happened in the elections office on Aug. 9, 2021. That was the day that  Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold issued a press release stating that the Mesa County office was under investigation.

“That day was extremely emotional for all of us,” Wenholz said. “It was absolutely heartbreaking when we found out our passwords were leaked.”

Wenholz had evidence related to that. She had recorded a meeting in May when Peters invited stolen-election conspiracists to her office to discuss how to prove voter fraud.

Eight people were in that meeting, including Peters’ friend Sherronna Bishop, a conspiracy theorist  who had been U.S. Rep Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager; Douglas Frank, a mathematician on Lindell’s payroll who was traveling around the country searching for voter fraud; Maurice Emmer, an Aspen attorney who was friends with Bishop; and four Mesa County  election officials. Two of the elections officials were on board with the idea the 2020 election had been stolen. Two did not believe their system contained proof of “phantom voters.”

“That was not correct,” Wenholz told the court about the theory Frank was promoting.

Wenholz turned her recording over to 21st Judicial District Attorney’s office investigator James Cannon. That recording helped to move along a case that was already underway and stacking up methodically obtained evidence.

Tuesday morning, Dominion Voting Systems’ customer success manager David Stah testified about his attendance at the software installation called a trusted build that is at the heart of the case. He said he attended the trusted build because he had heard there was a clerk questioning his company’s machines. Stahl attended trusted builds at only two of 62 Colorado counties with Dominion equipment — Mesa and Delta.

The remainder performed the routine software upgrades without question.

Venezuelan election discussed in courthouse chitchat

While the step-by-step testimony played out in the courtroom and around 600 people watched the live stream of the trial at any given time on YouTube, Peters’ crowd of supporters grew this week with some nationally known voter-fraud figures.

Prominent election denier Mark Finchem showed up Monday and Tuesday. He is currently running for a senate seat in Arizona and was recently sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit there. He has ties to Trump’s core of stolen-election conspiracists including Rudy Guliani and Michael Flynn.

Finchem showed up with two bodyguards. He said he spoke to a fundraising gathering Sunday at a private home in Mesa County.

A friend of Finchem’s said the party attracted about 90 people, most from out of the Mesa County area. Another attendee estimated there were 40 to 50 people there.

“We have to pay for this circus somehow,” Finchem’s friend said as she pointed towards the courtroom.

Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack also attended the trial Monday and Tuesday. Mack is the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. He wore shirts promoting the group and pinned a whistle and a plastic medallion to the front. The medallion was inscribed “Tina Peters Whistleblower.”

“Our position is that wrath is raining down on the clerk for doing her job,” he said outside the courtroom.

Mack spoke to a second gathering of Peters’ supporters Monday night.

“I hate injustice,” Mack said while he waited outside the courtroom during a break.

Marty Waldman, a member of the Constitutional Sheriffs group, called the Peters’ trial “the apex of civilization.”

He explained that, in his view, Mesa County’s election system is akin to the voting machines currently embroiled in elections in Venezuela that are being called corrupt.

“Everything that happened in Venezuela is happening in this courtroom here,” he said. “If you look at the graphs, they are the same. The algorithms are the same.”

Defense attorney Daniel Hartman brought some of those conspiracy theories into the courtroom Monday and Tuesday even though 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett has ruled that topic is not admissible.

“You can’t engage in crime to expose a crime”

With the jury out of the courtroom, Hartman spent 40 minutes trying to convince Barrett that testimony about Dominion Voting Systems should be allowed and that Peters should be found innocent because she was trying to protect Hayes who he claims is a federal informant. He said it was necessary that Peters protect his identity and that led to the subterfuge with Gerald Wood.

Hartman referred to articles in the Gateway Pundit and to elections in Serbia and called the case against Peters “a mob hit,” before Barrett ruled again that Peters’ trial has nothing to do with the functionality of voting equipment.” Hartman promised to cite cases to back up his claims but did not offer any cases.

“You can’t engage in a crime to expose a crime,” Barrett said about Hartman’s argument that Peters covered up an unauthorized person’s identity only to try to show there were errors in voting machines.

He called Hartman’s arguments, “irrelevant, misleading, confusing and a waste of time.”

Outside the courtroom there was another bit of drama when Peters grabbed the arm of a reporter who was trying to snap a photo of her on a cell phone. The reporter for the Colorado Newsline was called to the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office Tuesday afternoon for an investigation.While Peters’ trial continues, with the prosecution expected to wrap up its case Wednesday or Thursday, the Colorado County Clerks Association is meeting just two blocks away in a city convention center – by coincidence. None of those clerks have shown up to observe the trial in person.

A judge Tuesday cleared the way for opponents of Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams to hold a gathering in about two weeks to vote on whether the embattled leader should be removed and replaced. 

Arapahoe County District Court Judge Thomas Willard Henderson IV rescinded the temporary restraining order he issued last month blocking the gathering.

Henderson wrote in his ruling Tuesday, which was issued after a hearing earlier in the day, that he was wrong to issue the order in the first place because he lacked jurisdiction.

Henderson’s decision opens the door for a meeting of the Colorado GOP’s central committee in as few as 15 days to consider a motion to remove Williams , whose work as chairman has been marred by accusations of self-dealing and disorganization. Indeed, the immediately after Henderson issued his ruling the gathering was scheduled for Aug. 24.

One-third of the committee will need to be present for any vote taken during the gathering to be considered valid, though 60% of the entire central committee will have to vote to remove Williams for the effort to be successful. 

Williams filed a lawsuit in Arapahoe County last month seeking to block a meeting scheduled for  July 27 at a church in Brighton to consider whether to oust him, citing a ruling by the Colorado GOP’s executive committee that the gathering was invalid. The executive committee has a maximum of 25 members, most of them allies of Williams, whereas the central committee is comprised of as many as 400 people.

The meeting to consider the motion to oust Williams  was organized by El Paso County GOP Vice Chairman Todd Watkins and Jefferson County GOP Chairwoman Nancy Pallozzi, who are the defendants in Williams’ suit. The pair gathered support from more than a quarter of the central committee to force the meeting, which the executive committee said it couldn’t verify and used as the basis for ruling the meeting invalid.

Henderson issued his temporary restraining order July 26. The meeting in Brighton a day later was transformed into a forum for the list of candidates vying to replace Williams as chairman. Republicans also used the occasion to air their grievances against Williams. 

This week, Pallozzi and Watkins asked Henderson to reconsider his order, forcing the hearing Tuesday. 

Chris Murray, a former longtime lawyer for the Colorado GOP, is representing Pallozzi and Watkins in the case. He argued that state law says only the party itself — and specifically the GOP central committee — can work out controversies, making Henderson’s ruling inappropriate. 

“This court lacks, as a fundamental matter, jurisdiction over this case,” Murray said.

Murray also argued that if Henderson were to uphold his ruling, it would effectively give the executive committee carte blanche to protect the chairman against efforts to remove him.

“That is not how the bylaws of the Colorado Republican committee work,” he said.

David Pigott, a lawyer for Williams, said he wasn’t asking the court to solve an internal controversy, but rather enforce the executive committee’s decision.

“We are asking the court’s assistance in enforcing the (executive) committee’s decision,” Pigott said. “We’re not asking you to decide the controversy.”

Henderson said when he issued the temporary restraining order, he thought he was enforcing a decision by the central committee, not the executive committee’s ruling. In the ruling he handed down Tuesday, he acknowledged that misunderstanding.

“When a dispute is within the jurisdiction of the state central committee of a
political party that central committee is the ‘sole tribunal to determine such controversies,’ and as a ‘necessary sequence, the courts do not have concurrent jurisdiction in the premises,'” Henderson wrote, citing the law. “The disputes here at issue … are clearly internal controversies within the jurisdiction of the CRC to make a final determination.”

Williams didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday night. Neither did Colorado GOP Vice Chairwoman Hope Scheppelman.

But in an unsigned email to central committee members, party leadership brushed off the ruling.

“Your state party will not sit idly by while Watkins violates proper process and procedure,” the email said. “If anyone wants a special meeting for whatever purpose then they must follow the rules to do so.”

The central committee was already scheduled to meet on Aug. 31 in Castle Rock, but it seemed the question of whether to remove Williams might not come up because of the executive committee’s determination that the effort by Watkins and Pallozzi to remove the chairman was invalid.

The Aug. 24 meeting will allow Williams’ opponents to try to sidestep any attempt by the chairman’s allies to stop the vote.

Williams is facing growing pressure to resign

Six of the state’s eight Republican congressional candidates, as well as state Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, signed a letter late last month urging Williams to resign. 

Additionally, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican, suggested in a Facebook post that Williams should step down.

“The past month of public dissension and infighting in the Colorado Republican Party has been embarrassing to watch as we have a golden opportunity this November to flip seats at every level of government,” she wrote. “This isn’t about competing policies or ideologies; this is about a failure from Chairman Williams to lead after our primary election and simply reach out to candidates and organizations throughout Colorado and beyond to offer support, mend bridges, and present a clear gameplan of how we can win together in November.”

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Williams was elected chairman in March 2023 and almost immediately began taking flak for his leadership. 

He first faced blowback for the party’s lackluster fundraising and because he was working as a full-time aide to a Republican state lawmaker while leading the state Republican party. 

The criticism intensified as he launched an unsuccessful run for Congress this year. 

When U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, announced in January that he would step aside, Williams used the state party email to announce that he would run for the 5th Congressional District seat in El Paso County. Williams rejected calls to step down as party chairman while he campaigned, and then spent party money to criticize his opponent, conservative commentator and activist Jeff Crank.

In April, Williams had a Colorado Sun reporter tossed out of the state party assembly.  The party also sent out a homophobic email during Pride month calling for people to burn Pride flags. 

Then, for the first time in recent memory, if ever, the Colorado GOP endorsed candidates in competitive primary elections, drawing anger from many in the party. Of the 18 candidates endorsed by the party, only four won their contests.

The party also spent $58,000 in late May and early June sending mailers urging voters to support Williams and criticizing Crank. Williams donated $60,000 to the party from his campaign account in June, which posed questions about whether the mailers and the apparent reimbursement represented a violation of federal postal regulations.

Williams lost to Crank in the Republican primary in the 5th District by roughly a two-to-one  margin.

The Colorado funeral home owners who allegedly stored 190 decaying bodies and sent grieving families fake ashes were ordered by a judge to pay $950 million to the victims’ relatives in a civil case, the attorney announced Monday.

The judgement is unlikely to be paid out since the owners, Jon and Carie Hallford, have been in financial trouble for years and face hundreds of criminal charges in separate cases, including abuse of a corpse.

That leaves the nearly $1 billion sum largely symbolic of the devastation wreaked on family members who learned the remains of their mothers, fathers or children weren’t in the ashes they ceremonially spread or clutched tight but were instead decaying in a building.

“I’m never going to get a dime from them, so, I don’t know, it’s a little frustrating,” said Crystina Page, who had hired the funeral home, Return to Nature, to cremate her son’s remains in 2019.

She carried the urn she thought held his ashes across the country until the news arrived in 2023 that his body had been identified in the Return to Nature facility, four years after his death.

Dozens of family members have received similar news as the 190 bodies have been identified, shattering their grieving processes. Many are still picking up the pieces, haunted by nightmares of what their decomposing family member may have looked like, or burdened by guilt that they had let a loved one down.

“If nothing else,” Page said, this judgement “will bring more understanding to the case.”

“I’m hoping it’ll make people go, ‘Oh, wow, this isn’t just about ashes,’” she said.

While the victims and their attorney, Andrew Swan, understood from the outset that it was unlikely families would receive any financial compensation, part of the hope was to haul the Hallfords into court and demand answers.

That, too, went unfulfilled.

Jon Hallford, who is in custody, and Carie Hallford, who is out on bail, did not acknowledge the civil case or show up to hearings, Swan said.

“I would have preferred that they participate, if only because I wanted to put them on the witness stand, have them put under oath and ask them how they came to do this, not once, not twice, but hundreds of times,” said Swan.

To Page, it felt like another slap in the face from the Hallfords.

The civil lawsuit lists over 100 family members but has been left open in case other victims come forward since 190 total bodies were discovered in the funeral homes facility in Penrose, southwest of the company’s office in Colorado Springs.

Jon Hallford is being represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases. Carie Hallford’s attorney, Michael Stuzynski, was not immediately available for comment.