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.”   

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.

GRAND JUNCTION — Prosecutors walked jurors through the complicated system behind vote counting in the first week of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ trial. They questioned witnesses who showed step-by-step how Peters allegedly invaded that system in her attempt to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent.

Even though election conspiracy theories are not allowed in the trial and Peters is not charged with election fraud, the testimony has tiptoed around some of the numerous tentacles of national stolen-election theories. 

The testimony so far has shown that election deniers descended on Mesa County when they found a clerk willing to accept their election-fraud theories.

Among the prominent right-wing figures cited by prosecution witnesses was Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the website that hosts the QAnon conspiracy. Famous election deniers MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and math teacher Douglas Frank also figured into testimony, along with former professional surfer turned self-described “cyber expert” Conan Hayes and right-wing activist Sherronna Bishop.

Peters is being tried on seven felonies and three misdemeanors alleging identity theft, criminal impersonation, official misconduct, and violating her duties as county clerk. Her trial is expected to run through next week and possibly into the following week.

In cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, Peters’ team of four defense attorneys and a phalanx of their clerks and consultants, attempted to show that Peters broke no laws when she breached her own system. They drew testimony that the breach was her way of trying to ensure the election in her county was accurate.

How the prosecution started

The prosecution opened its case with a detailed account of Peters’ actions delivered by James Cannon, the chief investigator for the 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Cannon laid out the steps he took in an investigation he began on Aug. 9, 2021, when his office received a call from the office of the Colorado Secretary of State notifying him that the election system for Mesa County had been hacked and images of operating systems and passwords had been posted on a QAnon website.

Within two days, Cannon had obtained search warrants for homes and offices linked to Peters and her elections office. He had yellow crime tape draping secure sections of the elections office. He had locks changed on secure rooms. He had checked all county records to determine who might have illegally entered the tabulation room during what is called a trusted build. 

That has been described in the trial as a system upgrade that is similar to periodic cellphone updates — but with tight controls over who can be in attendance. 

In this case it was supposed to be a handful of representatives from the clerk’s office, the Secretary of State’s Office and Dominion Voting Systems, the maker of the voting system in use in Mesa County and most other counties in Colorado.

One of those listed on the slate of trusted build attendees was Gerald Wood, who was identified as an administrative assistant for Peters.

Wood, a local man who has been mentioned at the heart of the Peters’ case since it first blew up into a national story three years ago, told the jury he was ensnared in the election-office crimes when he was asked by Peters and Bishop to take a consulting job with the clerk’s office. 

Wood, a 32-year software engineer for an alarm-monitoring company, came into Peters’ orbit when he joined a conservative Mesa County group called Stand for the Constitution. Wood said it was initially organized for educating citizens about the Constitution, but evolved into a political conspiracy-promoting group that included Peters.

Wood agreed to do consulting work for Peters and, after passing a background check, was issued a badge to enter secure elections areas. Peters’ assistant clerk asked Wood to return the badge before he ever did any work. It was never returned to him.

Wood, who was questioning election integrity at the time, did attend Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a cyber-expert participant. Peters was also at that symposium where confidential election information from Mesa County was publicized. It purportedly showed that Dominion Election Systems could change election results.

Wood said the symposium was touted as an event where proof of election fraud would be revealed. He said it was not.

Man’s home was raided when he was a “cybersecurity” symposium

While he was there, Wood got news that his home had been searched by law enforcement officers and that his name was being publicized nationally as a participant in election-system hacking in Mesa County. 

Using Wood’s access badge and identification, Hayes had allegedly entered the area that was off-limits during a time when security cameras in the tabulation room were turned off. Employees testified that it was the first time in memory that those cameras had been turned off.

The plot came together after Peters became enmeshed with election deniers intent on showing that former President Trump had not lost the 2020 election, according to prosecution witness Brandi Bantz.

Bantz, Mesa County’s director of elections, described being called into Peters’ office for a meeting where Frank and Peters were present along with two other Peters’ employees who have since taken plea deals and been sentenced for their parts in the election-system breach.

Bantz said she was asked by Peters to leave that meeting and was ordered to attend a stolen-election seminar being given by Frank that evening at a Grand Junction hotel.

She said she was uncomfortable.

“Theories were being discussed — theories about voter fraud,” Bentz told the jury. “I do not support those theories.”

Frank was promoting the idea across the country that voting tabulation systems allowed for “phantom voters” to sway election outcomes. He said he was doing it at the behest, and on the payroll, of Lindell.

“I think it’s a feather in your cap if we discover this corruption in your county,” Frank was recorded telling Peters and her subordinates during a meeting in Peters’ office on April 23, 2021. Part of that meeting was recorded by Peters’ election manager, Stephanie Wenholz, who also testified that she was uncomfortable with the election-conspiracy information seeping into the Mesa County office.

She called investigator Cannon sobbing when she felt she needed to report what was going on.

During the meeting that upset her, Frank offered to bring in a team to find phantom voters on Mesa County’s system.

“They will do it for you. They are the best in the country,” he said on the recording played during the trial.

Peters’ defense team spent much of Friday afternoon trying to poke holes in the testimony of Wood who told jurors he did not remember many dates and faces and conversations associated  with his activities that are linked to the Peters’ case.

At the end of his testimony as a prosecution witness, defense attorney Daniel Hartman caused a stir in the courtroom when he shoved a paper at Wood in an attempt to subpoena him as a defense witness. Wood left the courtroom without taking it. The exchange came after the jury had been dismissed from the courtroom. 

Judge Barrett later ruled that attempted serving of a subpoena was “ineffective”  because an attorney is not allowed to serve a witness.

The trial will continue Monday with two more days expected for the prosecution’s witnesses before the defense presents its case.

GRAND JUNCTION — Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ decision three years ago to help breach her own county’s voting system made her a national hero in election-denier circles. But this week, a jury will decide if she is guilty of crimes that could send her to prison for decades.

Peters, 68, is being tried on seven felonies and three misdemeanors that allege she participated in identity theft, criminal impersonation, official misconduct and violating her duties as a county clerk. An indictment alleges she carried out a clandestine election-equipment scheme in May 2021 in the hope that she could prove voter fraud. 

Peters denies all wrongdoing and refers to herself as a victim of a corrupt legal system. 

Opening statements were delivered Wednesday afternoon.

Robert Shapiro, an attorney with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office who is part of the prosecution team, portrayed Peters as a mastermind of a criminal plot to steal election-computer information to satisfy her “obsession” with finding irregularities in voting systems.

“In actuality, this is a very simple case of deceit and fraud,” he told the jury.

Defense attorney Amy Jones spoke softly of Peters being a grieving mother who had lost her son, a Navy SEAL who died in a skydiving accident in New York City, but selflessly decided to run for the clerk’s position to help make the county offices operate better for citizens.

She said what Peters did by bringing  in an outside consultant to access the county’s voting equipment software was not against the law at that time. 

“She wanted to protect it,” Jones said as Peters sat nearby nodding her head.

Peters’ much-delayed trial comes after three previous trial dates were canceled. Peters discarded five attorneys over the past several years — some just days before scheduled trials. She repeatedly deployed legal stalling tactics, including hitting national, state and local officials with lawsuits in failed attempts to have charges against her thrown out or, at least, held up.

Her most recent attempt to avoid prosecution came two weeks ago when she unsuccessfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt her criminal case.

Two pretrial hearings and a day of jury selection over the past week have given a glimpse into what promises to be a tension-filled trial. Attorneys for the prosecution and defense have accused each other of lying and their arguments have grown testy over what evidence and witnesses should be allowed  in the trial. 

Outside the courtroom Wednesday, former child actor-turned-election denier and COVID-19 skeptic Ricky Schroder confronted reporters. He carried a Bible and recited prayers for Peters.

About three dozen other Peters supporters crowded the courtroom and the hall outside.

Twenty-first Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett has admonished Peters supporters to strictly follow rules if they want to be in his courtroom. 

Barrett loudly called out a Peters supporter Tuesday who audibly snorted about one of his statements.

“You will be ejected, or worse,” for such outbursts, he said.

The Mesa County Justice Center has federal, state and local law enforcement officers providing extra security after Peters’ supporters made threats of violence away from the courthouse. Plainclothes officers are augmenting a heavy uniformed police presence.

“I can tell you that law enforcement agencies are taking security very seriously,” said 21st District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, who is one of those prosecuting the case against Peters and one of those threatened with violence.

The rise of “Clerk Tina”

Peters’ rise as a national hero for right-wing stolen-election conspiracy theorists has placed her in a spotlight as a “whistleblower.” It has also given her a platform to fundraise for her legal defense. 

Once a little-known, first-time office holder in Mesa County, Peters is now held up as “Clerk Tina” on national podcasts that promote stolen election theories that began with former President Donald Trump.

Those theories, rooted in skepticism about the efficacy and honesty of Dominion Voting Systems and about the integrity of elections in general, will not be allowed as part of her defense in her trial even though they were raised by the defense in pre-trial hearings. 

Barrett has ruled that election conspiracy theories cannot be mentioned in front of the jury. He has told defense attorneys that they are not to refer to Peters as a whistleblower during the trial.

“This trial is not about whether voting machines accurately and reliably collect voter data,” Barrett wrote in an order.

Peters has not denied that she used election-conspiracy cronies to copy and disseminate confidential election information in 2021. But she claims she was acting in accordance with a federal mandate that requires county clerks to preserve election records. She claims that an election system software installation called a “trusted build” that is done in accordance with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office was going to change and delete some records from the county system, so she had to step in and take action to prevent that.

“It was her job to preserve the records,” one of her attorneys, Daniel Hartman, told Barrett in a pre-trial hearing last week. “It goes to the heart of her acting in her official capacity.”

Barrett didn’t buy that argument. He pointed out during a pretrial hearing that if Peters had suspicions about the voting equipment, she could have obtained a court injunction to have the system examined. He stressed that the charges against Peters have nothing to do with the functionality of the equipment and repeatedly said that arguments about voting-machines “are not to be made to the jury in any way, shape or form.”

Made copies of a Dominion hard drive

Peters landed in this legal jeopardy when she brought in a “consultant” to make copies of the Dominion hard drive in a Mesa County Clerk’s office secure room where the computerized brains of the election system are located, authorities said in an indictment. Video cameras that keep track of who is in the room were turned off days before the breach. Peters had obtained a pass for the out-of-state consultant by using a local man’s name and credentials. The consultant was former professional surfer turned self-described ‘data expert’ and 2020 election denier Conan Hayes, authorities allege.

The information Hayes obtained from the system was published on a QAnon blog after Peters and some of her fellow election deniers flew to South Dakota, with the Dominion data in hand, to a cybersecurity seminar hosted by MyPillow CEO and election denier Mike Lindell.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold tracked that leaked election material back to Mesa County and began an investigation into Peters’ actions. Peters went into hiding for nearly 40 days, saying she feared for her life. 

Meanwhile, she was still on the payroll as the official Mesa County Clerk. Her absence and the county’s attempts to keep the office functioning without a clerk ended up costing the county millions of dollars that included legal fees and the purchase of new election equipment to replace the equipment that had been compromised.

An effort to recall Peters that was undertaken during the pandemic failed.

In March 2022, a Mesa County grand jury indicted Peters on the criminal charges she now faces in trial. That came a month after she announced that she would be a candidate for Colorado Secretary of State. She lost that race in the Republican primary.

Other employees prosecuted

Two of Peters’ former employees in the clerk’s office have already been prosecuted and will be witnesses for the prosecution against their former boss. 

Former deputy clerk Belinda Knisley pleaded guilty to trespassing, official misconduct and violation of duty for her part in the election equipment tampering and was given two years of probation. She is permanently barred from working in elections. 

Former election manager Sandra Brown pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant and official misconduct and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. 

Peters is currently under house arrest in a separate case for obstruction of a government operation after she illegally recorded a hearing for Knisley on an IPad and then refused to turn over the device to police who tried to serve her with a warrant. Her scuffle with the police took place in a local coffee shop when she kicked at officers who were attempting to arrest her. Videos of that incident went viral online.

In spite of being confined to home (except for her court appearances) and having to wear an ankle monitor, Peters has continued to use regular appearances on right-wing podcasts to gin up support for her trial, encouraging listeners to “Stand with Tina.” Recent posts on the platform X urge supporters to come to her trial to protest, wave signs, and publicly pray for her acquittal.

Schroder, who starred in the 1980s sit-com “Silver Spoons,” appeared to be the only supporter to take up the exhortation for public prayer on Wednesday. 

Peters’ attempt to enhance her status as a nationally recognized election denier will continue outside the courtroom this week. She has scheduled a benefit concert and dinner at a Grand Junction bar that will feature presentations by election deniers Joe Oltmann and Mark Finchem.  Top-tier tables ranging in price from $2,500 to $5,000 have sold out. 

Peters has also been leaning heavily on scripture in her online postings. But some of her supporters, including Oltmann, have been making threats of violence on social media ahead of the trial. Oltmann, a right-wing provocateur who has been sued by Dominion for allegedly slandering the company, called for Peters supporters to take up arms during a speech at a local church two weeks ago.

Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has also made threats connected to Peters’ trial. He said on a podcast carried on X this week that those prosecuting Peters should be met with piano wire and blowtorches. He later said he was only speaking metaphorically.

Local authorities did not take it metaphorically. Courthouse deputies cited Oltmann’s and Byrne’s threats as part of the reason for the beefed-up security at the justice center.

Propaganda directed toward potential jurors

Potential jurors have also been targeted with propaganda.

Two electronic billboards have flashed messages along a heavily traveled highway in Grand Junction encouraging people to go to a “jury nullification” website that advises potential jurors they can reject the charges and acquit a defendant even if they believe that person is guilty. The website also gives those called for jury duty tips on how to hide their true feelings and even how to dress and act so they will be chosen.

Around 100 potential jurors were chosen for oral questioning in the Peters trial after hundreds were winnowed based on their written questionnaires. On Wednesday, questioning was attempting to narrow that group down to a dozen jurors and two alternates.

Many potential jurors had indicated in questionnaires that they are skeptics of fair elections, Dominion Voting Systems, the FBI and the Colorado Attorney General’s office. Some wrote that they don’t trust the government and believe the 2020 election was stolen.

Twenty-first Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, who is prosecuting the case, along with Colorado Attorney General’s Office attorneys Robert Shapiro and Janet Drake, sought to kick out those who said they cannot be impartial. 

Peters is being represented by a team of four attorneys who have a contingent of clerks and consultants rolling large plastic boxes of files into the courtroom each day.

At least two of her attorneys have argued election-conspiracy cases around the state and country.

Denver attorney John Case represented Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder and Douglas County Clerk Merlin Klotz when they followed Peters’ example and copied material from election hard drives.

Michigan attorney Dan Hartman is representing a case in that state involving officials who allegedly carried out a voter data breach. A judge recently delayed that case due to a legal challenge from Hartman. Hartman has been the target of ethics complaints in Michigan.

Peters is also represented by Michael Edminster of Carbondale, and Jones, a former judge from Ohio.

During the pre-trial hearing Tuesday, Hartman had to apologize to Judge Barrett for not having information about potential jurors organized.

He said that, with four attorneys, “We have a little problem of disorganization.”

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In a farmyard on the western outskirts of Palisade, a distinct odor seeps through the sweet scent of ripening peaches, the yeasty aroma of fermenting wine, and the perfume of lavender.

It doesn’t take a vampire to recognize that punchy smell. It is allium sativum — garlic — and it is wafting from the Green Acres U-Pick farm.

Green Acres U-Pick is the most prolific grower of garlic varieties in Colorado. In five acres that neighbor a handful of wineries, bulbs of Montana Zemo, Russian giant, Georgian crystal, Killarney red, rose de Lautrec and dozens of other garlic cultivars are waiting under the soil for farmer Bob Korver’s digging fork. 

About 1,500 pounds of bulbs will be liberated within the next several weeks.

Bob and his wife, Elaine, still have fruits and vegetables dotting and fringing their small farm, but it is the half-acre spiked with the spear-like leaves of 40 garlic varieties that has bumped up the Korvers from garlic growers to garlic geeks.

If the Korvers were to put pins on a map showing where their garlic cultivars originated, the dots would be sprinkled to the far reaches of the world.

This year’s garlic crop originated in Siberia, the Republic of Georgia, the San Juan Islands, Uzbekistan, Russia, Italy, Spain, France, Transylvania, South Korea, Vietnam and Romania. There is also garlic that was first grown in California, New Mexico and the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington.

“I don’t think you will find anyone that is crazy as I am,” Bob admits about his garlic enthusiasm.

Elaine puts that obsession into more sensible terms: “We like to experiment.”

How to grow (and sell) garlic by hand

All the work of planting and harvesting garlic at Green Acres is done by hand except for the initial field preparation. Bob does that by putting around on his little orange Kubota tractor to create furrows.

Halloween is planting season. That’s when Bob hunkers down over those rows poking each garlic clove into the ground. For the next seven months, if all goes right, those single cloves will expand into a fist-sized bulb made up of many cloves.

Shortly after each Fourth of July, Bob starts the harvest by aiming his trusty garden fork with uncanny accuracy into the weed-choked rows. He digs and hauls in the early mornings and the evenings because the hot sun can leach some of the flavor from garlic.

He lays out the newborn allium bulbs in his well-used wheelbarrow and hauls them one load at a time up the road, past the revelers on the patio of Red Fox Cellars winery, to the Korvers’ little garlic-colored house.

There Elaine sorts it, with nothing more than an appraising eye and a quick heft in the hand to determine the size of each bulb.

In a couple of weeks, this same patio will become the sales floor for Green Acres garlic.

The Korvers don’t waste any time or money on advertising. Those in the know watch their Facebook page for Elaine’s posts that the garlic is ready or that different varieties are running out.

Right now, the Korvers’ earliest harvest is undergoing a two-week curing rest in their four-car garage (which has never had a car in it). They fill it with garlic four times each season.

Bob is responsible for nipping the leaves and stems from the rested bulbs before Elaine takes a cheapo toothbrush to them to banish clinging dirt. Bob helps out with that task, too, when he is waiting for dinner or hiding from the heat.

Last year, there was more scrubbing to do. The Korvers had 50 cultivars of garlic. A few of those didn’t do so well in the increasing heat of western Colorado.

Bob could easily have replaced those with some of the new allium cultivars he ogles in seed catalogues during the winter, but “she said enough,” he explains while cutting his eyes toward Elaine.

She levels a hard stare at him over a grin: “Enough is right!”

Trading the classroom for the field

The Korvers, both in their early 70s and married for 37 years, never saw garlic taking over their lives back in the day.

Bob moved with his third-generation agricultural family to a farm just down the road from Green Acres when he was 4 years old. He grew up picking peaches and trying to listen to his father who warned him: “If you want to make a million dollars in farming, start out with $2 million.”

He went off to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, then on to Colorado State University where he earned a master’s in guidance counseling. He taught English and journalism and coached volleyball and track as well as serving as a counselor at schools in Columbus, Nebraska, on the Eastern Plains of Colorado and eventually in Steamboat Springs.

Elaine first met Bob in Greeley where she was attending college to earn a degree in library science. She describes herself as a city girl. She had grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, and after college aspired to teach in larger places like Denver and later Grand Junction.

The two came together like garlic and bread when Elaine was doing a librarian stint in Rifle during the oil shale boom. Friends invited her along to watch a volleyball game in Steamboat.

In between games, she spotted a guy in the bleachers who was busy grading papers, oblivious to the hubbub around him. His briefcase was beside him. Bob!

Their conversation led to a connection and eventually to Green Acres after they both decided they would retire from their professions and farm together. They would grow fruits and vegetables without using pesticides and herbicides and showcase rows of lavender.

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They proved they could master lavender when their oils won two first-place prizes in an international lavender competition last year in Australia.

Neither one remembers exactly how they came to decide that the fragrant lines of waving lavender could be neighbors to a garlic plot. It has something to do with saving water. Garlic does not require much water.

Bob’s years of classroom planning made him well suited to garlic farming. Garlic is an easy thing to grow. Home gardeners can plunk cloves in loose soil and create a bulb. But the way Bob does it requires complicated charts and graphs and timing schedules. Locations, planting dates, size of cloves, names are all neatly printed out on papers spotted with sweat and dirt, and snapped onto a clipboard that resides in the garlic field while Bob is working there.

His colored charts correspond to brown, pink, blue, red, green, orange and yellow flags that flutter at the end of rows in the recent air-fryer heat.

“We wouldn’t want anyone to think they were getting one kind of garlic and get another,” Elaine explains about all that paperwork. She is, she admits, “the queen of handouts.”

Each garlic bulb sold or given away at Green Acres comes with one of Elaine’s cheat sheets of information about that particular cultivar. Elaine staples the info to the brown paper bags that she stresses are the only proper receptacles for storing garlic. Her slips include information on variety, taste, storage, cooking, how many cloves should be in one bulb, where the garlic originated and where the seed to grow it came from.

Elaine’s taste descriptions require a passel of adjectives, including mellow, complex, spicy, musky, hot, full-bodied and even explosive. 

Beyond supermarket garlic

“I never knew there were that many varieties. It’s insane,” says Katie Henderson, a dedicated garlic customer at Green Acres who claims to cook with garlic every day.  When she runs low on Green Acres garlic, she asks the Korvers to scrounge around for scraps. Even a couple of cloves will do, she says, to keep her from having to buy grocery store bulbs that she now writes off as bland.

Julie McSherry of Omaha waits every year at this time for a box of garlic from Green Acres.

“I get about 15 types. The variety is exceptional,” she says. “Pungent is a good word for it.”

Pungent is a good word for it.

— Julie McSherry, an Omaha resident who gets a yearly box of garlic from Green Acres

Jarrett Nelson says Green Acres garlic has become a favorite at the Gypsum Fire Protection District where he works with the Korvers’ son.

“I am not a garlic taste-tester expert, but I can definitely tell the difference,” he says of the many varieties he has tried and used in his firehouse meals of lasagna and carne asada. This year, he has found more recipes to showcase garlic. He also plans to roast it, store it in olive oil and turn it into a butter.

Sherrie and Scott Hamilton who own Red Fox Cellars say they also cook with it regularly. They welcome garlic wafting over to mingle with the top notes of cabernet franc and merlot at their winery.

“A lot of my customers see Bob out there working in his field and they ask us, ‘What is it that he’s doing?’” she says.

A crop with deep roots

If wine tasters wander over to talk to Bob, they can get a garlic lesson.

Garlic is one of the oldest crops tended by humans. It is believed to have evolved and spread from south central Asia and was carried around the Mediterranean and European continents by nomadic tribes.

Garlic appears in the oldest written language, Sanskrit, in writings from 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians used garlic with its loads of sulfides for food and medicine. They revered it so much they entombed garlic with their dead.

There are two subgroups of garlic — hardneck and softneck. The hardneck varieties send up a flower stalk that is known as a scape (a tasty morsel on the grill or in a pickle jar). Hardnecks do better in colder climates, and they often pack the spiciest punch.

Softneck garlic (the kind you will see in those fancy garlic braids) has no tough stem.

Beyond those neck differences, there are 13 sub-varieties of garlic. Bob holds up one called an artichoke. The name comes from the fact that the cloves resemble artichoke petals. The cloves on the outside are large, and they get smaller toward the center.

Bob has also grown sub-varieties of porcelains, purple stripes and creoles.

He didn’t do great with the latter, he says, because he failed to figure out that something called creole would do better in Southern climates.

 “I’m kind of slow sometimes. I learn some things the hard way,” Bob says, garnering an indulgent smile from Elaine.

Garlic’s future 

There are other vegetable farms around Colorado that grow garlic. The Rocky Mountain Garlic Farm near Salida grows about a quarter-acre on an agricultural operation that has gone in the opposite direction of Green Acres and pivoted to more vegetables. Several other small Colorado garlic farms have closed in recent years.

Trisha Nungester with Tagawa Gardens in Centennial says Tagawa sells about 40 varieties — mainly for seed. Their garlic comes from multiple sources, including the motherlode of U.S. garlic, Filaree Farms in Washington state. When Tagawa announces that garlic is ready for sale, there is always a line out the door with people clamoring for favorite varieties.

In terms of homegrown variety in Colorado, the Korvers take the odiferous prize.

They grouse about maybe wanting to plant less. They both have had health problems in recent years.

But their seed-saving practices say cutbacks won’t happen soon.

They are already at work picking out 300 pounds of the fattest bulbs that will be saved to seed next year’s crops.

And there is always one new garlic variety to try, one more wheelbarrow load to sort, one more giant bulb to marvel over, and one more group of kids who come to Green Acres to get a farming lesson from a librarian and a teacher who can’t drop those old habits.

Bob won’t tell many of them one of the deepest, darkest secrets of Green Acres: He really doesn’t like to eat garlic.

As tourists, commuters, ranchers and shoppers await the promised partial opening of the Blue Mesa bridge by July 4, “what-ifs” and “how-comes” continue floating around about the abrupt closure of the bridge 10 weeks ago.

The 1,500-foot-long span known as the Middle Bridge was closed when inspectors, acting on directives from the Federal Highway Administration, found a significant crack in a crucial weld on a bridge girder.

The bridge was closed to traffic that same day, creating commuter chaos among people who had to chose between detours of six or seven hours to travel between Montrose and Gunnison, a trip that takes about 75 minutes when U.S. 50 is open. Parents were separated from their school-age children, workers from their jobs and patients from their medical caregivers.

As surprising as the closure was for those U.S. 50 drivers, state and federal highway officials had known for decades that there could be problems with bridges, like Middle Bridge, that were constructed with a certain kind of high-strength steel that was welded on bridges using a technique that turned out to be faulty.

The FHWA in 1978 created a “fracture control plan” for such bridges and in 1995 made new welding methods a standard for all highway bridge construction. But the bridges stayed open in a sort of watch-and-wait mode.

In 2011, the FHWA issued a technical advisory warning about “fracture critical” bridges after the Sherman Minton Bridge over the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana suffered extensive cracking that year. The bridge was closed for more than five months for repairs.

That cracking on a major bridge sparked an awareness that bridges across the country built with the steel called T-1 might pose unique safety problems. The Middle Bridge was in that category.

The advisory to states pointed out that all bridges built with T-1 steel should be inventoried and regularly inspected using ultrasound to look inside the welds that were most prone to cracking. Those inspections identified another bridge with dangerous cracks in 2021. The Hernando de Soto Bridge across the Mississippi River in Memphis, Tennessee, had to be closed for about 2½ months for repairs.

Those major bridge closures led to more focus on T-1 steel, which turned out to be truly high-strength after it was developed in the 1960s, but to also have a previously unknown problem with brittleness. Welded joints on T-1 constructions tend to develop problems with cracking because hydrogen was introduced into the welds during construction — a practice that is no longer acceptable today. Hydrogen gas can build up in the metal of a weld, forcing breakdowns in the structure.

Nowadays, that problem is understood and mitigated with hydrogen control measures and test welds during bridge constructions.

Why was CDOT behind on inspections?

The Hernando de Soto Bridge problem prompted the Federal Highway Administration to follow its earlier advisory with a more strongly worded memorandum issued Dec. 13, 2021. That message directed all state highway departments to identify potentially problematic T-1 bridges by the end of March 2022.

Testing on those bridges and reports on the results of those tests were required to be complete by the end of March 2024.

Colorado missed those deadlines in spite of the memorandum stating, “these actions are critical to maintaining safety, avoiding similar closures of important structures, and the major disruptions that follow.” 

The highway administration granted Colorado an extension, according to a FHWA spokesperson, because federal law requires the agency to give states an opportunity to address noncompliance issues.

The spokesperson, who did not want to be identified, said “Colorado is currently doing that.”

There were reasons why Colorado slipped into noncompliance in the 2½ years since the memorandum was issued, according to Colorado Department of Transportation communications director Matt Inzeo.

The state agency initially had to wade through state and federal transportation requirements as bridge engineers went on the hunt for problematic bridges, Inzeo said. Meeting those enhanced requirements took place outside the scope of the state’s normal bridge inspection schedule.

CDOT completed an initial review of all 8,450 bridges in the state in early 2022.

After bridges that potentially used T-1 steel were identified, CDOT then had to sift through the detailed construction documentation to determine if they could be eliminated from the list that would require further testing.

That meant digging into details of how bridges were welded together and if they were constructed using the methods that are no longer considered safe. They found five potentially problematic T-1 bridges.

Further inspection showed there were three that fit the federal criteria for further action — two over Blue Mesa Reservoir and one in Bent County. The Bent County bridge is small and low to the ground and was easily and quickly inspected. It was deemed to be safe in 2023.

The Blue Mesa bridges were a whole other matter. Doing the extensive federally mandated testing required extraordinary measures for the Middle Bridge. The Middle Bridge is 1,500-feet long and has 12-foot-high girders that are as long as football fields. The bridge sits over some of the deepest water in the state.

Initially, the department had to conduct load analysis on the U.S. 50 bridges to determine what kind of weight the semitrucks, tourist trailers, timber flatbeds and regular traffic were placing on the structures. Load requirements for the bridges have increased since they were built.

A full phase of testing on the Middle Bridge was approved in September 2023. That was planned to include stripping paint and peering into the bridge structure with ultrasound devices — in the same way a doctor might examine a damaged joint.

CDOT could not do the specialized inspecting and testing in-house. It contracted with Benesch, a Denver engineering firm, for that. That took six months to get underway. Benesch was not able to inspect the critical butt welds on the bridges until April because it was not possible to carry out the testing during the bitter, blustery winters that Blue Mesa is notorious for.

The ultrasound equipment that uses gels to conduct the sound waves through the metal would not work in frigid temperatures. Workers dangling from the sides of the bridge would not be safe in winter storms.

Chaos or success?

Inspections finally began April 8. Ten days later, when a Benesch employee found the now-infamous 3-inch crack that spelled big trouble, the bridge that had stood for 61 years with its questionable construction was deemed by state and federal highway authorities to be dangerous enough to warrant an immediate closure.

Highway authorities who have seen the test results have not argued with that decision.

But critics of the response, who asked not to be identified, called CDOT’s early response “chaotic.”

CDOT brought in Kiewit Construction to handle planning and to carry out the bridge repair work as well as help with detours. Michael Baker Engineering was hired to design the bridge repairs that Kiewit is constructing.

John Cater, a division administrator for the FWHA, said even though Colorado did not meet the deadline for T-1 bridge inspections, once the problem was identified, “I think they moved pretty aggressively to address it.”

Cater noted that the Blue Mesa bridge has presented “a unique challenge” because of its size and its location over deep water.

“In some ways this is a success story,” Cater said. “The crack was found, and it was closed before anything happened.”

Inspectors for CDOT are still in search of cracks. Initial testing has been done on Blue Mesa’s Lake Fork Bridge, but more in-depth testing will not take place until after the Middle Fork Bridge, 2 miles to the west, is patched up with giant steel plates and partially opened.

CDOT Region 3 director Jason Schmidt said testing may require some shutdowns on the Lake Fork Bridge, but he expects it to move much faster using techniques learned under duress on the Middle Bridge. He said if significant cracks are found, CDOT will be ready to quickly do repairs.

The department is also getting ahead of a possible Lake Fork Bridge shutdown by preparing a county road as a detour. That road would be in addition to the county road that is serving as a detour for the Middle Bridge.

The Colorado Transportation Commission has already approved $20 million for all the testing and repairs on the two bridges as well as work on dirt-road detours. CDOT has requested another $10 million.

Once the T-1 bridges are fixed, Colorado has hundreds of other bridges in need of repairs. A Federal Highway Administration listing of poor-condition bridges shows that Colorado has 437. Another 5,370 out of 8,954 bridges in the state are considered to be only in fair condition.

“We have to continue to be vigilant,” Cater said.

Inzeo also has a silver-lining attitude toward the devastating U.S. 50 bridge closure.

“The anomalies in the welds have existed since the bridge was originally constructed, and we have 61 years of lived experience and bridge use without issues,” he said. “Still, we are grateful that the inspections have identified these issues before any incident occurred, and the fixes that are now underway will restore the ability of these bridges to carry the traffic that they did before.”

No highway authorities contacted for this article would say that — if the Middle Bridge problem had been found 13 years ago when T-1 steel welds were first definitely identified as a danger, or 2½ years ago when states were put on alert to find and fix T-1 bridges — the crippling closure could have been avoided. They are focused on being thankful that there were no calamitous failures.

One lane of U.S. 50 on the Middle Bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir could be open for intermittent traffic by July 4 if four “critical repairs” can be completed by then, state transportation director Shoshana Lew said Tuesday evening.

The repairs include using 2½-inch thick steel plates that are 30-inches wide and 27-feet long to reinforce defects in welds made when the bridge was assembled starting in April 1961.

Reopening the bridge could coincide with completion of CDOT’s Little Blue Canyon project between Montrose and Blue Mesa Reservoir. Widening, straightening and rock scaling on U.S. 50 in that area has been going on for more than three years and has required multiple closures and delays with single lane traffic

When traffic is allowed on Middle Bridge again, it will flow in one direction for a certain period of time and then flow in the other direction, possibly guided by pilot cars or flaggers. However, travel will be limited because repair work cannot be done while vehicles are driving on the bridge.

Engineers have found a total of 183 defects in welds during an intense assessment that began after the 1,500-foot-long bridge was shut down April 18 when a 3-inch crack and other anomalies were discovered during a safety inspection of high-strength steel bridges required by the Federal Highway Administration. 

Not all of the defects detected using sophisticated ultrasound equipment are considered critical. Older technologies could not identify the problems, CDOT engineers said during a routine update held in Gunnison.

The plan is to have Middle Bridge open to traffic in both directions by Halloween. Keith Stefanik, CDOT’s chief engineer, said the agency will develop a long-term replacement plan for Middle Bridge, though it may not be needed for another 25 years.

CDOT also is preparing to begin inspecting the 900-foot-long West Bridge, about 2 miles to the west, which is made from the same steel. Traffic will be running in one direction on that bridge during the inspection.

Since the abrupt shutdown of the bridge, travel between Montrose and Gunnison has been detoured over County Road 26, a gravel road that crosses federal land. More traffic is being allowed on the primitive road and now there are seven “release” times when drivers cue up on either side of the detour, waiting to follow pilot cars that drive in one direction only. 

The detour is an alternative to long drives around Blue Mesa, which can add six to seven hours of travel to a journey that typically takes just over an hour.

Locals had hoped that Kebler Pass, a short cut between Crested Butte and Delta County, would be open for Memorial Day weekend. However two snowstorms stalled the plan to clear the 30 mile road that is only partly paved and tops out at 10,007 feet.

Before a banner reading “Ongi Etorri” — “welcome” in the Basque language — Grand Junction officials, along with Basques from across Colorado, and from California came together over the weekend to celebrate a Basque handball court, the only one of its kind in Colorado and one of only a handful in the nation.

The nearly half-century-old Plaza Urrutia court has been officially established as a state historic site with its inclusion on the Colorado Register of Historic Properties. The designation for the three-sided concrete court that Basques call a fronton was approved last fall, but the official plaque was unveiled at the site Saturday.

“This is a place of belonging for this community,” Grand Junction Mayor Abe Herman said Saturday in his address to the mostly Basque crowd.

“This is just really, really important and special. It’s a prideful thing for me,” said 25-year-old Grand Junction resident Sydney Corra whose Basque mother, Itzaxo Amarica, used to bring her to Plaza Urrutia as a child. Her Basque grandparents, who came to Grand Junction from Guernica, Spain, also found a bit of home at the fronton.

If the nearly half-century-old court had been demolished as planned in the late 1990s, Corra said, “I think it would have crushed my soul.”

Instead of being destroyed to make way for a parking lot, the fronton has become the only site in Colorado officially recognizing the importance of the Basques who started coming to Colorado and Utah a century ago to herd sheep. There are now an estimated 2,200 Basques in Colorado. Very few — if any — still work at herding. Many of those who came as humble herders are now successful businesspeople, civic activists and respected philanthropists.

The late Gene Urruty was one of those. He built Plaza Urrutia on a ranch he owned. His wife, Benerita, donated the land with the fronton on it to the city after his death. The land was turned into a showcase park for Grand Junction.

Canyon View Park quickly became a busy magnet for sports, including soccer, baseball, and volleyball. The handball court which was decorated with sun rays and other Basque symbols to mimic the frontons found in many villages in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, was an incongruous and unnecessary relic in a new manicured park.

At least that’s what city officials thought at the time.

Community rose up to protect the fronton

When word got out that the fronton was going to be razed, the Basque community rose up, and with hundreds of supporters, convinced the city to save the fronton. First-generation Basque Mona Dyer, recalled at Saturday’s celebration that city workers had to shovel manure out of the edifice that had been turned into a sort of landscaping storage place for the park.

Juan Vertiz had tears in his eyes Saturday as he sat in front of a fluttering red, white and green Basque flag with the fronton behind him and the crack of pelota balls punctuating the hum of conversation around him. Pelota is the Basque version of handball, a more hardcore game that is played with rock-hard balls that have left older pelota players with leathery fingers the size of sausages.

Vertiz helped to build the fronton about a decade after he came to the Grand Valley as a teenager in 1964 to herd sheep.

“It was something we had to enjoy ourselves here. I remember playing the first game here,” he said pointing around the gathering at three other Basque men who played with him that day in 1978.

After the older Basque men gave up the demanding game, the court on the park corner remained an oddity or a mystery to some. It became a place for Saturday handball games for non-Basques. Its statewide significance was not recognized until several years ago when the president of the Euskal Extea Colorado Basque Club was driving through Grand Junction and spotted the distinct lines of the fronton.

Marie “Mayi” Berterretche Petracek organized a gathering of the club at the fronton in 2022 that drew Basques from the Front Range and from as far away as California and Mexico to celebrate the existence of a tournament-sized fronton and to play exhibition games of pelota.

National and State Register Historian Eric Newcombe read a story about the fronton celebration in The Colorado Sun and prodded the Basque community and the City of Grand Junction to make an effort to have the edifice designated as a historic site.

Dyer worked with then Grand Junction city planner Kristen Ashbeck to complete an application last summer after they secured local approvals. The History Colorado board then approved the designation.

Another larger celebration at the fronton, which is increasingly recognized as a Basque meeting place for the western United States, is slated for Sept. 21 when the Colorado Basque club will host a North American Basque Organizations meeting in Grand Junction.

Petracek said that gathering will bring more semi-professional pelota players, a Basque priest to bless Plaza Urrutia, Basque dancers from Boise, Idaho, a band and a crew to roast lambs.

As that is being planned, Ashbeck and Petracek are already on another planning track. In 2028, when Plaza Urrutia is 50 years old, it will be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ashbeck said she has retired from her 33-year job as a city planner, but I will keep working with the Basques to make sure that is completed.

“We are not finished yet,” Ashbeck said

For now, Ashbeck’s new job is being a horticulture worker for the city. That means she filled a planter near the fronton with flowers this spring. She will also be installing the new plaque recognizing Plaza Urrutia as a historic site.

The plaque created by a city that once wanted to raze the plaza now recognizes that it is “a beloved and respected symbol of the Basque culture in the Grand Valley and statewide.”