Jurors deliberating in case of Colorado clerk Tina Peters in election computer system breach

DENVER (AP) — Prosecutors on Monday urged jurors to convict former Colorado clerk Tina Peters in a security breach of her county’s election computer system, saying she deceived government employees so she could work with outsiders affiliated with MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists, to become famous.

In closing arguments at Tina Peters’ trial, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed a man posing as a county employee to take images of the election system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.

Drake said Peters observed the update so she could become the “hero” and appear at Lindell’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a few months later. Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump.

“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage,” said Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

Drake has been working for the district attorney in Mesa County, a largely Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.

Before jurors began deliberations, the defense told them that Peters had not committed any crimes and only wanted to preserve election records after the county would not allow her to have one of its technology experts present at the software update.

Defense lawyer John Case said Peters had to preserve records to access the voting system to find out things like whether anyone from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine while ballots were being counted.

“And thank God she did.