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.
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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.