A video posted online by former Overstock CEO -- and occasional Donald Trump adviser -- Patrick Byrnes may have placed embattled Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters in greater legal peril.
According to a report from the Daily Beast's Kelly Weill, Peters is already under the gun over accusations that she and one of her aides stole a local man’s identity and then proceeded to break into county voting machines, overseen by her office and then shared the data with "conspiracy theorists like Ron Watkins and Mike Lindell, who falsely claimed that it showed election malfeasance."
That, in turn, led Peters to be indicted by a grand jury earlier in the month on "felony charges of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of identity theft, as well as the misdemeanors of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state."
According to the Beast report, Byrnes' video contained an admission that will likely help prosecutors make their case when they go to trial.
As Weill wrote, "Byrne is an active participant in the Stop The Steal movement, supporting and financing efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 election. He reportedly acted as an unofficial adviser to Donald Trump in Dec. 2020, when he and three other people gave Trump a draft version of an executive order that would have directed the Secretary of Defense to seize voting machines," adding, "In his Wednesday video, Byrne appears to reveal inside information from the Mesa County breach, much of it supporting the charges against Peters. Byrne even claims to have FaceTimed with an unnamed man who was posing as a county worker while examining voting machines."
The report goes on to state that Byrne described the break-in, adding, "They gave him some county credentials or something and he dressed up like a little nerd and he went in and he took an image, a forensic image that could be producible in court.”
The report suggests that the man was Conan James Hayes, with the Beast report stating, "Metadata from the Mesa County leak shows that a person logged into the voting machines using the initials 'cjh.' During a presentation about the Mesa County data at a 'cyber symposium' on election fraud last summer, conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins claimed that 'Conan James Hayes may have taken, without authorization, the actual hard drives from the Mesa County [Clerk].' Hayes and Watkins had previously discussed election fraud conspiracy theories on Twitter, now-deleted tweets show."
You can read more here.
