3/
You need to know a couple of the clowns in this clowncar to get the picture here.
Most importantly: Mesa County Clerk & Recorder Tina Peters. Ol' Tina is currently under state and federal investigation for compromising the security of voting machines.
Peters herself accesses elections hard drive, state says
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and two others entered a secure area of the Election Division in the dark of night days before a scheduled upgrade of the system in
https://bit.ly/3APPnWh
The other main player is Sherronna Bishop, AKA America's Mom, a semi-influencer for the seditious.
Bishop is better known for (1) being Lauren Boebert's campaign manager, and (2) loving the Proud Boys.
GOP candidate's former campaign chief: Thank God for Proud Boys
The top aide to Lauren Boebert, Republican Congressional candidate from Colorado, hosted a member of the Proud Boys on a Facebook video.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gop-can ... d=73636943
After unsuccessful attempts to become a lifestyle influencer over the past decade or so, Bishop, 40, rose to local prominence in Colorado's right-wing extremist circles during the hilariously ill-fated recall attempts of 2019.
Republicans Split on Republican Senator's Anti-Recall Efforts
Fellow Republicans are not happy with the new recall reform legislation that would hold recall efforts to a higher standard.
https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2019/ ... rts/17979/
Despite the total collapse of several separate wingnut-led recall campaigns in 2019, the failed attempts served as an amazing networking opportunity for Colorado's least-hinged conservatives.
Enter Lauren Boebert.
I first noticed Lauren Boebert during the 2019 recalls, when she messaged multiple sockpuppet accounts I use to monitor the worst parts of Facebook. I realized fairly quickly that she was messaging everyone who was active in the recall groups...and that it was a good idea.
I don't know if Bishop and Boebert knew each other before 2019, but the pro-recall organizing brought them both a lot of followers. Soon, the two linked up with Sherronna as Lauren's campaign manager, able to leverage Sherronna's audience of malcontents for Lauren's campaign.
9/
The rest of that primary is history: very few people saw it coming, but Lauren Boebert, the tiny, gun-toting lady who had slid into everyone's DMs, ousted Scott Tipton.
Then she--in the most charitable terms possible--continued to be herself.
But this is all background.
10/
FAST FORWARD to 2021. Boebert's goons attack the Capitol on 1/6, Sherronna Bishop continues to gain followers by peddling The Big Lie, and the brain worms continue to feed and grow.
This spring Bishop helped to organize the CO chapter of USEIP, the US Election Integrity Project. (the USEIP is a silly project where The Wingnuts
go door-to-door to somehow prove election fraud? It's likely an effort to build lists of Even More Wingnuts, and it's tangential to this story, but esteemed Man About Town @emaulbetsch wrote about it)
Colorado Election Conspiracy Group Going Door-to-Door in Search of 'Phantom Ballots'
Members of a QAnon-linked election fraud conspiracy group -- some of whom are armed -- are knocking on doors of voters across Colorado, attempting to find
https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2021/ ... ots/38866/
Ostensibly as part of USEIP--but really as part of a documented, years-long addiction to live streaming her every delusional thought--Sherronna has been live-streaming about election integrity all summer.
That's the material I went back and looked at, and hoo boy.
Last week, I tweeted about a Zoom recording I was sent on June 2nd, of a conversation that occurred on June 1st. In that call, Bishop leaned heavily on implications that like-minded County Clerks could be useful in the fight to "prove" election fraud.
For context, we now know that Tina Peters' breach of the Mesa County voting systems happened on or around May 25, 2021.
After-hours access of Mesa County election equipment revealed in Griswold investigation - Colorado Newsline
The Mesa County clerk and others entered a secure room that contained county election equipment after normal work hours, investigators say.
https://coloradonewsline.com/briefs/aft ... stigation/
While a lot of Bishop's comments in the video from June 1st seem to imply in retrospect that she knew what Peters had done, those implications don't hold a candle to hints Bishop dropped in later videos.
The first eyebrow-raising line I stumbled across in my re-checking of these videos this week came in a line from Bishop's July 15 video about "election integrity."
At one point in the video, after talking about how Colorado's elections were rigged, Bishop knowingly says: Image
“We’ve been fortunate to find some elected officials who have not forgotten their oath of office and are partnering with us and are standing with us” Bishop says these officials are helping “hold the line for the Constitution.”
The video is still up:
https://bit.ly/3m8u9yU
As a general rule of thumb, no elected officials should be "partnering with" a group that is attempting to overthrow an awful election. Just a little pro tip.
Who could she possibly mean?
This is as good a time as any to mention that Sherronna Bishop and Tina Peters go way back. In fact, Sherronna endorsed Peters for Mesa County Clerk & Recorder, and had her on one of her live streams to promote Peters' candidacy in 2018. ImageImage
The July 15th video, and that line about elected officials working with Bishop's Whackobirds, got my ears perked up enough to keep going back through the archive to see if she ever let the mask slip a little bit further.
And of course she did.
On June 6, Bishop posted a doozy of a video.
This is a good time to remind you that I'm not a lawyer, the following view is mine alone, not that of my yada yada, and is only a strong working theory, but:
By June 6th, Bishop almost certainly knew what Peters had done.
Bear with me for excerpts: Sherronna Bishop does not love speaking in a linear fashion, so accurate transcription is going to eat up my character count very quickly.
For those who can't abide abbreviations, the original video is still live:
Log in or sign up to view
See posts, photos and more on Facebook.
In the video, Bishop lays out the substance of the specific conspiracy theory that she, and presumably Peters, were operating on:
Dominion and the CO SOS, according to Bishop, were attempting to illegally push a software update. toDominion voting machines, which would...
...destroy or conceal or obfuscate all of the "evidence" of how the 2020 election was "stolen."
Bishop dedicates a large portion of the video to exhorting her followers to call their local county clerks and ask them to postpone the software update until August.
Bishop claims that the software update violates federal law, somehow.
"We haven't been allowed to touch the machines," she repeatedly, bizarrely, complains. Image
So, in the minds of this right-wing fringe, the Dominion software update to Colorado voting machines was going to destroy their only chance to PROVE that the election was "stolen."
Well, these patriots couldn't let that happen.
Bishop, in the video, says "we elect our clerk & recorder to protect our vote, but they really can’t check and see if this voting tabulating machine is really doing just only the voting tabulating job it was given."
If only some brave, patriotic clerk was willing to risk it all.
Bishop continues, almost incoherently: "When you think about all of the stories we have heard...all the things that are being proven, Maricopa County, come on you guys, 250,000 votes, I mean come on, they’re cheating. And we can't do a forensic audit on these machines." Image
Bishop then pivots to deliver some weird version of hope to her weird version of an audience:
"We need to have access to these machines, see what’s on there, THEN [Dominion] can do their stuff and maybe we can see what it looks like after they’re done."
Last week, Tina Peters and Sherronna Bishop both appeared as guests at Mike Lindell's "Cyber Symposium," AKA Pillow Pal's Den of Delusions. On stage, Tina Peters framed her actions in a way *remarkably* similar to how Bishop did on June 6th, two months before the news broke. Image
The video of these kooks at the Pillow Fight or whatever is more than an hour long, but the rationale boils down to: Peters needed to make a "before and after" image of the voting machine hard drives so that she could PROVE that the Dominion update erased data.
To recap that last part:
- on May 25, Peters compromised the voting system
- on June 6, Bishop opined that some valiant clerk needed to "have access to these machines, see what’s on there, then they can do their stuff and maybe we can see what it looks like after they’re done"
- last week, we learned that Tina Peters is under investigation for doing exactly what Bishop suggested
- on Aug 10, both Bishop and Peters essentially admit guilt at Pillowpalooza '21 but frame it as a victory lap.
So my questions are: who else knew? who else helped?
Were leaders in the @cologop aware of the plot? After all, Party vice chair Priscilla Rahn was a participant in the June 1st call.
And most of all, why was Lauren Boebert's campaign manager seemingly conspiring to tamper with election equipment?
I wish I had more for you now, but I don't.
In the end, these people were so bought-in to such a self-evidently ludicrous, preposterous, and baseless set of conspiracy theories that they decided to take actions which could carry legitimate legal consequences.
Have fun, y'all.
(badly threaded)
Unroll available on Thread Reader