Colorado election denier asks Supreme Court to halt trial on election security breach charges

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — Tina Peters — the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, and a prominent 2020 election denier — asked the Supreme Court on Friday to halt her upcoming trial on charges stemming from her alleged involvement in a security breach at the county’s election offices in 2021.

Peters has pleaded not guilty to 10 state charges — including three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant; one felony account of criminal impersonation; two felony counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation; one felony count of identity theft; and misdemeanor counts for first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with requirements of the Colorado secretary of state — after an apparent security breach in Mesa County’s elections office in May 2021.

The criminal investigation into the clerk’s office began after Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, accused Peters and her deputies of facilitating the 2021 security breach. The breach resulted in confidential voting machine logins and forensic images of their hard drives being published in a QAnon-affiliated Telegram channel in early August 2021.

The Colorado breach was one of several incidents after 2020 where allies of former President Donald Trump tampered with election systems in hopes of proving his voter fraud claims. Loosely affiliated groups of Trump supporters orchestrated similar breaches in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and others are facing charges.

Peters’ trial is set to begin on July 29.

Two lower courts have rejected Peters’ attempt to throw out the criminal case. Peters has argued that she was acting “pursuant to an express federal order to preserve election records” and is therefore immune from prosecution.

“No serious argument, supported by any credible evidence, has been advanced that Ms. Peters’ conduct was unreasonable or unnecessary to fulfill her federal duty to preserve election records,” her attorneys told the Supreme Court, adding that the state indictment against her is a “transparently punitive move to criminalize her efforts to comply with federal law.”

Peters is asking the high court to pause the impending trial so they can file a more fulsome appeal to the justices. It’s possible that the court will set a briefing schedule in the coming days as it considers her request to halt the state court proceedings.

Peters was sentenced in April 2023 to four months of home detention after being found guilty of obstructing a government operation in a separate case.

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CNN’s Marshall Cohen and Jeremy Harlan contributed to this report.