More than three years after Tina Peters took part in a scheme to prove a false theory of fraud in her own elections office, the former Mesa County clerk has been held to account. As of this week, Peters is a felon. She gave a California man access to some of the most sensitive data on her county’s election machines and deceived state public officials about his identity.
A Grand Junction jury found that the 68-year-old Republican election denier’s actions constituted serious crimes and pronounced her guilty on seven counts . Peters is Colorado’s most notorious “big lie” believer, and her place in the firmament of MAGA bandits was cemented by national press attention and her association with prominent election conspiracists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell . This week’s verdict advances the country’s reckoning with the harm that came from misinformation around the 2020 election and former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won.
It joins the suspension in May of former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis’ law license in Colorado, as well as the criminal prosecution of those accused of interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf around the country, in reassuring Americans that their institutions, in some cases, are still capable of impartial feats of democracy and justice. And there is reason to believe more criminal charges could come Peters’ way. GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX What happened in Mesa County has been the subject of a yearslong federal investigation on top of the local district attorney’s investigation that brought Peters to trial in recent weeks.
Federal authorities have communicated very little about the case, but we know the federal probe persisted to this year from other sources. It started in 2021, when FBI agents executed search warrants at Peters’ home and the homes of several of her associates, including conspiracist Sherronna Bishop, who during the trial was portrayed as a Peters go-between for national election-denying operators. In September 2022, FBI agents in Minnesota working on the Mesa County investigation seized Lindell’s phone .
As late as January, Peters’ lawyers in a document filed with the U.S. appellate court in Denver said, “The Department of Justice, including the FBI, has continued its investigation to determine if any federal crime had been committed by Peters.
” An FBI spokesperson this week declined to comment on the case, as did a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver.
There appear to be several potential criminal charges of interest to federal authorities, as well as several possible targets. The state case against Peters, brought by Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, largely focused on her dishonesty, such as when she presented to state election officials the California man, conspiracist Conan Hayes, as Gerald Wood , a Fruita resident who had been approved to enter secure elections areas in Peters’ office. Peters allowed Hayes, who used Wood’s access badge, into the secure area in May 2021.
A substantial amount of sensitive data from election system computers then made it into the hands of unauthorized people, and some of it was posted on the internet. The Mesa County grand jury indictment that led to Peters’ conviction implies that prosecutors thought computer crimes had occurred. “The public dissemination of this sensitive information constituted an unauthorized data breach,” the indictment said.
“The compromised sensitive data included images depicting a proprietary hard drive with unlawfully downloaded/imaged software from Mesa County’s election management server’s hard drive.” But while the state prosecution avoided potential culpability related to computer activity in the charges it brought, it can’t be ruled out as the basis for possible federal allegations. We have clues about how federal authorities view the matter.
The FBI’s search warrants for Bishop and Lindell both pointed to parts of federal law related to intentional damage to a protected computer and conspiracy to cause intentional damage to a protected computer. The warrants also variously cite identity theft, conspiracy to commit identity theft, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and the Lindell search warrant mentions as “co-conspirators” Peters, Bishop, Hayes, Lindell and others. Dan Hartman, an attorney for Peters, told Newsline this week that he does not expect federal charges to emerge for his client.
But even if Peters or others who were involved in the Mesa County election security breach face federal charges, no degree of accountability in the case can satisfy the nation’s need for justice so long as the person ultimately responsible goes unpunished. What occurred in Peters’ election office can be traced directly back to the early morning hours after Election Day 2020 at the White House , when Trump said, “This is a fraud on the American public ..
. Frankly, we did win this election.” The “big lie” was born at that moment, leading to incalculable legal and political wreckage, including the Jan.
6 insurrection, that will only deepen as the next presidential election approaches. America’s institutions might have proved effective in checking some of Trump’s followers, but they have crumbled before Trump himself. The verdict achieved in Mesa County this week is a triumph for the community.
But Peters played only a small part in a much larger offense for which accountability has proved elusive. SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST. Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: [email protected] .
Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and X . OKLAHOMA CITY — A judge presiding over the major embezzlement case against the co-founders of Epic Charter School faces a call to recuse, with a defense attorney accusing her of being an “advocate for the prosecution.” District Judge Susan Stallings denied the request for her disqualification during a hearing Thursday at the Oklahoma County Courthouse.
Both she and prosecutors from the Attorney General’s Office disagreed with the defense’s argument that she is unable to be impartial. “The court finds there were a lot of assumptions made but no facts,” Stallings said. Defense attorney Joe White, who filed the motion, said he intends to appeal Stallings’ decision.
First, the matter would come before the chief judge in Oklahoma County, a responsibility the district judges share on a rotating basis. Then, if rejected again, White could raise it to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. It’s not uncommon for a judge to receive a request to recuse, but most are resolved in private.
Far fewer disqualifications are ever disputed in a public hearing. White said Stallings should be disqualified because of her work history at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, which investigated Epic and filed charges against the school’s co-founders. Stallings is a former Oklahoma County prosecutor who led the DA’s Domestic Violence Unit.
“You may well have been a participant at least in hearing information about the Epic case,” White told the judge during the hearing. “There is reasonable evidence, reasonable reasons that I question your impartiality. What matters not is the reality of bias but its appearance.
” Stallings said she had no knowledge of the Epic investigation until the charges were filed years after she left the DA’s office. The DA’s office charged Epic’s co-founders, Ben Harris and David Chaney, in 2022 with racketeering and a litany of financial crimes, accusing the defendants of creating a complex scheme to enrich themselves with millions of public education funds. Harris and Chaney deny ever misusing taxpayer dollars.
The Attorney General’s Office has since taken over prosecution of the case. Epic’s former chief financial officer, Josh Brock, faces many of the same charges as Harris and Chaney. He has since agreed to testify against the co-founders in exchange for a plea deal that would guarantee him no prison time.
Although more than two years have passed, multiple delays have kept the court proceedings in their early stages. A weeklong preliminary hearing in March laid out the evidence against Harris and Chaney, but a week wasn’t enough to get through all the witness testimony. Special judge Jason Glidewell handled the preliminary hearing.
He would decide whether prosecutors have established enough probable cause for the case to continue to trial with Stallings, who is Glidewell’s superior. The preliminary hearing was set to resume in May, but it was stalled again by a motion to disqualify Chaney’s attorney , Gary Wood. Brock’s attorneys said Wood used to represent their client and therefore should be barred from cross-examining him.
Wood denies ever representing Brock. In an unexpected turn of events, Stallings decided to handle Wood’s disqualification hearing herself, rather than the special judge overseeing the preliminary hearing. White, who represents Harris, said Stallings’ work history came to light during meetings leading up to Wood’s hearing.
He said she should have disclosed the information sooner. The attempt to force Stallings off the case adds another delay to an already stalled case. It remains unclear when the preliminary hearing will resume or when the request for Wood’s disqualification will be resolved.
White complained Stallings can’t remain unbiased in Wood’s disqualification hearing when her old boss, former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, could be called as a witness. Prater’s former first assistant, Jimmy Harmon, said there is “zero” basis to remove Stallings and called White’s complaints an attempt at “judge shopping.” Now the head of the attorney general’s criminal division, Harmon said any information about the Epic investigation stayed between himself and the DA.
He said Stallings wouldn’t have known any details because team leaders didn’t talk in front of each other about ongoing, sensitive investigations. “That’s not the way Mr. Prater ran his office,” Harmon said during Thursday’s court hearing.
White also contended that Harmon revealed details of confidential negotiations between Prater and Wood — information that he says now spoils the judge’s ability to be impartial. The information was disclosed in a witness list Harmon filed for the hearing on Wood’s disqualification. The witness list states Prater would testify that Wood attempted to negotiate a settlement agreement on behalf of Harris, Chaney and Brock.
The settlement, which never ended up happening, would involve the defendants paying “a significant sum up-front in restitution” in exchange for no criminal charges being filed, the witness document states. The fact that Stallings is now aware of this information is disqualifying and “reeks of bias,” White said. Prater declined to comment on Stallings’ and Wood’s disqualification proceedings.
“I believe it’s appropriate for any information about the Epic case to come out at future hearings in open court,” he told Oklahoma Voice. SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST. GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: [email protected] .
Follow Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and X . WASHINGTON — Democratic and left-leaning youth organizing groups have seized on a new opportunity to rally younger voters now that Vice President Kamala Harris is their party’s presidential nominee. Young adult voters — including millions of Gen Zers — could be pivotal in determining the outcome of the race in which the 59-year-old Democrat vies for the Oval Office against former President Donald Trump , 78, the GOP presidential nominee.
Members of Gen Z eligible to vote are 18 to 27 years old this year. These groups say young voters are excited to possibly elect someone who more closely represents their demographics, as Harris would be the first woman to serve as president, the second Black president and the first president of South Asian descent. About 45% of the Gen Z generation eligible to vote are young people of color, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Democrats nominated Harris after President Joe Biden , 81, gave up his reelection bid following a disastrous performance in a June 27 debate and intense pressure on him to drop out. The organizing groups are also highlighting Harris’ connection with young people on issues that have historically been important to this demographic, such as protecting reproductive rights and climate action. With less than three months to go until Election Day, these groups are in full swing as they target battleground states in which the presidential contest has historically been particularly close and utilize their state and local chapters for youth voter outreach.
Kati Durkin, western vice president of Young Democrats of America, said they have a “pretty targeted campaign plan” that narrows in on traditional swing states — such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin— to reach out to YDA members in those states and help members contact their peers. “We’re really looking at: How do we mobilize the young vote using our network of chartered units across the country? So how do we get in there and go tell folks on a college campus in Nevada, ‘Hey, here’s how you register to vote, here’s why voting is so important and here’s why we’re really excited about Vice President Harris’?” YDA, directly affiliated with the Democratic Party, is the largest youth-led, partisan political organization in the country and has over 20,000 members across all 50 states. Durkin said the group makes sure that “as our folks on the ground are doing the work, we are bringing in the people from the Washingtons and the New Yorks of the country and getting them to help make calls in a state like Nevada, but also making sure that, as the DNC does youth-targeted outreach, we’re bringing our members to that, we’re helping with that infrastructure.
” Similarly, College Democrats of America — the official collegiate arm of the Democratic National Committee — communicates with its local chapters that are working on the ground in their respective areas to get out the vote. “We’ve seen a lot of local organizations really do a lot of heavy lifting, especially in districts that might be historically red, to get the youth vote out, make sure that people on their campuses or in their states are actively registered to vote (and) are excited about voting,” Gia Iyer, deputy communications director for CDA, told States Newsroom. CDA is also collaborating with other youth organizations to get their messaging spread beyond the confines of who their individual accounts follow on social media.
“It’s a lot of just outreach and making sure that we can get as many young people to be excited about this election,” Iyer said. Shortly after Harris announced her intent to win the Democratic nomination, a coalition of youth organizing groups, including YDA and CDA, endorsed Harris. “As a champion of reproductive freedom, climate action, economic justice, and gun violence prevention, Vice President Harris is uniquely equipped to build a coalition of young voters who will lead her to victory,” 17 youth and advocacy groups said in a late July statement .
The organizations highlighted Harris’ historic presidency if elected, as she would be the “first woman, first Asian American, and second Black president.” “As members of the most diverse generation in our nation’s history, a Kamala Harris presidency would be one in which we see ourselves,” the coalition said. Voters of Tomorrow — one of those 17 organizing groups backing Harris — had more people apply to join its chapter network and more volunteer sign-ups in the three days after Harris’ announcement than it did in the two months prior.
The left-leaning organization aims to increase youth voter turnout and has a chapter network across more than 20 states. Part of the group’s key efforts, according to deputy press secretary Jessica Siles, include running an organizing boot camp to train young people and having weekly text banks and phone banks. Siles said the group’s chapter network “will also be organizing on different college campuses, whether that’s voter registration drives or town halls with local candidates, just trying to meet young people where they’re at, whether that’s on a campus or online, and trying to get them the resources they need to protect our future.
” Recent polling shows Harris holding a lead over Trump, particularly among young voters. In a Morning Consult poll conducted Aug. 9-11, 48% of voters ages 18-34 say they would choose Harris, compared to 41% who would pick Trump.
Durkin of YDA said “not only is (Harris) the right candidate for the job, but she has generated so much excitement. I have not seen it in years, I mean just this morning, my friend was texting me: ‘Is this what hope feels like?’” Harris is “somebody that has put her effort, historically, into backing up her values, which are our values, and showing up for young people, and I think that is a lot of what’s generating this excitement,” Durkin added. Minnesota Gov.
Tim Walz , whom Harris tapped to be her running mate, has also generated enthusiasm from young voters. Iyer of CDA said Harris is “really catering to a younger, more progressive audience, which is great,” adding that “Walz, himself, is an incredible governor who’s done great things for people across his state, and it’s just a really great combination to see someone who actually is advocating for issues that matter to young Democrats, like the members of CDA.” Though Harris is gaining momentum among young voters, pro-Palestinian organizers are putting pressure on both the Biden administration and Harris, as she campaigns for the presidency, to enact an arms embargo on Israel .
It’s not yet clear how much of an effect opposition to the Israel-Hamas war may have on turnout among young Democrats. The “Not Another Bomb” national campaign is the latest initiative from the Uncommitted National Movement , where a wide swath of organizers, including young and progressive voters, have protested Biden’s policies regarding the Israel-Hamas war. Organizers are urging Harris to “shift away from President Biden’s disastrous policy on Gaza,” saying a “call for a ceasefire and arms embargo is a moral and human imperative.
” Activists are also holding a “Not Another Bomb Day of Action,” with rallies across the country during the weekend leading up to the Democratic National Convention. Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence.
Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: [email protected] . Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X .
Twenty-two years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the era in which he and I both grew up, when the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich ran between 74 and 90 percent. Back then most business people avoided politics, preferring to stick to running their companies; in large part this was because when the rich seized political control of America in the Roaring 20s they crashed the economy so bad they were shamed into staying out of the political arena. Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.
By 1980, the middle-class encompassed as much as 55 to 60% of us, depending on whose numbers you’re using. Today it is well down in the 40s. This middle class paradise (at least for white people) came about following the Republican Great Depression because President Roosevelt imposed a 90 percent top income tax bracket after about $2 million/year in today’s money, which helped build that extraordinary middle class of the 1940s-1980s era.
In the four-plus decades since Ronald Reagan and his Republicans turned America’s tax code on its head and transformed the merely well-off into the morbidly rich, things have changed a lot. Today, the world’s richest man buys the world’s largest social media site just to promote his own social and political biases. The world’s second richest man shot himself into outer space on a penis-shaped rocket after buying America’s second largest newspaper, which now regularly scolds Democrats.
And the Australian billionaire Murdoch dynasty daily pumps political and cultural poison into the homes of millions of Americans, producing billions in profits while elevating and keeping naked fascists’ political power. While five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing political bribery accounts for some of this, the explosion of great wealth at the top, and homelessness and poverty at the bottom, flow almost exclusively from the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts. Thus, there are three primary reasons why we must raise the top tax rates on corporations and the morbidly rich: — Low income taxes at the top encourage oligarchy, where politicians become mere front men for great wealth and democracy is left in the dust.
— Low income taxes at the top encourage an explosion of wealth among the already-rich, accompanied by a collapse of the middle class. — Low income taxes at the top deprive government of the revenue it needs to maintain the foundations of life for small businesses and working class people. Back in the 1935-1981 era, when corporate taxes topped out at 48% and the top personal income tax bracket ran between 74% and 91%, CEOs only took out of their companies at most 30 times what they paid their workers.
(Today it’s often hundreds or thousands of times what workers make.) When Reagan came into office in 1981, there were only 13 billionaires in America. Most had inherited much of their initial money.
The American middle class was growing faster than any other time in world history, and it was government policies protecting working people and small businesses (particularly high taxes on the very rich) that facilitated much of that growth. Americans understood, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said : America chose democracy, and elected FDR to the White House four times, then followed that with Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy all who advocated and maintained that top 91% personal and 48% corporate income tax rate. LBJ dropped it to 74% (actually raising taxes on rich people because he closed so many loopholes), and it stayed there through the administrations of Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
Throughout those 50+ years, Congress passed laws that reflected what the average working people of our nation wanted while the nation’s debt continue to decline to a mere $800 billion — $0.8 trillion — when Ronald Reagan came into office. We paid for all of these with income and FICA taxes: Social Security the minimum wage unemployment insurance world class public schools nonprofit requirements for hospitals and health insurance companies free to very inexpensive state colleges the right to unionize civil rights and voting rights legislation publicly-owned utilities new highways and airports quality mass transit anti-trust laws to maintain competition and protect small businesses Medicare The EPA Medicaid school lunch programs and “food stamps” workplace nondiscrimination for women and racial minorities tax-deductibility for interest payments on car loans and credit cards federal deposit insurance to protect people from bank failures Head Start literally hundreds of laws that protected consumers and the environment from corporate predation and dangerous products.
As Michael Hiltzik notes in his book The New Deal: A Modern History , just one of FDR’s programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), used that top 91% personal and 48% corporate income tax bracket to rebuild America from top to bottom: Republicans, representing the interests of the morbidly rich, opposed all of it. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when he cut the top tax rate down to 27%, the top income tax bracket has so collapsed and been shot-through with holes that the average billionaire is paying somewhere between 3 and 8 percent tax on his income. America’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, paid less than 1 percent .
When that revenue shrank under tax cuts from Reagan, Bush, and Trump, so did many of the programs listed above. But an even worse side-effect of cutting the top tax rates has been the explosion of great wealth at the top that has directly pushed the collapse of the American middle class and the weakening of American democracy. Congress no longer passes legislation the majority of Americans want: the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporate “persons” and the new billionaires created after Reagan’s tax cuts could own their very own politicians and judges, and those wholly owned politicians and judges, in gratitude, could block anything of consequence that might require new taxes.
This has led to widespread cynicism and political disengagement by working class people, which has become a dagger to the heart of democracy. The middle class has fallen from about two-thirds of us to fewer than half of us, and even at that it takes two incomes to maintain a lifestyle a single income could support before Reagan. As the headline at TIME Magazine reads : Inequality has exploded: the morbidly rich now have so much cash slopping around that they’re using their pocket change to compete on who has the largest mega-yacht, who can throw the most money into politics, and to build luxury survivalist bunkers that resemble small underground cities.
Which brings us back to Brandeis’ assertion. With the election of 1980, Americans — most unknowingly — chose great wealth over democracy, oligarchy over a middle class, billionaires over working people. As working class Americans got poorer and poorer, the GOP had to come up with increasingly outrageous pitches to keep their votes.
Attacking racial minorities and women in the workplace (“Feminazis”) worked well for Republicans for the better part of the first 20 years, and in the past 20 years they added Muslims, immigrants, and trans people to their hate-acceptable hit list. Singling groups out for violence this year, they’ve most recently added journalists and elected Democrats to their list. Now they’re increasingly relying on Qanon conspiracists, neo-Nazis, religious fanatics, anti-abortion/anti-woman incel freaks, and conspiracy nuts to fill out the edges of the voting bloc that keeps them in power.
Which puts the survival of our democratic republic itself at risk. We’re following a path Russia trod in the late 1990s when, pressured by George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, they slashed taxes and regulation and used Milton Friedman’s neoliberal “shock therapy” to sell off and privatize huge swatches of the government’s functions. And the American oligarchs’ pet politicians on the right are sounding more and more like Putin every day, from banning books to trashing LGBTQ + folks to promoting a white “Christian” ethnostate to raving about minority immigrants and turning their backs on democracies like Ukraine .
Democrats and the Biden administration tried this past year to re-strengthen the American middle class, promoting a new top income tax bracket on those whose net worth exceeds $100 million. It’s a start — although Republicans successfully blocked it for the moment — but it’s nothing close to what will be necessary to restore a functioning democracy and a vibrant middle class. And Republicans in Congress continue to prevent things average Americans want and countries like Canada , Australia, and all of Europe already have, with free or affordable college and medical care at the top of that list.
It’s beyond time for America’s morbidly rich and biggest corporations to go back to doing business and making money, rather than using their great wealth to buy politicians, judges, and public opinion. To become good citizens again, rather than playing the role of political kingmakers in an anti-democratic oligarchy. That will require overturning Citizens United, reinstating campaign contribution limits , and raising income taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations back to at least the 74 percent they were at when Reagan took office and began his infamous War On Working PeopleTM .
While that’s going to be a hell of a lift if Democrats can seize control of DC this fall, it’s the first step to unwinding the American Oligarchy that Reaganism has created. Without it, we could easily see more decades of plutocracy with cranky billionaires and their monopolies eventually controlling every aspect of our lives..
