What It Comes To Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Click for soundtrack apropos headbanging against the desk. One way of putting it, per David Gilbert↱ at Vice, would be to say, "The Stop the Steal-QAnon-MAGA-8chan singularity has been achieved in Colorado." The detail: A Colorado election official who's a fervent supporter of Trump's Big Lie is now being accused of compromising her county's voting machines and allowing information to be leaked to one of QAnon's biggest promoters, who shared it to the world this week. In May, Tina Peters, county clerk in Mesa, Colorado, allegedly ordered county officials to turn off surveillance cameras that were monitoring election equipment. Peters then allowed someone to steal sensitive election data, as well as film a Dominion Voting Systems Corp. employee updating the election system software, according to Colorado's Secretary of State Jena Griswold. When Griswold found out about the leak earlier this week, she sent officials to Peters' office on Tuesday to find out what, exactly, was going on. Peters was nowhere to be found, but hours later she turned up on stage at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's bogus Cyber Symposium conference, where QAnon promoter and 8chan administrator Ron Watkins shared the very data stolen from Mesa County with the entire world. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was unequivocal: "To be clear, the Mesa County Clerk allowed a security breach, and by all evidence at this point, assisted it." It's all very strange; as Gilbert explains, "in addition to Peters, Lindell, and Watkins, this story also includes a millionaire pro surfer-turned-election fraud conspiracist, the lawyer who represents Seth Rich-conspiracist Ed Butosky, Rep. Lauren Boebert's campaign manager, and duck sounds." The basic story is that on two dates, May 23 and 26, someone accessed a voting machine and, according ot Gilbert was able to download images of the device's hard drives. In between those two dates, on May 25, Dominion employees visited Mesa County to conduct what is known as a “trusted build”—effectively an update to the machine's software that sees the entire system wiped before a version of the operating system known to be safe is reinstalled. That process is highly regulated, and state election rules mandate that only staff from Mesa County, the Secretary of State's office and Dominion may be present in the room when it is happening. On the day, Peters' staff introduced a man called Gerard Wood, and told Griswold's representatives that he was a member of their staff. But, as Peters' office later admitted, he wasn't. In fact, no one knows who Gerard Wood is. But whoever the person was, while he was inside the room when the installation was happening, and he captured video footage of the machines being updated. Over a month later, on August 2, the video was posted to Watkins' hugely popular Telegram channel, with the former 8chan administrator claiming that the video was provided by a “whistleblower,” and showed evidence that the machines can be remotely administered. Of course there's no evidence of that happening, and Watkins' video was quickly debunked by cyber security experts. Watkins also asked his followers to download and share the video, but those who did found it contained a virus that infected their phones and computers. First, it's not funny; this is the real deal. To the other, liberals do sometimes wonder about how these things play out; like the decade of right-wing bawling about "vote fraud", which was rare enough to play up dubious cases in which Democratic voters were found to have broken the rules, though the same period saw actual conservative election officials and party hands voting illegally in ways that were much more clearly wrong, like actually voting in the place of dead relatives. Kind of like it was Republican voter reg firms that turned out to be destroying voter reg forms according to partisan declaration. Still, though, while Watkins told viewers he was careful with his redactions because, "a minor slip-up could potentially dox the whistleblower", and it was precisely that, according to Gilbert, that did it, "an image showing a spreadsheet of passwords for accessing election equipment", and as "the passwords are managed by the state, so Griswold's office was quickly able to identify the leak as coming from Mesa County". Earlier this month, Griswold ordered inspection of the Mesa County system, "But when the officials arrived on Tuesday, Peters was already on her way to South Dakota, where she was the headline guest on day one of Lindell's conference." Her appearance went about as we might expect; as Lindell's Chinese-hacker conspiracy theory wasn't working out, he turned to Peters, who apparently made up a story about her staff being forbidden access to the room during the inspection, and described a politically motivated "raid". Gilbert observes, "Even the GOP-dominated Colorado County Clerks Association supports the investigation into one of the group's own members." Matt Crane, a Republican who heads the association, slammed Peters for the role she has played in undermining trust in the electoral process. “As an election official, she has to be even that much more careful so as to not erode public trust,” Crane said during Thursday's press conference. “Standing here today, I wish that was the extent of it. Obviously the damage done to public trust by her far exceeds anything that she put on Twitter.” Despite appearing several times on stage during Lindell's three-day event, Peters never provided evidence to back up her claims of election fraud. That evidence was supposed to come from Watkins, who checked in from Sapporo, Japan. "And what evidence did Watkins have?" Gilbert asks. "As it turns out, he had the disk images taken from the Mesa County machines on May 23 and May 26." And then Watkins apparently got a call from his attorney, Ty Clevenger, telling him to stop showing the files. As it is, the 8chan administrator claims to have received the files from a right-wing activist and Proud Boys supporter who previously served as campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO3). And then, for whatever reason, Watkins identified former pro surfer Conan Hayes, who has found new celebrity, of a sort, tweeting election conspiracies. Gilbert explains: He has worked on an election audit in Antrim County and has suggested on social media he was in Phoenix where the Arizona audit is currently taking place. He also has links to Doug Logan, the Cyber Ninja CEO who is currently running the sham audit in Maricopa County. Further evidence that Hayes was the person who captured the images was provided by cyber security experts tracking this situation, who found Hayes’ initials in the downloaded files: Clevenger confirmed to VICE News on Thursday that it was in fact Hayes who had provided the data from Mesa County to Watkins. What Clevenger, who represented the Seth-Rich conspiracy theorist Ed Buttosky, was not able to say for certain was if it was Hayes who also provided the video clip to Watkins, who Gerard Wood was, or if, as some open sources investigators tracking this situation believe, that Hayes and Wood are in fact the same person. The only person who seems to be able to clarify this is Peters, but unfortunately she is not answering her phone at the moment. Gilbert suggests Peters' attempts to explain, onstage, the legal circumstances of the leak, she "made little sense" and was "drowned out at times by a loud duck quack sound effect, which was used throughout the conference as an apparent warning to speakers that what they were saying could potentially get them in legal trouble". So, no, this is not funny. It is, in fact, the real thing; yet, still, that's the thing. I think of an old joke about how the theft and ransom of Chaplin's corpse was itself desperately slapstick; there are moments of Nixonian infamy that seem nearly clownish. It's one thing to be angry about the equivalent of twenty-two emails—combined sent and received—a day, average, over the course of Hillary Clinton's tenure at State, but we still don't know what is actually in the twenty-two million missing emails that aren't really missing except that we're not allowed to see them so we still have to take the word of the people who lost them in the first place. We finally find that sort of alleged corrupt behavior in electoral officials, and of course it's Republicans, and of course it is clownishly stupid as hell. Mayhaps we ought to learn the lesson; it's not exactly new. Meanwhile, Gilbert did update his story, yesterday, via Twitter↱, reporting, "The FBI is now investigating Peters while Mike Lindell told Steve Bannon that he is hiding her 'in a safe place'." This is what it comes to, but what is it: The Wednesday Putsch ... the GOP ... American conservatism ... the right wing? ____________________ Notes: @daithaigilbert. "Updates on this story from Friday about Tina Peters, the Colorado election official accused of helping leak sensitive election data to QAnon. The FBI is now investigating Peters while Mike Lindell told Steve Bannon that he is hiding her 'in a safe place'". Twitter. 18 August 2021. Twitter.com. 19 August 2021. https://bit.ly/3kfr8dI Gilbert, David. "Elections Official Accused of Helping Leak Data to QAnon Leader". Vice. 19 August 2021. https://bit.ly/3mjzAeq
