Michele Fiore & Tina Peters, Found Guilty, Going To Prison
You may remember Colorado crackpot Tina Peters, last week the first election official in the country convicted in Trump’s stolen election scam. A graduate of an unaccredited “college”-by-mail institution, she holds a fake degree in holistic nutrition, enough of a credential to be elected county clerk in 2018 by the voters in Mesa County, Colorado. (This is one of the reddest counties in the state, just 34.8% having voted for Biden.) She was never charged for throwing out ballots in a drop box outside her office in 2019 but she was indicted in 2022 by a Mesa County grand jury on seven felony and three misdemeanor counts of election tampering, while she was running for Colorado Secretary of State. She lost the GOP primary with 28.9% of the vote. It’s been all downhill since then. Various judges barred her from involvement in county elections— a county clerk’s primary job— and 2 months ago she was convicted on 7 of the charges, sentenced to 9 years in prison this past Thursday. At the sentencing, Colorado District Court Judge Matthew Barrett told her she’s a danger to the community who “would do it all over again if you could… [You’re] no hero— you abused your position and you are a charlatan [who peddled] a snake oil proved wrong time and time again.”
Peters has long been unapologetic for what she did. She smiled in her 2022 mugshot and campaigned to be Colorado’s secretary of state— a run that didn’t survive a Republican primary. True to form, Peters cried after the primary that her loss was the result of voter fraud.
At her sentencing she noted “health problems” that would not be treatable in prison; including the need for a “magnetic mattress” she has been using since 1995. She claimed she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia— a disorder that causes widespread musculoskeletal pain as well as fatigue, sleep, memory and mood issues— after two apparent car crashes in 1984 and 2010.
“I was up all night because I was in bed all day, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t control these symptoms until I got, believe it or not, a magnetic mattress of which I still sleep on. I will not have that at the Department of Corrections.”
This was also a bad week for another dangerous Trumpist psychotic, Michele Fiore, whose started covering when she was a Nevada Assemblywoman and (losing) tea party congressional candidate, best known for rhetoric so violent that she made Trump seem like a hippie in comparison. She penned a failed bill to allow concealed firearms on school campuses (and day care facilities) and was well-known for telling her constituents that cancer is a fungus and can be flushed out with salt water and baking soda. Back then, she owed the IRS over a million dollars in back taxes, took in over $6 million in her very fishy home health care service (whose license was eventually revoked) and has called for shooting Syrian refugees in the head. “I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out. Just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I’m good with that.”
She was elected to the Las Vegas City Council but other than that ran for various offices, lost them all and in December, 2022 she was appointed Justice of the Peace for Nye County. She’s also the Nevada Republican Party national committeewoman responsible for fundraising in the state. Three months ago she was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of defrauding donors to a charity to memorialize police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. On Friday, she was found guilty of soliciting tens of thousands of dollars for a statue honoring a fallen officer and instead using the money for personal expenses, including her daughter’s wedding and plastic surgery for herself, after a local developer paid for the entire statue ($70,000). It took theory less than 2 hours for the jury to return guilty verdicts on all 7 charges. Sentencing is January 6, although she plans to appeal.
If Trump wins the election, unlikely, he will certain pardon both Fiore and Peters. Of course, he has his own various legal cases to worry about. The 165 page legal document Jack Smith presented to Judge Chutkan last week is chock full of evidence of Trump’s crimes, leading up to and following the coup attempt and insurrection. Slate outlined much of what Smith presented in court. For example, “In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Trump privately told his advisers, campaign staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence’s staff that he did not plan to accept the results; instead, ‘he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected,’ Smith wrote… Three days before the election, according to the special counsel’s motion, a ‘private political advisor’ (the name is redacted) who had been working on Trump’s campaign told a gathering of Trump supporters that the former president was going to declare victory no matter what. ‘That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner,’ the adviser said. The adviser also explained that mail-in ballots would mostly favor Biden, and because they take longer to count, it would create an opening for Trump to dispute the election. ‘And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it— that’s our strategy. He’s going to declare himself a winner.’”
According to Smith, “FBI forensic examiners were able to trace Trump’s movements on his phone during the Jan. 6 insurrection and their logs indicate he ‘was using his phone, and in particular, was using the Twitter application, consistently throughout the day after he returned from the Ellipse speech.’ On Jan. 6, Trump kicked the day off by tweeting around 1 a.m. that if Pence ‘comes through for us, we will win the presidency’ and falsely claimed that states mistakenly certified their election results. He continued with this aggressive digital pressure campaign while Trump’s attorneys contacted Republican senators in an effort to convince them to accept fraudulent electoral vote certificates and hand them to Pence during the vote count. (Pence’s staff rejected this.) Because Pence was not cooperating with his scheme, Trump decided to ‘reinsert into his campaign speech at the Ellipse remarks targeting Pence for his refusal to misuse his role in the certification.’ That galvanized thousands of supporters who would violently attack the Capitol, shouting, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’ ‘Where is Pence? Bring him out!’ and ‘Traitor Pence!’ Smith argues that Trump’s words created an expectation that his supporters had to fight in order to ‘take back’ their country. Later that afternoon, while the Capitol was being overtaken with insurrectionists, Smith’s motion says Trump sat alone in his dining room, fixated on his phone and tweeting messages that were fueling the ongoing riot. This is when Trump sent his infamous tweet attacking Pence, claiming he didn’t have the courage to ‘protect our Country and our Constitution.’ One minute after Trump published this tweet, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence from the Capitol to a secure location. And when a staffer informed Trump that Pence had been evacuated, the former president said, ‘So what?’”
Smith also made sure to note that as Trump was doubling down on his schemes to steal the election, “his staff warned him that none of his fraud allegations were amounting to anything, yet he refused to stop repeating false claims about the election. Smith’s motion says one co-conspirator told Trump in November that fraud allegations ‘could never be proved in court,’ to which Trump responded, ‘the details don’t matter.’ Another person identified as ‘P9’ [attorney Eric Herschmann] told Trump that one of his fraud claims was ‘bullshit,’ and another was quoted saying, ‘It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.’”
The special counsel offers an example of Trump and his team’s lies at play in Arizona, where they initially claimed 36,000 noncitizens voted. “Five days later it was ‘beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote’; three weeks later, ‘the bare minimum [was] 40 or 50,000.’ ” In Michigan, Trump personally asked Ronna McDaniel, former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, to promote a report about fraud in Michigan, which she denied because a top state official described it as “f—ing nuts.” (McDaniel’s name is redacted in the report, but her title is included).
Smith’s motion also says that after the chief counsel of the RNC publicly refuted Trump’s false claim that Pennsylvania issued 1.8 million absentee ballots and received 2.5 million in return, the chief counsel followed up with a private email to an unnamed RNC spokesperson in which they said that the Trump team’s attempt to argue the election was stolen “is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” they said. Eventually, that chief counsel was fired.
People on Trump’s team seemed to be aware that there was something off about the scheme, according to the memo. Before a call discussing the fake electors scheme, one of Trump’s campaign advisers referred to the participants as the “Star Wars bar.” (Smith helpfully explains this means “a motley assortment of characters, and in this case specifically ones whose professional competence [the campaign adviser] doubted and whom he personally would not choose to hire.”)
And yet… after all these years of Trump’s transparently predatory behavior— including a conviction in the only case that’s come before a jury so far— his sucker base still appears thrilled to be ripped off. On Friday, Matt Novak reported that since Señor T launched Truth Social in 2022, the platform has served as a home base for “scammers who are swindling users out of enormous sums of money. We’re talking about people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a relatively short period of time… Truth Social seems to be a target-rich environment for people who are easy to con.” I wonder why.
Many of the victims are elderly Trump supporters, so we’re talking about the stupidest people in the country, extremely riper being ripped off. “One 72-year-old man,” reported Novak, “who reported chatting with a ‘beautiful’ woman on the site was scammed out of $21,000. His complaint ends with, ‘I haven’t told my wife about this blunder. She still doesn’t know about it.’ Another person in their 60s said they lost $500,000 to scammers on Truth Social and seemed to think there might be a way they could get their money back, telling the FTC, ‘After I pay this they promise there will be no more fees and I will receive my assets.’… [S]cams happening on Truth Social appear to be most commonly pig butchering, a method of gaining someone’s trust while getting them to give you increasingly large amounts of money, all while making it seem like the victim is making wise investments. Truth Social, with its older user base of Boomers who have access to a lifetime of savings and retirement accounts, appears to be an attractive target for scammers running pig butchering operations… [I]f you were a scammer, who would you think might be the easiest marks on the planet, ready to believe anything a conman might say? If you said Trump supporters, you’re clearly not alone.”
Let me end with a bit of irony. You know Trump and the MAGAts have been falsely accusing the Biden Administration of discriminating against Republicans areas that have been hit by Hurricane Helene? (One delusional MAGA-freak is even intimating that Biden caused the hurricane to hurt Trump.) But that doesn’t mean God’s wrath won’t harm Trump’s efforts. Trump is going to get what’s coming to him and many of his supporters in North Carolina and Georgia probably won’t be voting next month since the hurricane hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of those two states. Politico reported that there’s research that shows “that major disasters can influence both voter turnout and voter preference. And Helene has pushed this contest into novel territory: It’s the first catastrophic event in U.S. history to hit two critical swing states within six weeks of a presidential election… The parts of western North Carolina and eastern Georgia that were flooded by the monster storm are largely Republican. In 2020, he won 61 percent of the vote in the North Carolina counties that were declared a disaster after Helene. He won 54 percent of the vote in Georgia’s disaster counties.”
A 2022 study by [voting policy scholar Kevin]Morris found that voter turnout fell below historical averages in the heavily Republican Panhandle counties of Florida after Hurricane Michael demolished the area in October 2018. Although Florida made it easier to vote by absentee ballots, voters were confused by the state’s moves to close and consolidate polling places. They weren’t sure where to go on Election Day.
“If [a voter’s] house is damaged or whatever else and they realize suddenly their polling place has moved, then maybe that’s the straw that makes it too much for them to vote,” Morris told E&E News. “A lot of the decreased turnout was attributable to the closure of polling places around the Panhandle.”
Another storm, Milton, is headed towards Florida’s west coast, probably as a category 2 hurricane.