In a video posted on rumble.com on April 3, 2024, Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, says he paid Tina Peters’ former attorney, Douglas Richards, $1 million to defend her, but was disappointed in Richards’ defense strategy.
Peters fired Richards just as her criminal trial was finally set to start in February, winning her yet another lengthy delay in her trial. It is now scheduled to start on July 31, 2024, after two days of jury selection.
Endorsement posted on the “JJ Fletcher for Mesa County Commissioner” campaign website
In what amounts to a subtle but seismic shift in local politics, former Colorado Mesa University (CMU) President Tim Foster publicly endorsed Janet Rowland’s opponent, J.J. Fletcher, for Mesa County commissioner, formally ending his years-long support for Rowland.
The forum for Republican candidates for CD-3 held at Appleton Christian Church, 2/12/24. (Photo: Sharon Sullivan)
This article is republished with permission from the Colorado Times Recorder. You can see the original article here.
Immigration policy dominated the discussion among five of the Republican candidates vying to win Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District primary election in June, and it included some eyebrow-raising statements.
The candidate forum, which took place Monday night at Appleton Christian Church in Grand Junction, included all but one of the Republicans hoping to become their party’s nominee following Congresswoman’s Boebert decision to abandon her hometown district for redder pastures on the Eastern Plains.
While their positions on immigration varied, the candidates found more consensus around their doubts about Colorado’s election system. Four of the five participants spoke in favor of banning the mail ballots used by nearly all Coloradans, based on the debunked conspiracy that they have been used to rig elections. All but one of the candidates advocated for a return to hand-counting paper ballots, a process which has been proven to be less accurate and far more expensive than Colorado’s current system. Hanks, Andrews and Varela all promoted elements of another debunked conspiracy theory: that the Dominion Voting machines used by nearly all counties to tabulate their elections could be manipulated to rig the results.
Mesa County Republican Party Secretary Terry Porter stood up to Colorado Republican Party Chair Dave Williams, saying his support of Tina Peters and Donald Trump is making “too many of us ashamed of being a Republican in Colorado right now.”
Mesa County Republicans may be starting to see the harm they are doing to their party and America by continuing to support Tina Peters, Donald Trump and others like them.
On February 2, shortly before Tina Peters’ criminal trial was about to start, Colorado Republican Party Chair Dave Williams sent a mass email out to Colorado Republicans telling them to “Keep Tina Peters in your prayers while she fights the establishment and our corrupt judicial system in her upcoming trial which will begin on February 9th in Mesa County.” He called the criminal charges against Peters “retaliation, persecution, and prosecution for preserving our election records and exposing the fraud inside the machines.”
That email drew quick pushback from Republicans across the state, including former Secretaries of State and current and former Republican county clerks. It also drew a sharp rebuke from Mesa County Republican Party Secretary Terry Porter.
Porter quickly emailed Williams back and included Colorado GOP Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman and Secretary Anna Ferguson in the thread, saying:
Many defendants who are facing an imminent trial on criminal charges might start showing remorse and contrition, but not former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.
In a rambling 27 minute interview on rumble.com on “The Matthew Dark Show” on December 13, former Mesa county Clerk Tina Peters continues to be defiant, insisting publicly that she did nothing wrong or illegal as Clerk when she copied voting machine hard drives and exposed the information at an election denier conference. She says what she did was required as part of her job, that she’s a whistleblower, what she did was “totally legal” and she’s being persecuted politically just because she’s trying to “tell the truth.”
At 6:09 in the video, she says her legal battles have nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, and says,
“They’re coming after Christians. They’re coming after our Constitution. And when I say ‘they,’ these are global elitists that want to take down America because they cannot do what they want to do for a one world government until they do that.”
Tina Peters, broadcasting her internet TV show, “The Tina Peters Show,” from an RV on Christmas night, 12/25/23
Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters spent the evening of Christmas, 2023 hunched over in a RV in the dark broadcasting her internet TV show, “The Tina Peters Show,” over wifi from an undisclosed location. She told viewers that for her, Christmas “is always a little bit quiet because the criminals have taken most of my family.” She interviewed an anti vaxx, anti-mask, election-denier conspiracy theorist-attorney from Oregon, begged viewers to donate money to help fund her personal support and legal expenses, warned viewers against taking vaccines, promoted fake Covid-19 cures and treatments, expressed her hope that “the scales would fall from the eyes” of Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein and the judge in her criminal case and both would undergo a Biblical awakening within the next 6 weeks before her criminal trial starts on February 9, see the error of their ways and drop all of the charges against her, since in her own mind she’s done nothing wrong.
Tina complained, “They want to put me in prison for being a whistleblower.”
KREX-TV News recently did a two-part series about the Mesa County Commissioners’ new, post-Jeff Kuhr Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) that more tightly regulates the County’s relationship with the Public Health Department (MCPHD), and how it differs from the old 2012 agreement in important ways that could negatively affect public health and safety in the county.
In the above interview posted on Rumble.com on 9/18/23 for the Clay Clark ReAwaken America tour, Tina Peters lies and tells viewers she won the 2020 election for Colorado Secretary of State. “The Reawaken America tour is a series of controversial far-right conferences held across the United States featuring prominent QAnon influencers, anti-vaxx activists, election fraud conspiracy theorists, Christian pastors, political candidates and elected officials,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
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Indicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters has filed to run for Secretary of State in Colorado in 2026, and as of July 23, 2023 had almost $305,000 in the bank for her campaign, according to Colorado Tracer, the online campaign finance reporting system.
Tina has not publicly stated she has an active campaign for Colorado Secretary of State in 2026, but that has not stopped her from listing campaign expenses for it.
But filing to run for SOS in 2026 looks more like it may be a tactic Tina is using to defray her personal costs of being a darling of the election denier cult while she awaits her criminal trial next February.
Tina Peters hosts four “doctors” on the Sept. 4, 2023 episode of her online show, “The Tina Peters Show” on Rumble.com The guest on the lower right, Bryan Ardis, told viewers that Covid19 was intentionally created as a biological weapon, that “spike proteins were created from venomous creatures all over the world, including snake venom, starfish and cone snail venoms,” that “they’ve been planning the pandemic for 72 years” and “they have engineered on purpose, the destruction of almost every aspect of our lives.”
Prior to being Mesa County Clerk, Tina Peters was a charlatan who made a living promoting work-from-home, get-rich quick schemes and selling unproven health remedies like magnets, shoe inserts and dietary supplements, telling people they would improve conditions like neuropathy, fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, autism and diabetes. As she awaits her February, 9, 2024 trial on criminal charges, she is falling back on this tactic, turbo-boosting her cons by capitalizing on her new-found fame as a national figure in the election denier business.
This time, however, her new-found charlatanism is far more dangerous and corrosive to American society.
A Facebook post by Janet Rowland during her 2020 campaign. The Washington Times is owned by the Unification Church and is noted for spreading misinformation about Coronavirus, climate change, the harmful effects of secondhand smoke and other issues. As of May, 2023, there have been 1.13 million deaths from Covid in the U.S., a number far from “ridiculously low”
In the wake of Commissioner Janet Rowland’s recent coup over the Mesa County Public Health Department, if the the past is a predictor of future behavior, under Rowland the Health Department is likely in for a significant reduction in its ability to respond to public health threats, and area residents will likely face more danger from emerging health threats.
Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland
Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland succeeded in imposing her political will on the Mesa County Public Health Department yesterday after appointing two final conservative members to the Mesa County Board of Public Health (BOH).
Health Department employees point out Rowland made all the new appointments to the Board of Health without consulting a single person at the Health Department.
“The fact that they keep appointing people to our Board that so clearly do not support the work that we do feels like a spit in the face every time,” one employee said.
Tina Peters on Rumble.com on 7/18/2023, telling lies and begging for money
In a July 18, 2023 video posted on Rumble.com — the online video platform right wing extremists turn to after being banned from YouTube and Facebook — indicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters optimistically starts off a half hour interview by saying “I always have a smile on my face because I know the best is yet to come.” She explains why she just fired her criminal defense attorney, Harvey Steinberg. She told her attorney,
“If you can’t get me off on two misdemeanors, how are you going to fight seven felonies and three misdemeanors?”
On of the many Facebook and Instagram posts by Mesa County Board of Public Health chair Stephen D. Daniels, lauding Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a vocal anti-vaxxer who has spread lies and conspiracy theories for “the better part of two decades.”
The Mesa County Commissioners’ newly-appointed Chair of the Public Health Board, Stephen D. Daniels, has made it known that he is a strong supporter of anti-vax conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK). In multiple posts on his social media accounts, Daniels urges people to be open to discussion about Kennedy’s views and believe what Kennedy has to say.
But does Daniels support what RFK told a table full of people last week at a press event in Manhattan (video), that the Covid-19 virus is “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, and to spare Jews and Chinese people?
RFK’s comments were widely reported as being a “Bigoted new Covid conspiracy about Jews and Chinese” (NY Times), as being “deplorable” and “hurtful” (Fox News), as spreading “false claims” about Covid-19 (CBS News) and being “antisemitic and racist” (ABC News).
Specifically, RFK said in part,
“There is an argument that it [Covid-19] is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Stephen Daniels, an extremist and anti-vaxxer the Commissioners just appointed to be Chair of the Mesa County Board of Public Health (Photo: Facebook)
A person the Mesa County Commissioners appointed to the Board of Health yesterday, Stephen D. Daniels, is a strong supporter of anti-vax conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK), according to his social media accounts. Posts on the same sources also reveal Daniels is anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Disney, and a climate change denier who opposes Colorado’s new family and medical leave law, which gives workers paid time off to care for a new baby or a loved one who has a serious health condition.
Presidential candidate RFK, whom Daniels supports, opposes vaccines that prevent dire illnesses in children and adults, like polio, measles and smallpox. In 2017, Scientific American wrote that “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality,” and if his anti-vax advocacy “leads to even a small decline in vaccine rates across the country, it will result in the waste of untold amounts of money and in all likelihood, the preventable deaths of infants too young to be vaccinated.”
Jeff Kuhr won plaudits for helping Mesa County get through the Covid-19 pandemic.
If Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland gets her way, the new, temporary members recently intstalled on the Mesa County Board of Public Health (BOPH) will do the Commissioners’ bidding and fire longtime Mesa County Health Department Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr, even though there is insufficient evidence of any financial wrongdoing by Kuhr and even though a large majority of the local public thinks the county commissioners are engaging in a blatant overreach of their authority.
Board of Mesa County Commissioners. (L-R: Bobbie Daniel, Cody Davis and Janet Rowland). Photo: Mesa County
District Attorney Dan Rubinstein announced he’s closed the investigation into the Mesa County Commissioners’ allegations of financial wrongdoing by Mesa County Public Health Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr, saying,
“We lack sufficient evidence of anything criminal…” and “…[We] lack sufficient evidence that Mr. Kuhr was personally involved in, or personally directed, any level of reporting that would make him criminally culpable for material misstatements.”
With Janet Rowland at the helm, so far the Commissioners have spent $49,000 in taxpayer funds on a financial audit of Kuhr in an attempt to try find some reason to fire him, in addition digging up and spreading around negative personnel comments about Kuhr from as far back as 2011. So far, everything they’ve found, including a $219 alcohol purchase that has since been reimbursed, have fallen flat. Even four members of the Mesa County Board of Health have said nothing they’ve seen about Kuhr so far rises to the level of a fireable offense. Then they all resigned in protest after learning the Commissioners were going to fire them if they didn’t agree to fire Kuhr.
MCPHD Director Jeff Kuhr, Ph.D. won plaudits for helping Mesa County get through the Covid-19 pandemic
Mesa County Public Health Department (MCPHD) Director Dr. Jeff Kuhr has been under attack by the Mesa County Commissioners, who for some reason have been working for months to generate credible reasons to fire him. Commissioner Janet Rowland in particular has targeted Kuhr, accusing him of financial impropriety and grievous errors in MCPHD’s procurement processes. The Commissioners have ordered the Mesa County Board of Public Health to fire Kuhr, but they refused, saying there is no actual evidence that he’s intentionally done anything wrong. Not only that, but the State of Colorado rates MCPHD as having the lowest possible financial risk (pdf) in its compliance with federal and state contracts, making it clear that the state trusts MCPHD, but our right wing commissioners don’t. (This financial risk rating is done every three years, but the state skipped it during the pandemic. The MCPHD is currently undergoing this analysis again.)
Janet Rowland probably did the most damage to current vaccination efforts through her campaign last year where she denigrated masking and embraced Q-Anon conspiracy theories about Covid-19.
Updated 5/6/23 to reflect support for the REOPEN movement by the violent, seditious hate group The Proud Boys, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, and the homophobic comments Rowland made on a statewide political TV show in 2006.
In a move akin to appointing an arsonist as fire chief, Mesa County Commissioners Cody Davis and Bobbie Daniel appointed Commissioner Janet Rowland to the Mesa County Board of Public Health yesterday, Tuesday, April 25.
Rowland has been an outspoken enemy of public health for years.
She fought Covid-19 precautions before vaccines were available and disseminated disinformation about the virus that was linked to QAnon. Her social media posts promoted the notion that Covid-19 was no more deadly than the flu. She said things on social media about the virus that contradicted public health messages instructing people in how to stay safe and reduce spread of what was then a largely deadly virus.
