Warren Hultquist@whultquist
Tina Peters: Suppressed Forensic Evidence and Emerging Federal Corroboration of Foreign Election Interference
Tina Peters, former elected Clerk and Recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, maintains that her prosecution and nine-year prison sentence were not for any crime but for fulfilling her sworn duty under federal election records retention law (52 U.S.C. § 20701) to preserve complete archives of the 2020 election. As the county’s chief election official, she asserts she had a legal obligation to protect records for at least 22–25 months so they could be audited or recounted. Critics who claim she failed to produce evidence of irregularities—particularly in post-conviction appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room—ignore the forensic materials she says were deliberately excluded from her trial.
In May 2021, anticipating a state-mandated “Trusted Build” software update to Dominion Voting Systems’ Election Management System (EMS) server that would overwrite original files, Peters arranged for exact, read-only forensic images to be made before and after the update. These images, created under supervision with a temporary vendor badge for cybersecurity expert Conan Hayes, became the foundation for three independent forensic reports. The reports—produced by experts including Doug Gould, Jeffrey O’Donnell, and Dr. Walter Daugherity—document approximately 29,000 deleted election records and logs, unauthorized new or duplicate adjudication databases created on October 21, 2020 and March 30, 2021 (with over 20,000 ballot records reloaded digitally), hash mismatches, erased audit files, and wireless networking cards creating backdoors and remote-access risks. A Venezuelan whistleblower identified 14 identical vulnerabilities matching Smartmatic software previously used to rig elections in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
Peters insists she never tampered with or altered any data, nor acted with malice. “I preserved the archive; the state tried to erase it,” she has stated. The prosecution’s “deception” and “tampering” charges stemmed from the temporary badge and the preservation itself. She argues the real destruction occurred during the Trusted Build, which violated federal law, while she merely complied with her duty as Clerk by saving the records when county IT refused assistance. She submitted the reports to the Board of County Commissioners exactly as protocol required when integrity concerns arose.
At trial, however, District Judge Matthew D. Barrett ruled the forensic reports and related expert testimony “irrelevant” or likely to confuse the jury, barring discussion of federal preservation obligations or the underlying election issues. District Attorney Daniel P. Rubinstein and his team successfully moved to exclude the evidence and struck defenses tied to it. Peters called the proceedings a “dog and pony show” in which every expert on her side was blocked while the jury heard only a narrow narrative of unauthorized access. The reports were never allowed as justification or exculpatory material.
These local events sit within a broader corporate and geographic web. Dominion, the system used in Mesa County, has been linked in alternative analyses to Smartmatic’s Venezuelan origins and alleged rigging architecture. The same vulnerabilities Peters’ experts documented appear in software reportedly developed or routed through a Dominion facility in Belgrade, Serbia, involving Venezuelan, Serbian, and Chinese engineers, with some reports citing Huawei servers potentially enabling Chinese Communist Party access.
This pattern now intersects with revelations from investigative journalist John Solomon about impending declassifications by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Solomon reports that raw intelligence documents—long suppressed by U.S. agencies—show Chinese actors accessed multiple states’ voter registration databases as early as February–April 2020 for analysis and potential influence operations. An FBI report on Chinese production of fake driver’s licenses (possibly for mail-in fraud) was recalled and ordered deleted. Gabbard’s tranche also addresses broader foreign election interference and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems, with officials confirming the materials will reveal “what China did, and who in U.S. government knew and when.”
The January 2026 arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces on narcoterrorism charges has further amplified these claims, with advocates arguing captured archives or testimony could expose technology-transfer pipelines from Venezuelan systems to U.S. counties. The strongest domestic corroboration arrived in late January 2026 when the FBI—acting at the direction of the Trump administration and with Gabbard personally present at Trump’s request—raided Fulton County, Georgia’s election hub, another Dominion jurisdiction. Agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images, voter rolls, and digital data to examine procurement, tabulation, and potential foreign exploitation. This federal seizure mirrors precisely what Peters attempted locally in 2021: securing original records before further alteration.
Peters, a lung cancer survivor now in her seventies whose health has reportedly deteriorated in prison, continues to describe herself as a political prisoner and whistleblower. The forensic reports she risked everything to preserve remain publicly available and are cited by supporters as the original U.S. evidence of the very foreign-influence vulnerabilities now being examined at the federal level through declassifications and raids. What began as one county clerk’s effort to fulfill her archival duty is increasingly viewed as the spark that federal actions under the Trump administration and DNI Gabbard are finally validating.
References
1. Mesa County Forensic Report No. 1 (September 15, 2021 – initial examination of EMS server images, deletions of election records/logs) - tinapeters.us/wp-content/upl…
2. Mesa County Forensic Report No. 2 (February/March 2022 – by Doug Gould; covers systematic deletions, wireless components, backdoors) - tinapeters.us/wp-content/upl…
3. Mesa County Forensic Report No. 3 (March 19, 2022 – signed database analysis by O’Donnell and Daugherity) - tinapeters.us/wp-content/upl…
4. Tina Peters Official Reports Archive Page - tinapeters.us/reports/
5. U.S. District Court Filing on Tina Peters Habeas Corpus (detailing trial exclusions) - archive.org/download/gov.u…
6. John Solomon Reporting on Gabbard Declassifications and Chinese Voter Data Access - thedesertreview.com/news/national/…
7. Solomon on Election Integrity Files and Gabbard Declass Timeline - tierneyrealnewsnetwork.substack.com/p/solomon-elec…
8. Democracy Docket Coverage of Fulton County FBI Raid and Gabbard’s Involvement - democracydocket.com/news-alerts/ga…
9. The Hill Reporting on Gabbard’s Role in Fulton County Election Raid - thehill.com/homenews/senat…
