Pillow Man doesn’t seem to know where the lines are drawn between legal and illegal activity in this country and he might find out the old fashioned way, when he finds himself under indictment and/or arrest. The latest news in the cockamamie world of Mike Lindell and the Big Lie is that both federal and state investigator are examining an attempt to breach the election network of an Ohio county, and said breach “bears striking similarities to an incident in Colorado earlier this year.” That incident involved Lindell crony and former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters. This is what you call terrible optics, not to mention illegal as hell. Washington Post:
The attempted breach in Ohio occurred on May 4 inside the county office of John Hamercheck (R), chairman of the Lake County Board of Commissioners, according to two individuals with knowledge of the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. State and county officials said no sensitive data were obtained, but they determined that a private laptop was plugged into the county network in Hamercheck’s office, and that the routine network traffic captured by the computer was circulated at the same Lindell conference as the data from the Colorado breach.
Together, the incidents in Ohio and Colorado point to an escalation in attacks on the nation’s voting systems by those who have embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud. Now, some Trump loyalists pushing for legal challenges and partisan audits are also targeting local officials in a bid to gain access to election systems — moves that themselves could undermine election security.
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed Thursday that the bureau is investigating the incident in Lake County but declined to comment further. Investigators are trying to determine whether someone on the fifth floor of the Lake County government building improperly accessed the computer network and whether any laws were violated.
Tina Peters, Lindell’s pal in Colorado, was visited by the FBI in an early morning raid three days ago. Peters was the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who has been accused by Colorado election officials of sneaking an outsider into he Mesa County election offices to copy the hard drives of voting machines manufactured by Dominion, purportedly to prove voting fraud. She also was accused of helping to leak voting system passwords to QAnon and the Gateway Pundit, of all places. And guess who else finds herself part of this strange mix? None other than Lauren Boebert’s campaign manager. Salon:
The FBI also raided a home in Garfield County, Rubinstein confirmed. Lindell said one of the homes raided belongs to Sherronna Bishop, a Garfield County resident who served as Rep. Lauren Boebert’s, R-Colo., campaign manager. Bishop has been one of Peters’ most prominent allies in stoking unfounded allegations of voting machine problems in the election and hinted at a rally last month that she was privy to unreleased data from Mesa County and Lindell’s “cybersecurity team.”
A judge last month banned Peters from overseeing elections in her county after a lawsuit filed by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. Griswold led an investigation over the summer that found that Peters shut off surveillance systems and allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s voting system during a security update. Just days later, Ron Watkins, a Qanon conspiracy theorist believed to be one of the masterminds behind the movement, published photos of election equipment that he said he received from a whistleblower. Watkins and the far-right blog Gateway Pundit also published passwords unique to Mesa County officials used to access the county’s Dominion voting system computers and servers. Two copies of the Dominion server hard drive were later published as well. Griswold in August ordered dozens of pieces of the county’s election equipment to be decertified over the security breach and appointed a supervisor to oversee the county’s future elections. […]
Peters, who was met with cheers at the event [Lindell’s cyber symposium] now casts herself as a victim of a politically motivated investigation and compared Colorado to Nazi Germany.
“The FBI raided my home at 6 a.m. this morning, accusing me of committing a crime. And they raided the homes of my friends, mostly older women. I was terrified,” Peters told Lindell TV on Tuesday, adding that authorities used a “battering ram” to destroy one of her friend’s front doors.
Peters said the agents “took all of my electronics.”
“Essentially, they were soldiers in combat gear. They were not men in suits with badges,” she said. “They looked very much like they were in a combat zone — soldiers with automatic weapons and combat gear.” […]
“They want to shut me up, shut me out, prosecute me, do whatever they can to villainize and demonize me just to cover up their dirty deeds,” she said Tuesday. “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen.”
The elaborate conspiracies that the right-wing fabulists, Lindell premiere among them, weave, are amusing, but vigilante election officials betraying their oaths of office and attempting to hack local systems are not. This is going to get hot and heavy very fast. And of course you know that Lindell is characterizing the raid on Peters’ home as an effort to detract from his Thanksgiving marathon and this latest news story about Ohio will probably be cast in that light as well.
This is what happens when Republicans have all that extra money. They spend it conspicuously, rather than consciously. Not all judges are Rs and not all of those are untrustworthy.