Tina Peters Trial, Day 4 – Secret Tape of Fateful Meeting

CPR is covering every day of Peters’ trial. You can read our explainer of the case Hereand catch up on the past days Here.

---

The trial of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters continues this week in Grand Junction, where the prosecution is trying to prove she committed identity theft while seeking evidence of fraud on voting machines in her county.

As the prosecution was gathering evidence against Peters, one of her former employees walked jurors through a meeting where the former official allegedly began planning to invite an unauthorized outsider to a secure software update and have the person make copies of the election equipment hard drives in her office before and after the update.

On Friday, the jury heard an audio recording of a meeting in Peters’ office in 2021 where members of her staff came to talk with Douglas Frank, a former Ohio math teacher who has become a leading figure in a movement to discredit the 2020 election.

“I think it’s a feather in your cap. If you can say, ‘We found this corruption in our county and we cleaned it up,’” Frank said in the recording, which was secretly made by front office elections manager Stephanie Wenholz while she was working with him.

Hart Van Denburg/CPR News

Wenholz testified that much of his statements concerned inflated voter rolls and fraudulent ballots.

“I travel around the country helping a lot of people,” Frank says in the video. “(MyPillow CEO) Mike Lindell pays me to do this, OK? So you don’t have to pay me.”

Lindell is an ardent proponent of the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

During the meeting, Frank asked for information about each voter on the Mesa County rolls, including when they registered to vote and in which elections they voted. The employee explained that this information is publicly available for a fee.

“If you gave it to me, I can run my algorithms on it and tell you where to start looking,” he said.

At one point, Wenholz said the county’s Dominion Voting Systems machines were connected to the Internet, noting that she had checked them herself when she started working. Frank said he believes Mesa County employees are patriotic and diligent about their work, but are unaware of nefarious forces trying to undermine elections.

During the meeting, Peters invited Frank to come back in a few weeks when the state would be updating its voting machine software. Frank responded that he wasn’t the guy they needed, “but I know a team and they’ll do it for you, and they’ll come back with the best in the country.”

Peters asked Wenholz to leave the room for the rest of the discussion. The two people who remained in the room — Peters’ then-deputy Belinda Knisley and elections manager Sandra Brown — have since reached plea deals and agreed to testify against Peters. Neither has yet testified in this trial.

Wenholz testified that the same day as the closed meeting with Frank, a larger group of the clerk’s office staff had to attend his public appearance at the DoubleTree Hotel in Grand Junction. She said the event made her fear for her safety, a fear the defense exploited during cross-examination.

“Did anyone actually threaten you?” the defense attorney asked.

“No. It was more the environment. It was anti-elections and administrators and what we do,” Wenholz replied.