“You’re a Charlatan”: Pro-Trump MAGA Clerk Is Going to Prison

A former Colorado county clerk was sentenced to prison Thursday for tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election and was thoroughly dressed down by the judge in her case.

Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years for allowing a man to use a security card to access her county’s election system, and deceiving investigators about who the person was. He was later determined to be working with MAGA gadfly and pillow magnate Mike Lindell, a prominent election denialist and supporter of Donald Trump.

“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” District Judge Matthew Barrett told Peters in announcing the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”

Barrett said that Peters, a Republican, didn’t take her job seriously, espousing claims about rigged voting machines even after they were disproven. During the trial, prosecutors said that Peters was seeking attention after associating with election denialists, and Peters remained unrepentant about her crimes.

“I’ve never done anything with malice to break the law. I’ve only wanted to serve the people of Mesa County,” Peters told the court before she was sentenced. She tried to repeat her claims about “wireless devices” and software that altered ballot images, only to be rebuked by Barrett, who said that no discrepancies were found in ballot recounts.

“I’ve let you go on enough about this. The votes are the votes,” Barrett said. He added that Peters made multiple appearances broadcasted to fellow election deniers for her own gain.

“It’s just more lies. No objective person believes them. No, at the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts and people flying with you,” said Barrett. “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”

While Peters will be going to prison, at least 70 other pro-Trump election denialists today are working in election offices in battleground states across the country, according to a July report. In Georgia, the state election board has been upended by pro-Trump appointees trying to give him every advantage in November to prevent Kamala Harris from winning, as Biden did in 2020. Hopefully, Thursday’s sentence discourages other attempts at election interference, otherwise November will be chaotic.

New York Representative Mike Lawler gave the strangest defense for once wearing blackface as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.

A photograph of Lawler from 2006, showing him posed like the iconic singer with brown makeup applied to his face, was obtained by The New York Times and published Thursday. Lawler, who is 38, would have been 20 years old when the photo was taken.

In a statement, Lawler did not deny the photo’s authenticity. “The ugly practice of blackface was the furthest thing from my mind,” he said. “Let me be clear, this is not that.”

“I am a student of history and for anyone who takes offense to the photo, I am sorry,” Lawler said. “All you can do is live and learn.”

It’s unclear why Lawler referred to himself as a “student of history” in his apology. Was it to signal that no one needed to chastise him for doing something so obviously and historically wrong? If Lawler knows that to be the case, it’s even stranger that he did it in the first place.

This latest scandal has the potential to affect Lawler’s reelection, as he is currently running in a toss-up race against former Democratic Representative Mondaire Jones for New York’s 17th congressional district seat.

Lawler has attempted to paint himself as a moderate, and was even lauded by President Joe Biden, who called him “the kind of guy that when I was in the Congress, the kind of Republican I used to deal with.” However, a ProPublica study found that Lawler voted in line with MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Green 81 percent of the time.

Last month, Rockland Republican Party Chairman Lawrence Garvey accused Lawler, among several other lawmakers, of retaliating against him for attempting to block an illegal $60,000 corporate donation through the state Republican Party.

Donald Trump’s campaign handed out signs with a slogan used by white supremacists at his Saginaw, Michigan, rally Thursday.

The signs read “Reclaim America,” a phrase the white nationalist group Patriot Front uses regularly. The group, which splintered from the neo-Nazi Vanguard America, has long used the slogan in an effort to make white supremacist ideology palatable to a wider audience. The slogan has been used in Patriot Front banners in marches and flyers across the country. On Thursday, the preprinted signs with the same slogan were handed out before Trump spoke.

While they were being distributed, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, former Representative Pete Hoekstra, told Trump’s fans that they were appreciated.

“You’ve got to put on a great show today, and the president will recognize your efforts,” said Hoekstra, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands during Trump’s presidency.

Who was behind the decision to use the slogan is unknown, although one wonders if they have ties to Patriot Front. At a Patriot Front rally in Nashville in July, the racist group’s members chanted “Sieg Heil” and “Deportation saves the nation,” while proudly displaying the “Reclaim America” slogan on a large banner. Trump supporters would likely agree with the latter chant at least, considering the former president’s plan for mass deportations.

Trump has flirted with white nationalism in the past, including during his 2024 campaign. He has complained about “anti-white racism,” and some of Trump’s confidants plan to use civil rights laws to combat the made-up problem if he returns to the White House. Trump infamously told the fascist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” at a 2020 presidential debate.

Over the summer, though, Trump drew the ire of prominent neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who thought some of the racist attacks on Kamala Harris went too far. Perhaps this is a “sign” that Trump still has white nationalist support and thinks it can help him win in November.  

Donald Trump was an hour and a half late to his rally in Saginaw, Michigan, on Thursday, but even the extra time couldn’t muster more people to line the stadium.

“Who else fills big places like this at three in the afternoon?” Trump asked the roaring crowd.

But from another perspective, it was evident that the Republican presidential nominee had only filled a fraction of the event space.

Another clip of the space showed the empty, fluorescent backdrop to his speech.

The low turnout is significant for a candidate who has frequently attacked his political opponents for their inability to draw as many people as he’s historically attracted to his boisterous, sprawling campaign stops.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Kamala Harris’s ability to meet and even exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. Just weeks after the announcement of her campaign, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Donald Trump’s attempt to politicize the devastation left by Hurricane Helene isn’t the first time he’s tried to exploit a natural disaster. While he was president, Trump was hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California, according to two former White House staffers.

E&E News spoke to Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who said that Trump didn’t want to send wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic. But after Harvey showed him voting data from Orange County, California, showing more Trump supporters there than in all of Iowa, Trump changed his mind.

“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris along with other GOP national security figures, told E&E News.

Former White House Homeland Security adviser Oliva Troye concurred, saying that she would field calls from local politicians around the country asking for disaster relief because Trump refused to provide aid, leading her to frequently ask Vice President Mike Pence to pressure the president. She warned that Trump will play politics with disaster aid again if he returns to the White House.

“It’s not going to be about that American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone, and the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote,” Troye said.

Trump eagerly sent aid to Florida in 2019 after Hurricane Michael hit the state’s Panhandle, according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s autobiography, The Courage to Be Free. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump told DeSantis after he asked for federal assistance.

“I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump asked, before directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of the state’s disaster costs. The emergency management agency ended up paying about $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s directive. In contrast, Trump only months earlier threatened to veto a bill in Congress that would have paid 100 percent of the disaster costs in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Since Hurricane Helene hit the American Southeast, Trump has pushed conspiracy theories that Democrats are neglecting Republican areas hit hard by the storm, doubling down after being called out. Even Republican politicians, like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, are pushing back against him. But as is often the case with Trump, every accusation is just a confession.