Mike Lindell, Election Denier and Tina Peters Supporter, Coming to Colorado Without Mustache

Mike Lindell is coming to Colorado this weekend to address the El Paso County Republicans at their Lincoln Day Dinner on Saturday, August 24. But you may not recognize the My Pillow mogul.

The election denier shaved off his trademark mustache before sneaking into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he fooled exactly no one, including a twelve-year-old who schooled the bare-faced Lindell on his bare-faced lies regarding the Georgia voting process in the 2020 election.

Even if you don't recognize his face, anyone who followed the Tina Peters trial earlier this month would recognize Lindell's name, which kept popping up during testimony regarding the former Mesa County clerk and recorder's role in an election equipment security breach in Mesa County.

Peters, too, had been drinking deeply from the election denier Kool-Aid, insisting that the 2020 presidential election was rigged — even though Donald Trump won Mesa County — and pointing the finger at Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems. Ironically, Peters had survived a recall attempt inspired by 574 missing ballots from the 2019 election; those were ballots misplaced by her own office, not deleted by Dominion.
And then came the security breach at Peters's office. On August 10, 2021, while Peters was at a cybersecurity event in South Dakota hosted by Lindell, officials with the Colorado Secretary of State were in Mesa County, investigating how protected passwords related to Dominion equipment could have been leaked.

“Yesterday I ordered the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder to comply with inspection of election equipment, video footage, and other documents in the county," Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced on August 11. "The Clerk’s Office must prove that chain of custody remains intact and that there has been no unauthorized access to voting equipment in the county. Failure to do so will result in decertification of the specific voting equipment in Mesa. Colorado has the best election system in the nation, with built in security redundancies. As Secretary of State, my number one priority is to ensure all election security protocols are followed and to safeguard Coloradans’ right to vote.”

Peters did not respond to that order; instead, she accused Griswold of “raiding her office” and stayed in hiding funded by Lindell.

Ultimately, Peters returned, and the Colorado Secretary of State successfully sued to block her from running elections in Mesa County. In 2022, Peters ran for Colorado Secretary of State, but she lost the Republican primary to Pam Anderson, former Jefferson County clerk. She didn't trust the results of that, either, and called for a recount...which she lost.

Good thing, because prosecutors were about to charge Peters with helping secretly copy hard drives by sneaking Conan Hayes, a professional surfer and Lindell cohort, into secure areas of her office in 2021. She used someone else’s security badge and lied to other workers in the department. Those images, complete with secret passwords, had subsequently shown up on the internet and at Lindell's cyber-security event devoted to deniers.

Despite her conviction, Peters has not given up. In a post on X after the verdict, Peters again accused Dominion of stealing votes. “I will continue to fight until the Truth is revealed that was not allowed to be brought during this trial," she posted. "This is a sad day for our nation and the world. But we WILL win in the end."

Lindell, who says he's $49 million in debt because of his election denial stance, has been sued by Dominion and humiliated by a twelve-year-old. Still, he sounds equally adamant. "If you knew what I knew, you wouldn't stop, either," he told CNN for a segment that ran the night before the Peters verdict.

On August 12, a jury found Peters guilty on seven out of ten counts, four of them felonies, including three counts of attempting to influence a public official, as well as official misconduct, violation of duty, failure to comply with an order of the Secretary of State, and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. (No, she did not wear a mustache.)

She will be sentenced on October 3.