Colorado election officials believe that a recent data request from the U.S. Department of Justice is part of a “fishing expedition” to help former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a prominent election denier serving a nine-year prison sentence.
In a May 12 letter, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division requested a broad swath of voter and election data from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office — a request that potentially covered everything from surveillance footage and custody logs to completed paper ballots from previous elections. The civil rights division’s head, Harmeet Dhillon, wrote that the agency had received a complaint that Colorado wasn’t complying with a federal election statute that includes record retention.
The request — and the records it sought — is unprecedented, said Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. The federal request was first reported by NPR.
“It’s really, really expansive,” Crane said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before, nor has anybody else that I know in this field.”
Secretary of State Jena Griswold said her office turned over some records to the agency, including two recent voter lists and a third document that included which Coloradans voted. Those are all public records that could be provided to anyone who asked, Griswold said Tuesday.
Griswold said her office either didn’t have access to other records that were requested, which are kept by individual counties, or her office didn’t believe the Justice Department had a legal basis for seeking them.
Crane and Griswold both said they thought the request was intended to help Peters, who was convicted last year of using someone else’s security badge in spring 2021 to give access to Mesa County’s elections system to a third party with ties to another prominent election denier, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Griswold said the federal laws cited in the Justice Department’s letter were the same used by Peters’ defense to claim that she was only seeking to preserve election records, and Crane said he worried that the request would expand what would be considered an election record to back up Peters. The letter also came a week after President Donald Trump referred to Peters on social media as a “political prisoner” and called for her release.
Shortly after Trump returned to office in January, the Justice Department had also previously filed a “statement of interest” in Peters’ case, a sign of the agency’s interest in her conviction.
The Justice Department did not return an email Monday seeking comment.
On March 25, Griswold’s office received a separate letter from the law firm that Dhillon, the Justice Department official, had founded. The letter, sent on behalf of the Republican National Committee, also sought a broad selection of election records.
The expansive request from the Justice Department had several problems, Griswold said. For one, it erroneously referred to Colorado as a “commonwealth,” and it requested data dating back to November 2000. That was a typo, Griswold and Crane said, and was supposed to refer to the 2020 election that Trump has falsely claimed he won. The two officials took that as another tip-off that the request was intended to affect Peters.
Griswold said her office hasn’t heard from the Justice Department since it sent some records last month. Crane said that, to his knowledge, no county has received a similar letter from the agency seeking the records that Griswold’s office says it doesn’t have. Griswold has also not received any information about the complaint that formed the basis of the letter.
“We don’t even know what it means,” she said. “As far as we know, it’s Donald Trump’s complaining on social media.”
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