Indicted Republican official Tina Peters, who claimed Lauren Boebert told her to do it, is now a fugitive at large

| 10:37 pm EDT July 14, 2022
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So this keeps getting stranger. While there has been no evidence of an organized effort to rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump, that hasn’t kept certain Republican and pro-Trump factions from promoting their imaginary conspiracy theories about the election.

One of them, Republican county clerk Tina Peters, took her antics so far that she ended up criminally indicted for tampering with voting machine systems to try to prove Trump won. She ended up out on bail, as often tends to be the case for nonviolent crimes. However, Reuters is reporting tonight that Peters has left the state in violation of her bail, and local officials are now pursuing her as a fugitive from justice.

Part of what makes this story so bizarre is that while Peters has maintained her innocence, weeks ago she also claimed that House Republican Lauren Boebert encouraged her to tamper with the voting machines. Peters is not known to have produced any evidence to support her assertion, and Boebert has strongly denied it.

And now of course Peters is a fugitive on the run. We don’t imagine she’ll get very far. Once the police catch up with her, the judge could decide to keep her in jail until her trial. This kind of pretrial confinement sometimes prompts suspects to cut a cooperating plea deal. But if Peters is looking to flip on Boebert or others, she’d need to produce evidence to support her claims, given that at this point her credibility is completely shot.