Colorado officials have recovered hard drives containing election data that was smuggled from a county’s voting machines by Trump-loving county clerk Dallas Schroeder, of Elbert County, Colorado, who confessed that he copied the sensitive data with help from a pair of Colorado conspiracy theorists linked to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the Daily Beast reports.
Schroeder returned two hard drives containing his county’s election machine data that he stole after the 2020 elections following a court order last Wednesday. The MAGA-aligned clerk told investigators that he initially gave one copy of the data to his attorney John Case, and another to an unnamed lawyer. But it’s still unclear who accessed that data—or what the conspiracy theorists hope to do with it.
Surveillance footage, reported by Reuters last month, shows Schroeder “fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing sensitive voting information,” The Daily Beast noted.
Some of Schroeder’s communications that day were with Shawn Smith and Mark Cook, a pair of election truthers who have promoted their conspiracy theories on Lindell’s “Lindell TV” webshow. Smith, who has previously stated that Colorado’s secretary of state “deserve[s] to hang” if involved in election fraud, also leads Cause of America, a Lindell-backed election denialism group. Schroder testified that he copied the voting machine data using a “Logic Cube Forensic Falcon Neo Device,” a $4,000 device that he borrowed from and subsequently returned to Cook.
Schroeder also testified that on Sept. 2, he returned to make a second copy of the data, which he gave to an attorney whom he has so far refused to publicly name. e was allowed to give the attorney’s name to a judge under seal last week, preventing the person’s name from entering the public record. Many speculate the lawyer could be Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman.
Schroeder is the second Colorado clerk accused of breaching voting machines under his supervision. The other clerk, Tina Peters of Mesa County, is currently facing a barrage of criminal charges for allegedly stealing a local tech worker’s identity, illegally copying her county’s election data, and leaking it to election fraud conspiracy theorists last spring. She also linked Mike Lindell to her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.