A new video from former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne appears to inadvertently bolster the criminal case against one of Byrne’s allies in the Stop The Steal movement.
On March 9, a district attorney announced a laundry list of charges against Mesa County, Colorado clerk Tina Peters and one of her deputies in the clerk’s office. The pair are accused of stealing a local man’s identity and using it to break into county voting machines, which were under the supervision of the clerk’s office. Data from those machines was soon leaked to conspiracy theorists like Ron Watkins and Mike Lindell, who falsely claimed that it showed election malfeasance.
Byrne is an active participant in the Stop The Steal movement, supporting and financing efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 election. He reportedly acted as an unofficial adviser to Donald Trump in Dec. 2020, when he and three other people gave Trump a draft version of an executive order that would have directed the Secretary of Defense to seize voting machines.
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In his Wednesday video, Byrne appears to reveal inside information from the Mesa County breach, much of it supporting the charges against Peters. Byrne even claims to have FaceTimed with an unnamed man who was posing as a county worker while examining voting machines.
That alleged impersonator is at the heart of the criminal complaint. Peters and her deputy Belinda Knisley are accused of allowing an unnamed man to pose as “Gerald Wood,” a local resident who briefly held a county access badge. Although the real Gerald Wood was uninvolved with the plot, according to an affidavit, his home was still raided by law enforcement, which seized many of his family’s electronics, according to search warrants in the stolen identity case.
Wood and his family are not commenting on the case, his wife told The Daily Beast.
Byrne’s video, first uploaded to his Locals account and later shared on Twitter by the researcher Trapezoid of Discovery, appears to shed new light on the unnamed impersonator at the center of the leak.
“They gave him some county credentials or something and he dressed up like a little nerd and he went in and he took an image, a forensic image that could be producible in court,” Byrne says in the video.
Neither Peters nor Mesa County’s District Attorney’s office returned requests for comment on the video.
Although the alleged imposter’s name has not been revealed, and the person is not facing charges, members of the Stop The Steal movement have previously suggested that the man was Conan James Hayes, a former professional surfer and current conspiracy theorist who previously tweeted data obtained from voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.
Metadata from the Mesa County leak shows that a person logged into the voting machines using the initials “cjh.” During a presentation about the Mesa County data at a “cyber symposium” on election fraud last summer, conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins claimed that “Conan James Hayes may have taken, without authorization, the actual hard drives from the Mesa County [Clerk].” Hayes and Watkins had previously discussed election fraud conspiracy theories on Twitter, now-deleted tweets show.
Reached via email, Byrne did not comment on whether Hayes was the unnamed imposter. In his video, however, Byrne claimed to have FaceTimed with the imposter while the man was in the room with the voting machines, and claimed that the man had filmed Colorado election officials “commit[ing] a million felonies right next to me.”
Byrne told The Daily Beast he was not concerned that investigators might contact him over the video and its claims.
“NO CONCERNS WHATSOEVER,” he said via email. “I LOVE IT WHEN INVESTIGATORS CONTACT ME AND I CAN SHARE INFORMATIONN THAT LANDS PEOPLE IN JAIL.” (Byrne clarified that he was not shouting, but typing in capital letters for convenience.)
Byrne said he was still in possession of the man’s videos allegedly showing election malfeasance.
Asked if he could share those videos, Byrne said he might make them available to The Daily Beast if this reporter would call for a review of certain Wisconsin ballots, based on a supposed Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that rendered them “unlawful.” When informed that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling actually upheld those ballots’ legality and that this reporter has no legal authority over Wisconsin elections, Byrne stopped responding.
