Lauren Boebert’s office denies she ‘encouraged’ indicted GOP official to commit crimes

An indicted Republican official in Colorado claimed in a new statement over the weekend that Rep Lauren Boebert, a congresswoman with a history of embracing conspiracy theories, “encouraged” her to take the actions that led to her being criminally charged.

Tina Peters made the remark in a statement to The New York Times in response to a profile the newspaper published detailing her criminal case and how she has used her newfound celebrity status among the far right to launch a bid to become the top elections official in Colorado. She is currently facing 10 criminal counts, related to her activities during and after the 2020 election, over accusations that she leaked sensitive county election information online to a community of election fraud conspiracists.

In a new explosive claim, Ms Peters now says that the first-term congresswoman “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging” of sensitive information that was eventually leaked online; if true, Ms Boebert could be criminally liable as well for the leak.

But the congresswoman’s office flatly denied that claim, the Times reported.The Independent has reached out to her office for further comment.

Ms Boebert is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump in the US House and her campaign manager was active in organising meetings of election fraud conspiracists in the weeks after the 2020 election concluded, according to the Times. Prior to her election to Congress, she was a vocal supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory that posits the idea that Democrats are part of a secret global Satanic cabal; in a 2020 interview, she declared: “Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.”

She has also won friends on the far right and made enemies among Democrats in Congress for persistent racist statements about Rep Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American and Muslim member of Congress.

Earlier this month, she even offended some Christians when she declared that Jesus Christ would not have died had he been armed with an assault rifle against Roman soldiers.

“On Twitter, a lot of the little Twitter trolls, they like to say, ‘Oh, Jesus didn’t need an AR-15, how many AR-15s do you think Jesus would’ve had?” Ms Boebert said during remarks to a Christian conference.

“Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him,” she added.