Tina Peters, Colorado’s indicted Mesa County clerk and Big Lie acolyte, has had to dig deep into her pockets to drag out the GOP primary for Colorado secretary of state where she got eaten alive last month.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s (D) office announced on Thursday that it had received the required payments from Peters and Lynda Zamora Wilson, a Republican candidate in a state Senate race, to hold discretionary statewide recounts in their respective primaries.

“The recounts will be conducted in accordance with the law, and will be finished by Aug. 4,” Griswold said.

Peters forked over a hefty sum of $255,912.33, the secretary of state’s office confirmed in an email to TPM.

Newly released emails are shedding light on the frantic effort by aides to then-President Donald Trump trying to reverse the results of the 2020 election in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The emails show people connected to Trump working to assemble lists of people who could falsely claim to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he lost.

"Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as 'fake," the newspaper reported.

"In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word 'fake' to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome," The Times reported. "And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny."

DENVER (AP) — Colorado's secretary of state's office on Wednesday said it has told two candidates who lost their Republican primary races last month that it will not conduct a recount of those races because they failed to pay the required amount by the deadline.

The office informed Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who lost her race for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, and state Rep. Ron Hanks, who fell short in his bid for the party's U.S. Senate nomination, that it was moving forward finalizing the results of the primary. Neither candidate paid the $236,000 that was due by July 15 for the recount.

Both Peters and Hanks have promoted the false claim that President Joe Biden did not actually win his election against former President Donald Trump in 2020, and they also claimed widespread fraud led to their losses in the GOP primary. They are part of a growing number of deniers of the outcome of the 2020 election also questioning their own primary losses.

In letters sent Tuesday to the secretary of state, the two candidates said they would not pay for the recount because it would not be done by hand.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday reiterated that "no person," not even a former president, was above the law amid calls from some congressional Democrats to charge Donald Trump after last year's Capitol riot.

During a press conference, a visibly animated Garland twice said that "no person" was above the law when pressed specifically about Trump, whom Democrats say incited the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection over his unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020. Democrats also cite Trump's larger, months-long campaign to try and reverse his election loss. (Trump insists he did nothing wrong.)

The Department of Justice has been prosecuting various cases related to the rioting last January.

"There is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what's it not doing, what our theories are and what our theories aren't, and there will continue to be that speculation," the attorney general said Wednesday. "That's because a central tenant of the way in which the Justice Department investigates and a central tenant of the rule of law is that we do not do our investigations in the public."