President Donald Trump’s administration appears to believe that general rules don’t apply. Whether it’s disappearing undocumented immigrants, shooting US citizens and deploying the National Guard against them, capturing the leader of a sovereign nation, or threatening to take control of Greenland, Trump’s reach appears limitless.
But despite the bravado, there is one situation that, so far, Trump has been unable to bend to his will: the case of Tina Peters, a former election clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who became a hero in the election denial community after she used another person’s credentials to facilitate an associate watching a software update of her county’s election management system.
Peters has served roughly 14 months of a nine-year prison sentence, and figures in the election denial community like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn have been campaigning for her release ever since. Over the last few months, Trump has joined in, seemingly pressuring the state of Colorado to release Peters.
Unlike the nearly 1,600 January 6 prisoners Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of on his first day in office, the president cannot pardon Peters because she was convicted on state rather than federal charges—though this didn’t stop Trump issuing a “pardon” on Truth Social last month. Nevertheless, Trump is now conducting an increasingly intense pressure campaign against Colorado and its Democratic governor, Jared Polis, whom Trump has called a “sleazebag” and a “scumbag” for refusing to release Peters.
Polis has since said he is considering granting clemency to Peters, a decision that has left elected officials in the state, both Democrats and Republicans, baffled and worried. Those who spoke to WIRED warned that reducing jail time for Peters—who continues to maintain her innocence and has shown no signs of remorse—would endanger the lives of election workers ahead of the midterms in November.
“I have major concerns that [commuting Peters’ sentence] emboldens the far right that has been attacking our elections and election officials,” Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state and the state’s top election official, tells WIRED. “I am concerned about the message that it sends to those of us who have been on the front lines in this threat environment, doing the work, day in and day out. The idea that the work we do to protect our elections and democracy can be so quickly undermined and the effect that has on election officials.”
Polis declined to be interviewed, but his spokesperson Shelby Wieman tells WIRED, “The Governor takes the responsibility of clemency very seriously, and his team reviews all applications submitted. He will review this inmate’s application just like he would any other.”
Peters first came to national attention in May 2021 when she allowed Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer who later worked for pillow-salesman-turned-election-denier Mike Lindell, unauthorized access to election equipment in Mesa County, as part of a scheme to prove that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump. QAnon promoter Ron Watkins subsequently published the data taken from Mesa County in 2021, which also appeared on the conspiracy-filled Gateway Pundit website. The information was widely hailed by election deniers as further proof that US elections were rigged, even though widescale election rigging in 2020 was never actually proven, and Trump’s own officials called it the most secure election in history. (Hayes was never charged with a crime.)
Peters was officially charged in March 2022 when she was already campaigning to become Colorado’s secretary of state. In June 2022, Peters lost the Republican primary but immediately questioned the validity of the result. A recount added 13 more votes to her total, but she still lost the primary by over 88,000 votes.
Peters was convicted in August 2024 on seven of the 10 charges she was facing, including four felonies. At her sentencing hearing in October 2024, district judge Matthew Barrett said: “You are no hero. You’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.” She is due for parole in September 2028.
While Peters has been incarcerated at the medium-security La Vista Correctional Facility for women in Pueblo, she has continued to be portrayed as a hero among the election denial community. Trump appeared to pay little attention to her cause, but in recent months, as Peters’ legal team was preparing to appeal her conviction, something changed.
The first signs the Trump administration was taking an interest in the case came in early March, when the Department of Justice announced it was reviewing Peters’ conviction. The announcement came just weeks before Trump criticized Polis for hanging an unflattering portrait of the president in the State Capitol.
In May, Trump posted for the first time about Peters’ case on Truth Social: “Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment,” Trump wrote. “This is a Communist persecution by the Radical Left Democrats to cover up their Election crimes and misdeeds in 2020.”
Trump then called for the Department of Justice to “to take all necessary action to help secure the release of this ‘hostage’ being held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons.”
He repeated his call for her release in another Truth Social post in August, threatening to take “harsh measures” if Peters was not freed. In early September, Trump announced the relocation of Space Command from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama.
In November, the Federal Bureau of Prisons sent a letter to Colorado to get Peters transferred to a federal prison, a request that can only be initiated by state authorities. Days after the letter was sent, Trump once again posted in support of Peters on Truth Social, writing: “FREE TINA PETERS, WHO SITS IN A COLORADO PRISON, DYING & OLD.”
Election workers and some Colorado officials have now come to believe that the president is engaging in a pressure campaign on Colorado. In recent months, the administration has threatened to remove the state’s control over its wolf reintroduction program, Trump announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research based in Boulder, and on December 30, Trump vetoed plans to complete the Arkansas Valley Conduit, an infrastructure project designed to bring clean drinking water to some 50,000 people in the southeast part of Colorado. The Trump administration also appears to now be trying to claw back federal grants from low-income families in Colorado.
Throughout this period, Trump has continued to post about Peters’ cause on Truth Social, specifically targeting Polis, whom he called “the SLEAZEBAG Governor of Colorado” on December 3. On New Year’s Eve, Trump wrote on Truth Social: ”Hard to wish [Peters] a Happy New Year, but to the Scumbag Governor and the disgusting “Republican” (RINO!) DA … I wish them only the worst. May they rot in Hell. FREE TINA PETERS!” (Trump has posted about Peters’ cause eight times on Truth Social over the last nine months.)
At the time, Peters’ legal team, led by Peter Ticktin, who attended the New York Military Academy with Trump, were putting in the work. On December 7, Ticktin sent a nine-page letter to Trump outlining his client’s case and seeking a pardon. Four days later, on December 11, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” Though Trump has no power to pardon those convicted on state charges, Ticktin claimed it applied to his client.
Peters’s legal team has applied for clemency from the governor. While Polis didn’t initially seem likely to entertain the idea, in recent weeks he has hinted that he is considering commuting her sentence, which he has labeled “harsh.”
“You look at every case on clemency on the merits,” Polis told CBS recently. “You have somebody who is nonviolent, a first-time offender, elderly. On the other hand, does she take full accountability for her crime? We don’t look at this in isolation.”
Polis’ possible change of heart has left many in Colorado baffled. Earlier this month, Griswold, together with a Colorado county clerk and the director of the state’s clerks association, sent Polis a letter urging him not to commute Peters’s sentence.
“I do not believe that giving in to a vengeful president makes the retribution stop,” Griswold tells WIRED. “Trump is a lawless president. He disregards the law, he disregards the Constitution, and when people do not cave, he then starts retribution. I believe giving in leads to more illegal actions and outrageous actions from the president.”
“Donald Trump and I have known each other since we were 15 years old,” Ticktin tells WIRED, adding that he has spoken to the president about the case directly but says Trump’s actions are not about retribution: “By Governor Polis standing up to Donald Trump for something that’s unreasonable, he’s drawing more attention to the state and causing the state to be looked at more, [but] I don’t think that it’s retaliation by Donald Trump.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether Trump is conducting a retribution campaign against Colorado, but instead provided a list of reasons why each action was taken—even including responses to two issues WIRED didn’t raise: childcare funding and disaster relief.
Election clerks around Colorado have already been meeting to discuss Peters’ possible pardon and following an online meeting this month, all but one of the members of the Colorado County Clerks Association agreed to the wording of the letter Griswold sent to Polis.
Matt Crane, the executive director of the clerks’ association, says that for his members, just months out from critical midterm elections, even the suggestion that Peters’ sentence could be commuted sends the wrong message, and potentially endangers lives. Election workers have been under threat for years, and just this past summer an election office in Archuleta County in southern Colorado was firebombed by a suspect who, according to the arrest affidavit, believes in election denial conspiracy theories.
“The environment is already hostile for election officials because of the lies coming from the president and his supporters, so this stuff with Tina just exacerbates that,” says Crane. “If the governor commutes her sentence, it sends a very clear message that it is OK for people to undermine our institutions and attack our elections, both the election itself and the people who do the work, because they’ll have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
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