March 04, 2025 10:54 AM UTC

Trump's "Big Lie" Revisionism Comes For Tina Peters

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Public Radio’s Andrew Villegas reported late last night, an Acting Assistant Attorney General issued a “Statement of Interest” in the appeal filed by former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is currently serving the first months of a nine-year sentence after her conviction last August on 7 charges including official misconduct, attempting to influence a public servant, and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation as part of a failed plot to obtain evidence that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate. Peters helped disable security and provide an unauthorized conspiracy theorist using false credentials to access and copy data from Dominion Voting Systems hardware, which was then made public. Although this stolen data failed to substantiate the baseless theories about Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, Peters’ actions have become part of the blinkered canon of election fraud mythology that Trump has never abandoned despite it being debunked by every reality-based analysis ever conducted.

But with Trump back in office, the January 6th insurrectionists pardoned, and the criminal case against Trump under the former administration a receding memory, Peters’ continued imprisonment stands out like a sore thumb against his otherwise triumphant rewriting of history:

The DOJ does not have the power to overturn a state conviction, and it’s unclear what, if any, intervention in the case the department or a federal court could make…

In a court filing Monday, Yaakov Roth, an acting assistant attorney general, said the Justice Department plans to evaluate the state prosecution of Peters and, citing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, said it would look at “whether the case was ‘oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.’”

“Parallel to these proceedings and Ms. Peters’ direct appeal, the Department of Justice is reviewing cases across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process,” Roth wrote, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump entitled “Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government.”

As 9NEWS reports and we noted in February, this “review” of Peters’ case comes as Trump loyalists continue to agitate for Peters’ release:

Colorado Republicans have appealed to the Trump administration to pressure Polis by withholding federal funding from Colorado or launching federal investigations into key players in Peters’ case.

Colorado GOP Director of Special Initiatives Darcy Schoening, who is running for state party chair, said she’s been in touch with the U.S. Attorney General’s Office about prosecuting the judge in Mesa County who sentenced Peters.

The first thing everyone needs to understand about this case is that although the state government in Colorado is controlled by Democrats, the prosecution of Tina Peters was carried out by a Republican DA in one of the state’s most conservative counties. Republican Mesa County commissioner and former Congressman Scott McInnis testified against Peters at her trial. The most damning testimony in the case against Peters was supplied by her own former subordinates, who described the criminal plot to defeat multiple layers of security and allow outside crackpots access to voting equipment. Even fervent election denier Rep. Lauren Boebert, a conspicuously former friend of Peters, vouched for the integrity of the prosecution by DA Dan Rubinstein.

Although Peters committed the crimes she was later convicted of in the defense of Donald Trump’s election conspiracy theories, at the end of the day this case is not about the “Big Lie,” but Peters’ official misconduct in wilfully defeating security systems and at least suborning identity theft to allow an unauthorized outsider to access secure data that was later distributed publicly. The only actual risk to election integrity uncovered in this investigation stemmed from Peters’ own actions. If Peters were to be let off the hook, it would send a message to every crackpot in the land that it’s open season on data security in pursuit of whatever crazy conspiracy theory they feel the need to prove.

This is why, no matter how inconvenient the case of Tina Peters may be to Trump’s false history of the 2020 election, Peters richly earned and in the interest of justice needs to serve her sentence. A lopsided majority of Americans feel the same way about the January 6th insurrectionists, but in this case Colorado law prevails over even presidential pardon power.

It’s not about politics. It’s about oaths of office, and the rule of law itself, still mattering.