May 06, 2025 11:07 AM UTC

Guilty Conscience? Trump Can't Let Tina Peters Rot In Prison Over His "Big Lie"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yesterday evening, a development we’ve been anticipating ever since Donald Trump won a second term as President last November: Trump personally weighed in on the case of convicted Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving a nine year sentence in Colorado state prisons for her role in a failed scheme to hack voting machines in her charge hoping to prove the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen. After Trump’s re-election ended the federal criminal case against him for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and the pardoning en masse of even violent insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Tina Peters is now the only person doing time for crimes stemming from Trump’s refusal to accept defeat.

And as Colorado Public Radio reports, Trump is now pulling out all the stops to free this last vestige of accountability for his actions:

“Tina is an innocent Political Prisoner being horribly and unjustly punished in the form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment,” he wrote.

In the post, Trump directed the U.S. Department of Justice to “take all necessary action to help secure the release of former Mesa county clerk Tina Peters,” referring to her as a hostage that was “being held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons.”

“FREE TINA PETERS, NOW!” Trump wrote to punctuate the message…

Trump’s online proclamation is the latest step in a growing federal effort to free Peters. In March, the Department of Justice went to court in a bid to help Peters and potentially free her from custody. Attorneys for the state of Colorado have asked a federal judge to reject the Justice Department’s filings. The judge said at the hearing that he will rule after determining whether he has jurisdiction. Peters is serving nine years at La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo.

For those of us in Colorado who have followed Tina Peters’ case from the original investigation that began in the summer of 2021, Trump’s version of events, including to the Republican elected officials in Mesa County who lived through the ordeal and the Republican prosecutor who convicted Peters, is so far detached from reality that it’s difficult to know where to begin unpacking:

Set aside the cheap and predictable “whataboutism” and let’s focus on what matters: Trump’s claim that Peters “worked to expose and document Democrat Election Fraud.” The truth is that none of the voting machine software illegally copied and distributed to election conspiracy theorists literally across the globe revealed any evidence of fraud. This was one of many issues that DA Dan Rubinstein comprehensively addressed with a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by Peters’ defenders. In reality, the only security breach uncovered during the entire case was Peters own actions to defeat security systems in place to protect voting machines and help a conspiracy theorists use false credentials to access the equipment.

Readers will recall that Rep. Lauren Boebert, who fully embraces the “Big Lie” that Trump won the 2020 election, nonetheless conspicuously failed to defend Peters during her prosecution, even going so far as to vouch for Rubinstein’s investigation as credible. But now that Trump has rallied to Peters’ defense, forget all that:

As we’ve discussed previously, comparing Tina Peters’ deliberate actions to defeat security systems and allow unauthorized access to hardware and software to the accidental leak of some passwords to voting machines by the Secretary of State’s office is completely ignorant of the law that specifies such releases must be “knowing” to be criminal. But after Boebert personally attested to the integrity of DA Rubinstein’s investigation of Peters, her sudden about-face to get in line behind Trump, to put it mildly, lacks credibility.

What happens next depends on the success of Peters’ petition to be released pending appeal, which doesn’t look likely to succeed as of this writing. From there, it’s unclear what actions the federal government can take to compel Colorado to release Peters, and that is naturally concerning since Trump could pursue “creative” means of inducing the state to do his bidding like disrupting the flow of unrelated federal funds. For his part, Gov. Jared Polis has publicly rejected any possible “quid pro quo” with Trump for Peters’ release.

As it has been from the beginning, the case of Tina Peters’ felony misconduct is about more than Tina Peters. Peters herself, though she has demonstrated that she does not have the ethical compass to serve in public office, was duped by the “Big Lie” promulgated by Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and became personally determined to abuse her own authority and public trust to prove it. After Peters’ crimes failed to supply evidence to support the “Big Lie,” the loopy conspiracy theorists like Mike “MyPillow Guy” Lindell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who put her up to the scheme were obliged to make Peters a martyr for Trump’s bogus cause.

And that leads to our most fundamental question: why can’t Trump just let this case go? If anyone was giving Trump smart advice, that would be the recommendation. Even if you believe as Trump does that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the improper actions Peters took to override security and allow outsiders to utilize fake credentials to access secure voting equipment were totally unacceptable. If you claim to care about election security, Peters’ actions should horrify you no matter what you think happened in 2020. To validate what Peters did would create a vastly larger risk to the integrity of future elections.

Donald Trump may honestly believe that he won the 2020 presidential election. At times, however, Trump has let slip statements that sound close to a concession. If Trump knows in his heart that he lost in 2020, it’s possible the guilt he would feel over Peters’ incarceration is real.

It should be. Any way you slice the question, Donald Trump is the reason Tina Peters is in prison.