June 13, 2025 10:27 AM UTC

Trump's DOJ Punishes Colorado For Keeping Tina Peters In Jail

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Denver7’s Brandon Richard reports, the Trump-addled Justice Department under Pam Bondi has issued a highly unusual and expansive request for elections data from Colorado on the last two presidential elections in 2020 and 2024, reportedly in reponse to a “complaint” made to the Department from (we assume) one of the many kooks and conspiracy theorists who have descended upon Colorado elections in their fruitless pursuit of evidence that Donald Trump never lost a presidential election:

“Well, it’s certainly an unusual request,” said Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerk’s Association. “I’ve been in elections here in Colorado for 25 years. I don’t remember any request from the federal government this expansive coming in.”

Crane said the DOJ’s request for records is so broad, it could mean many things.

“It could be anything from voter registration information, voter turnout information. It could be information from the voting system access and activity logs from inside the voting system software. It could be the actual ballots themselves,” said Crane.

In its letter to the state, which NPR obtained, the DOJ said it had received a complaint about Colorado’s election records retention…

Matt Crane of the county clerk’s association, a Republican, says that little data from the 2020 presidential election remains, being beyond the prescribed retention policy for counties. It’s a different story for 2024, of course, but considering that’s the election no one disputes that Trump won nationwide, that’s not the data they would really care about.

And that’s assuming the Justice Department cares about the data at all, since there’s no reason to assume after the state’s exhaustive audits of every election that there was a problem. Crane has another theory for why the state is being saddled with this onerous and likely unfulfillable demand:

Crane suspects it has something to do with Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk and 2020 election denier who’s currently serving a 9-year sentence for allowing a man to access voting equipment. [Pols emphasis] Peters isn’t mentioned in the Justice Department’s letter.

“When we get this kind of request asking for election records, when it’s something that she’s been putting out in the public square, as her supporters have, we think it’s pretty fair to say that it has something to do with that,” said Crane.

After Trump’s Justice Department and then Trump personally intervened in the appeals from former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving a nine year sentence on state misconduct charges that Trump cannot pardon for her plot to breach election system security and allow and outside actor to steal voting machine software in a failed attempt to support evidence supporting Trump’s still-baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, it’s not a stretch to suggest that this laborious “fishing expedition” into Colorado’s election data is a form of retaliation against the state for Peters’ continued incarceration.

After indisputably winning in 2024, Trump could let what happened in 2020 go. Considering Trump was the primary antagonist in the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War that year, letting the matter rest would be the smart thing to do. But for whatever reason, Trump cannot let his defeat in 2020 fade into the history books. Trump is determined to rewrite the history of the 2020 elections no matter how many times Trump’s contention that he actually won that year is debunked. And that means no one can be left to rot in jail for following his “Big Lie” over a legal cliff, be it the January 6th insurrectionists or Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters.

So now, our state will be squeezed by any means at the administration’s disposal–to persuade Gov. Jared Polis to relieve this last lingering prisoner of his Trump’s delusional arrogance from Trump’s conscience.

It is an obligation to principle much greater than Peters’ case that Colorado not give in.