November 17, 2025 08:56 AM UTC

Make No Mistake, Trump Is Moving To Spring Tina Peters

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• by: Colorado Pols

As 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark reported on Friday, the Trump administration’s goal of freeing the last incarcerated co-conspirator in once-and-again President Donald Trump’s failed quest to prove the 2020 presidential election he lost was decided unfairly shifted gears, with a formal request from the Justice Department for ex-Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to be transferred to from the custody of the state of Colorado to the federal prison system:

President Trump cannot pardon the former Mesa County clerk, who is serving a nine-year prison term on state charges for a scheme to sneak fellow election deniers into Colorado’s voting systems in a search for election rigging.

Far-right activists have repeatedly called for the Trump administration to use a novel maneuver to free Peters by first taking her into federal custody, perhaps by claiming she is a witness in a federal investigation into the 2020 election.

Peters has echoed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

President Trump’s U.S. Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin, announced on MAGA strategist Steve Bannon’s show on Nov. 10 that the administration had put Colorado on notice that the Trump administration wants Peters moved to federal custody.

Colorado Public Radio reports that Peters’ attorneys find La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo where Peters is serving her sentence to be a real hellhole:

Peters’ attorneys have also filed a federal habeas petition to ask a federal judge to release her on bond while she appeals her state conviction. Her lead attorney, Peter Ticktin, told CPR News he is advocating to get her moved to a federal facility and pushing the U.S Department of Justice to join the effort. He said she has long-term safety concerns about her current situation.

“For somebody who’s perhaps a little more genteel, a little bit more educated, a little bit more established, perhaps, it puts her in a more difficult position for sure. She’s been threatened for sure,” said Ticktin.

But apparently there’s a problem with getting Peters out of the rough and tumble of the general prison population, a problem that those of us who have been following Peters’ long and winding road through the legal system sadly won’t find surprising:

He also said the state informed her legal team that, because of her behavior, she cannot move into a different zone within the state prison.

“There is sort of a level and a place in the prison where they can kind of isolate women and put them with safer people, but you need to get approved for that. And so they say, ‘oh, no, she’s been written up too many times,’” said Ticktin. [Pols emphasis]

It has not been reported why Peters has had disciplinary problems in jail that have apparently prevented her from being transferred into a more sedentary setting, but recalling Peters’ iPad shuffling antics and kicking of officers taking her into custody, it’s nothing we wouldn’t put past her. On social media, the tales of Peters’ positively medieval treatment in the Colorado gulag are growing tall:

This report claims Peters’ cell is being kept at “near freezing temperatures,” which doesn’t sound to us like Colorado DOC policy…but according to Peters’ attorneys via 9NEWS, her cell isn’t freezing cold at all?

A Nov. 13 filing by her attorney said Peters has had a cough since the La Vista Women’s Correctional Facility turned on the heat for the season. [Pols emphasis]

Our intention here is not to make light of conditions in prison, which are certainly unpleasant whether kept too hot or too cold. But we know enough about Colorado’s correction system and state government to believe that Peters is not being subjected to any kind of particular treatment due to the political externalities of her criminal case. Tina Peters was convicted of serious felonies after presiding over a totally unacceptable breach of multiple layers of election system security involving identity theft and the disabling of security cameras, which happened to have been carried out in support of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election. Peters was convicted by a Republican district attorney, and fellow Mesa County Republican officials condemned her actions.

Those are the facts. The question now is what to do with Tina Peters. Peters was convicted in August of 2024 and sentenced in October. The following month, Trump won re-election and immediately upon taking office in January began revising the official history of the 2020 elections in every way he had the ability. The federal prosecutors involved in the prosecution of the January 6th rioters have been fired, and the rioters themselves pardoned. Last week, Trump issued a further round of pardons to co-conspirators in the 2020 plot including Colorado’s Jenna Ellis and former CU professor John Eastman.

Tina Peters is one of the last–maybe the last–remnant of accountability for Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. If Peters is transferred to federal custody, at the very least she can expect to be moved to a “Club Fed”-type facility like the one controversially now housing Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in pedophilia Ghislaine Maxwell. But if Colorado officials agree to the request to transfer Peters, our money would be on Peters being a guest of honor at Mar-a-Lago by Christmas.

As a proxy litigation of the “Big Lie” that Trump won in 2020, this case has always been about more than Tina Peters. But the “Big Lie” was not actually allowed to be argued either way in Peters’ trial to her dismay–with the case strictly being about the conspiracy to access and steal data from voting machines under Peters’ sworn protection as an elected official.

The standard being upheld in the conviction of Tina Peters is that integrity from elected officials must always transcend politics.

That applies to both Peters’ responsibilities and…democracy itself.