President Donald Trump announced that he would grant a full pardon to Tina Peters, the former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who was convicted of participating in a scheme to prove Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and sentenced to nine years in prison.
“Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!”
Trump doesn’t have the authority to pardon Peters, however. Presidential clemency powers extend only to federal cases, while Peters—the only Trump ally currently imprisoned in connection with the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election—was convicted last year in a state court.
That means that rather than an actual pardon, Trump’s announcement is simply a symbolic show of support. But it marks a high point in his Administration’s advocacy for the former county clerk, who the President in May called a “political prisoner” and said was being “horribly and unjustly punished.”
Senior Justice Department officials previously encouraged a federal judge in March to give “prompt and careful” consideration to releasing Peters from state prison after she filed a federal lawsuit arguing that her constitutional rights had been violated and requesting that she be let out on bond while she appealed her conviction.
“Reasonable concerns have been raised about various aspects of Ms. Peters’ case,” the federal officials wrote, saying that the Justice Department would also review the Peters’ prosecution and whether it was “oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.”
After months of hearings, a federal judge in Denver on Monday rejected Peters’ request for release.
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who alone has the power to pardon Peters, defended her conviction following Trump’s announcement on Thursday.
“No President has jurisdiction over state law nor the power to pardon a person for state convictions. This is a matter for the courts to decide, and we will abide by court orders,” Polis said in a statement.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser struck a similar cord, highlighting the state’s authority over the case and dismissing Trump’s effort to pardon Peters as an “outrageous departure” from the Constitution.
“One of the most basic principles of our constitution is that states have independent sovereignty and manage our own criminal justice systems without interference from the federal government,” Weiser said. “The idea that a president could pardon someone tried and convicted in state court has no precedent in American law, would be an outrageous departure from what our constitution requires, and will not hold up.”
Days before the federal judge dismissed Peters’ bid to be released from prison, an attorney forPeters sent a letter to Trump making the case for the President to grant her a pardon and contending that he has the power to do so.
The lawyer, Peter Ticktin, asserted that Peters was “innocent and wrongfully persecuted” and said that she received death threats in prison from “violent offenders” and was attacked three times. Ticktin admitted in the letter that “the question of whether a president can pardon for state offenses has never been raised in any court,” but argued that the part of the Constitution that establishes the President’s clemency authority—which says “he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in the case of impeachment”—confers “the power to grant a pardon in any of the states of the United States.”
Trump has continued to make false claims that the 2020 election, in which he lost to former President Joe Biden, was stolen from him, and has previously offered clemency to others who acted on those claims. On the first day of his second term, he issued a pardon for nearly all 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
But those charges were levied on the federal level. Peters’, in contrast, is beyond Trump’s official power.
“Tina Peters was convicted by a jury of her peers for state crimes in a state court,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement on Thursday. “Trump has no constitutional authority to pardon her. His assault is not just on our democracy, but on states’ rights and the American constitution.”
