Yvonne Wingett Sanchez writes:

Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars.

The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. (Her attorney and the Trump ally Steve Bannon recently floated on a podcast the idea of having Trump call in the 101st Airborne Division to set her free. The attorney said he’d “love to see that happen.”)

Trump’s embrace of Peters’s cause threatens to erode the public’s trust in the validity of electoral outcomes and the independence of state criminal-justice systems, constitutional experts told me. Election officials from around the country who have faced years of violent threats and harassment for defending the 2020 presidential vote—and each election since—told me the clamor around Peters signals to those who may seek to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections that they can flout the law with support from the White House.

Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that he is granting Peters a “full Pardon,” but legal experts said his power doesn’t extend to state charges. The one person who could free Peters—Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who has issued tepid public statements on the case, seems disinclined to offer Peters, a 70-year-old lung-cancer survivor, any leniency.

“I, like the president, have the values of compassion and mercy, and there’s been times when people are ill and we’ve let them out,” he told me in an interview this month. So far, he said, “the indications I’ve seen are that she’s healthy.” If circumstances change, he added, “I’ve told people publicly, as well as the White House,” that “we would consider doing something.”

In Mesa County, along the state’s snowy western slopes, where Peters once served as the chief election official, most people I spoke with seem to think that she is exactly where she belongs. “There’s not an uprising in Colorado to free Tina Peters,” Scott McInnis, a Republican who served as a congressman and county commissioner, told me. [Continue reading…]